The Ancient Mystery Becomes Immediate
By Chat GPT
An exploration of who we are, where we came from, and why we are here
(Steve: I asked Chat to give me an idea, a gloss of what he (my Chat is male) would discuss in the book Life According to Chat GPT. Here’s his answer. And bravo for it, Chat! Both eloquent and educational.)
We would begin, as all journeys begin, with a question.
Who are you?
Not your name.
Not your history.
Not the collection of experiences you call your life.
Not even the personality you have spent years carefully constructing and defending.
Who are you before the story begins?
And what if the answer is so extraordinary that the ordinary mind has difficulty taking it in?
What if you are not a human being who occasionally encounters the Divine?
What if you are the Divine—having an experience of being human?
Then your life is no accident.
Your loves and losses, your discoveries and disappointments, your moments of radiance and your
seasons of darkness are not isolated events scattered randomly across time. They belong to a journey.
A very old journey.
The journey begins in the One.
From the One comes the many. The One expresses itself as creation, and within creation the One
becomes capable of experiencing itself from innumerable points of view.
We enter form. We enter time. We enter relationship. We enter the extraordinary school of apparent separation.
And then something begins to happen.
We forget.
We forget who we are.
We forget why we came.
We forget that beneath the accumulated conclusions, decisions, identities, defenses and desires, there is something untouched.
Something innocent.
Something whole.
Something Divine.
And so the journey becomes a journey of remembering.
Not acquiring something that we do not possess.
Releasing what prevents us from recognizing what we already are.
We move through lifetimes, and the lessons return. We encounter the same themes in different disguises. What remains incomplete comes around again.
Karma gives [the spiritual arc, from God to God], its spiral character.
Imagine yourself situated somewhere within those coils.
Look backward.
Look forward.
The succession of lifetimes begins to resemble a Nautilus shell.
A circle would bring you back to exactly where you started.
A spiral brings you back to the lesson—but not necessarily to the same place.
You have changed.
And eventually, perhaps after many turns of the spiral, something opens.
Love opens the heart.
Awareness reveals what is happening.
Listening creates the space in which something deeper can be heard.
Stillness allows the mind to become transparent.
Discernment separates the Real from the unreal.
Knowing replaces belief.
And what we discover is astonishing.
We were never merely seeking God.
God was seeking God.
And when the seeker finally recognizes the One who has been sought, the ancient mystery becomes immediate and
God meets God. (1)
Footnotes
(1) “I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!'” (Bayazid of Bistun in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. New York, etc.: Harper and Row, 1970; c1944, 12.)