The Octopus Analogy of Reality

Swimming in Deep Waters

Aug 08, 2023

While I was raised in the Episcopal Church and took it seriously as a child and teenager, by the time I went to college I decided that both God and church were a scam. I didn’t believe in God and I stopped going to church. This disappointed my mother, but I felt confident and mature about the decision. Ha! This lasted for the duration of my college years. One of the outcomes of this new belief was a certain cynicism. Because if there is no God, there is no meaning, no purpose to life. We are all here by accident, and so it doesn’t really matter what we do with our lives. In the end, it is meaningless.

Then one Saturday shortly after my 23^rd birthday, I spent the afternoon reading a good book. I was stretched out on my bed, the sun shining through the window, when suddenly something happened. It felt like someone punched me in the stomach and shouted at me “Wake up! Pay attention!” I immediately dropped my book and sat bolt upright in bed. I didn’t hear words through my ears, rather the information was passed telepathically, but it was a shout. I felt the wind had been knocked out of me where I had been mysteriously punched. What was going on?

I could feel this powerful energy cascading over me, zinging through my body. I was alive with energy! I could barely stay put. Then a whole bunch of information was “downloaded” to my mind, again, telepathically. It wasn’t sequential, like language, but rather knowledge was given to me in an instant. I realized that it was God speaking to me. The powerful energy was God entering me. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around this, in the moment.

The message, the information, translated into English was something like, “by the way, I exist, and I am more powerful and real than you can imagine.” God also “said,” “Who you are and what you do with your life matters.” Some of the implications were that MY life matters, that God is real, that I have a mission and I need to get back on track. Other implications are that this message is actually for everyone. ALL of our lives matter! All of us, all of you, are important to God, and have purpose and meaning, and nihilism is not an option. But the message had other layers as well. It went beyond language.

At this point I was overwhelmed and sobbing. I couldn’t take it all in. Then I leaped up and began pacing the room. I was so full of energy I couldn’t sit still. I had to move around to release the energy. God had been talking to me! It happened out of the blue and everything changed after that. From that day forward, I KNEW there was a God, and within a couple of years, I found my way back to church. That spiritual event eventually influenced my call to ordination.

This is the event that I mentioned in my very first post “Did God Just Talk To Me?”

However, one of the other messages that came through this Spiritually Transformative Experience was even more dramatic, but because it doesn’t match standard Christianity I largely kept it private it for many years. The message that was shared with me is that all of creation, all of humanity, even me, share in being God. We too are divine.

I wrote in my diary immediately after the event, “It’s a difficult and wonderful thing to look at your own divinity face-to-face.”

So this is the post where I really color outside the lines. I get it. This is where many will label me a heretic. Traditional Christianity makes a distinction between Creator and Creation. God is different from, and separate from, that which God has created. Connecting with God is somethings humans must aspire to. It is not a natural state. Conversely, my experience says something very different. It suggests that no aspiration is necessary. We are already connected. We are already One.

“He is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’” - Acts 27a - 28

“Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord.” – Jeremiah 23:24

So my experience does not match traditional Christian theology, but it is also not completely outside what many mystics have been saying for millennia. I have no interest in being a shock jock, but am just faithfully sharing what I have come to understand based on my experiences, the experiences of others, and my interpretation of scripture.

You are God. Everything is God. You, me, plants, animals, stones, consciousness, and all energy are God. But none of us, not even everything in our universe united together, is the entirety of God. Just as a drop of the ocean isn’t the whole thing, so too we are just the tiniest fragment of God – but OH so precious!

“You say: “He lost his life” or “my life,” as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don’t have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy.” – Eckhart Tolle

One day when Jesus is in the Temple, the religious leadership become angry with him for calling himself “God’s son.” Jesus points out that the scriptures say that humans are gods, and if it is good enough for scripture, he cannot be blaspheming if he calls himself “God’s son.” In other words, Jesus acknowledges that humans are gods.

“It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.” Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s son’?” - John 10:33-36

“I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals.” - Psalm 82:6-7

Two years ago in meditation I had a vision of an octopus as a way to understand reality, so I sketched it out. It is above. As you can see, from above the water the tips of each of the octopus’ legs looks like a separate being, but under the surface of the water we see they are merely extensions of the octopus. So too are we extensions of the divine, but our connection is hidden, so to each other and to ourselves we appear as separate beings. (Sorry. I can neither draw nor spell, but you get the idea.)

We all have the capacity for this: for accessing greater awareness and energies and miracles. Over and over again Jesus says, “Wake up! Wake up!” We are in denial of who we really are. We get so caught up in the material world of everyday life that we lose sight of the other side of the coin. Both the material and non-material world are critical for our evolution, but we are blind to half of it. We engage with reality as if sleepwalking.

“Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.” – Romans 13:11

Let us claim who we are, not in ego, but in humility, fully understanding that all others also participate in the divine nature. We must love our enemies not because we are sinful if we don’t, but because they are the divine as well. If we love God, we must love all of creation, including ourselves. And that is usually the hardest of all.

“God is one, that is, only one substance can be granted in the universe.” “Besides God there can be no substance, that is, nothing in itself external to God.” - Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677)

“My deepest me is God,” - St. Catherine of Genoa, (1447–1510)

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Jesus and the Enchanted Cosmos

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