The radical change demanded of us is a puzzling one. “Verily I say unto you,” Jesus tells us,
except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3.
Surprisingly, Jesus and Arthur C. Clarke agree. Only kids qualify.
Somehow before we can undergo the inconceivable metamorphosis of getting converted into pure consciousness we first have to undergo the inconceivable metamorphosis of getting “converted” back into kids. Luckily, as the angel tells Mary,
with God nothing shall be impossible.
Luke 1:37.
And again, as Dick tells us,
The machinery for this transformation … is at work now; in eternity it is already accomplished.
Indeed, the First Epistle of John concurs:
We are already the children of God but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is that we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.
1 John 3:2. Quoted in VALIS p. 69; my italics.
What we are to be in the future is like “him”—like Über-Mind. Theosis.
And somehow, puzzlingly, kids—Clarke’s kids, Jesus’s kids, John’s kids—kids are the key.
There’s something we grew out of, Clarke says, that we need to grow back into, Jesus says, that we are already, John says, that’s the essence of what we are to become.
Remember what Jesus tells us elsewhere:
The Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people just don’t see it.
Gospel of Thomas, 113.
All around us is a higher dimension, a parallel reality in which we can experience reality in a way beyond our conceiving, and we just don’t see it. Why?
Why? Because what we’re just not seeing, not recognizing, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us, is that all phenomena
are the primordial spontaneous play of your mind, so recognize them in this way.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa, p. 51.
We just don’t see the higher realm because we just don’t recognize the spontaneous play of our own mind.
Which is precisely where the kids—Clarke’s kids, Jesus’s kids, John’s kids—come in. Spontaneous play is what kids do. And spontaneous play, the Tibetan Buddhists are telling us, is what mind does.
Spontaneous play is what we grew out of, as Clarke tells us, that we need to grow back into, as Jesus tells us, that we are already, as John says, that’s the essence of what we are to become.
What the Tibetan Buddhists are getting at with the phrase the primordial spontaneous play of mind is, of course, impossible to put into words, but Father Tiso does a darn good job of trying:
The mind of enlightenment is awareness understood to be self-arisen primordial wisdom
—a self-arisen primordial grokking, we might say—
free from the characteristics and the qualities of phenomena. . . . The world of appearances arises from the play or potentiality of this very mind of enlightenment. . . . Awareness itself . . . is the unobstructed basis of appearance. Thus objective appearances are understood as the luminous appearances of that which does not exist, posited as neither being nor as different from mind.
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 95.
[Awareness] is spontaneous because, from the perspective of appearances, its luminosity is ceaseless; it is a self-renewing energetic process of manifestation. . . . Being primordially pure in essence, it never really falls into cyclic existence. However, cyclic existence manifests from the inherent playfulness and potentiality of the ceaseless spontaneity of [awareness].
Rainbow Body and Resurrection, p. 97.
My personal, totally provisional, hopelessly shaky understanding of what the Tibetan Buddhists are getting as is this: my awareness that everything is spontaneous play of mind, my immediate experience of everything as spontaneous play of mind somehow ultimately leads to nothing but the awareness of Awareness Itself. Not my little small-a awareness, but Capital-A Awareness Itself. Which is synonymous with Father Tiso’s Mind of Enlightenment. Which is synonymous with what I call Über-Mind.
And that’s precisely what the Über-Eucharist effects: an immediate experience of the Real Presence of Über-Mind, an immediate experience of communion with, of union with the Real Presence of Über-Mind.
To put it another way, the Über-Eucharist is ‘me’ experiencing that while, yes, to all appearances it seems to ‘me’ that ‘I’ am experiencing awareness, in fact beneath, beyond that appearance, it’s really Awareness experiencing this ‘me’—it’s really Awareness manifesting this ‘me’ out of the inherent playfulness and potentiality of its ceaseless spontaneity, like a little kid on Halloween dressing up as Hermione or T-rex just for the fun of pretending, just for the fun of imagining what it’s like.
Which maybe says something about the mundane experience each of us earthlings is having right at this moment, about something profound in this experience that we’re maybe overlooking if Awareness is as totally immersed in it, as enthralled by it as a kid on Halloween.
In the traditional Eucharist, once the words of consecration are spoken, all that’s left in The Matrix is the appearance of bread and wine; in Really-Real Reality (a higher dimension in which we can experience in an entirely different way, in which we can have experiences of an entirely different order beyond mere appearance), there exists only the Real Presence of the Body and Blood.
Likewise, in the Über-Eucharist, once the words of transformation are spoken, all that remains in The Matrix is the appearance of ‘me’. ‘I’ have been transubstantiated; the ‘I’—which is just a construct of The Matrix—has been utterly and irreparably hacked. In Really-Real Reality (where experiences are experienced in an entirely different way), ‘I’ now am the Real Presence of Über-Mind. In Really-Real Reality (where all experience is of an entirely different order), ‘I’ have never been anything other than the Real Presence of Über-Mind.
The truth is ‘I’ have never ever possessed awareness of ‘my’ own, even inside The Matrix; Awareness has always possessed ‘me.’
That’s what Paul is getting at when he says,
It is not I who live, but Christ who liveth in me.
Galatians 2:20.
That’s what Athanasius of Alexandria is getting at when he says,
God became man so that man might become God.
The Über-Eucharist is theosis, except that we’re not becoming, we already are. But—
Hack the Eucharist | Crash the Matrix 