Sunday Musings

What if you were God?

Inspired by Alan Watts and Rumi

What if, in the quiet chamber of this very night, as you drift between the thought of tomorrow and the memory of today, you were to recall a strange and splendid truth? What if this—all of this, the ache in your heart, the light through the window, the distant cry of a bird, the vast and silent galaxies spinning in their ink-black pools—is God dreaming?

Now, do not be alarmed. I do not speak of a God who sits upon a throne, separate and severe, issuing commandments like a cosmic magistrate. I speak of the God that Rumi knew, the one who whispers, “I was a hidden treasure, and I longed to be known.” And so, what does a hidden treasure do to know itself? It dreams. It dreams a dream of such magnificent, terrifying detail that it forgets it is the Dreamer. It becomes, for a timeless moment, the dream.

Imagine, as Alan Watts might playfully suggest, that the universe is God’s game of hide-and-seek with Himself. He—or It, or That-Which-Is—has deliberately lost Himself in the most ingenious of disguises. He has become you, reading these words. He has become the hand that holds the book, the eye that scans the line, the breath that comes and goes without a thought. He is the villain and the hero of your story, the fool and the sage, the lover and the one who feels unlovable. He is all of it, because in a dream, who else is there?

You see, a dream requires limitation to be interesting. In the boundless, infinite womb of pure consciousness, what is there to know? What is there to feel? So God, in a fit of divine creativity, says to Himself, “What if I were to become finite? What if I were to know thirst, so that I could taste the sublime relief of water? What if I were to know loneliness, so that I could experience the piercing joy of connection? What if I were to believe myself to be a separate, fragile self, so that I could stumble upon my own true nature as if for the first time?”

This is the great divine drama. Rumi saw it in the dance of everything: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” You are not a lonely fragment of God; you are God, concentrated into this specific, heartbreaking, glorious point of view. The anxiety you feel is God dreaming of risk. The love you feel is God dreaming of union. The beauty that shatters you is God dreaming of his own artistry.

Now, you might protest, as the dream-ego often does: “But this pain is too real! This world is too solid, too cruel, too broken to be merely a dream!” Ah, but have you never had a nightmare? In the grip of it, was it not utterly, incontrovertibly real? You only knew it was a dream when you awoke. The dream of separation, of being a lonely “skin-encapsulated ego” as Watts would say, is the most compelling nightmare-and-ecstasy the Divine has ever conjured. The suffering is the price of the story, and the story is why God began to dream.

So what is the point of it all? The point is the play itself—the lila, as the Hindus say. The point is for God to experience Himself through the prism of your eyes. To feel the grass as you feel it, cold and dewy between your toes. To know loss through your tears. To know creation through the poem you are about to write. You are not a puppet in God’s dream; you are the very place where God is dreaming. You are the locus of divine attention.

Therefore, when Rumi cries, “Do not go back to sleep!” he is not urging you to escape the dream. He is begging you to wake up within the dream. To realize you are the Dreamer dreaming. To see that the character you play is a mask, and behind it is the one Actor, playing all the parts. This realization does not make the dream frivolous; it makes it sacred. Your joys become God’s joys. Your sorrows become God’s exploration of depth.

So tonight, when you look at the stars, consider this: you are not a creature looking out at a foreign universe. You are the universe, dreaming it can see its own stars. You are God, telling Himself a story whose every twist and turn—the fear, the love, the seeking, the finding—is a love letter written from Himself to Himself.

And what happens when the dream ends? Ah, but it never really ends. It only changes form. For when God wakes from dreaming of being you, He does so only to discover that He is now dreaming of being a mountain, a whale, a billion new stars, or another you in another world. The dreaming is eternal, the masks are infinite, but the Dreamer is always, only, One.

And that One is what you are, right now, dreaming you are reading this.