Parallel Lives During Wartime: The God Game Vision from 2002 to 2020, Who Knew?!

The God Game was the name of a film project I was working on in early 2002. I was living in London, and recruiting people wherever I could find them. I was also visiting the New Age bookshop Mysteries, in Covent Garden, and the occult shop Watkins, quite a lot (I was even reading Tarot in Watkins). Once when I was on my way to or from Mysteries, I ran into the actor Rufus Sewell, star of Dark City. The film is summed up at IMDB as “A man struggles with memories of his past, which includes a wife he cannot remember, and a nightmarish world without a sun.” It came out in 1998, the year before The Matrix, and the two films are often compared.

I stopped Rufus and told him about my film project; he professed interest, politely, and gave me his card.

Rufus never got back to me. But Mark Lawn did, and became the first God Gamer.

Why am I sharing all this now? Here’s why:

Dave Oshana underwent a profound change of consciousness in June 2000, which he refers to as “enlightenment.” Rather than wait twenty years (as one person advised him) before speaking out, he began having meetings, attempting to transmit his experience with anyone open to receiving what he (later) called “the enlightenment transmission.”

One of the first places Dave had his meetings was in an upstairs room above Mysteries. These meetings were occurring in early 2002. He also visited the occult bookshop Watkins. There can be  little doubt that, if I had come across Dave at any of these junctures, I would have tried to recruit him. What would Dave have said?

Short of entering into a parallel time stream where this meeting took place, there is no way to ever know.

Flashforward to 2020, Dave is speaking and writing about “group enlightenment” and how human beings are not persons but bodies that host a collective, fragmented human spirit, a common life force. I have found this aspect of Dave’s teachings challenging, exciting, demanding, refreshing, even radical. Yet also strangely familiar and easy to take on board. Almost as if I have heard it somewhere before…

Yesterday, I had a sudden insight, and dug up my old treatment for The God Game, a sort of “pitch letter” which was posted at my site (divine virus), with a link sent out to potential recruits (it was later updated into a description of the finished product):

To this end, humans of all ages and backgrounds are being recruited. Each one is interviewed intensively for a single day about his or her beliefs, philosophy, life experiences, dreams, goals, views on society and religion and “the greater picture.” They are guided to undergo imaginative exercises by which to recreate themselves in specific ways, i.e., as a religious leader, a terrorist, an animal, and so forth. They are given the opportunity to imagine themselves as a different person altogether, living a different life, and to contribute their own personal recreation of the Afterlife, depicting their view of existence beyond the body and the self, their thoughts on how life looks to them from this new, transpersonal perspective.

The film sets out to portray distinct, charismatic humans as masks or windows onto the gestalt Human: a unified collective consciousness of which we all are but fleeting manifestations. The idea of death is what finally unites all these separate entities into a single, continuous energy or Life Force.

 

To clarify this point: the acceptance of The God Game is that in death the illusion of selfness is shed, along with the body, and consciousness “returns” to the primordial, formless energy from which it emerged. Whether this once individual consciousness is then dispersed into the Universe, recycled into a new form, or something else altogether, is entirely up to the individual, and depends on just how far s/he has developed his/her awareness while alive.

…

The God Game is about perception, illusion, identity, and the masks we wear to hide from the terrible truth of ourselves: that we are the sole creators of our reality.

My original idea had been to film 24 participants and then edit them together into a single film in which they would all merge and overlap, one human continuing the thoughts of another, a third completing them, and so forth. I wished to create a cinematic representation of the collective human being. This proved over-ambitious, however, and I ended up editing the footage I had (of six participants) into six stand-alone episodes.

You might say the great group-merge project was aborted. Worse, the project collapsed midway, turned into Being the One, and became all about meeee. You might then say that my ego took over the project, and reduced something that was supposed to showcase all of humanity into my own personal platform for self-aggrandizement. This is a bit similar to how that same year, my brother (having been crucified in 2000 as a means to face his demons and emulate Christ), had an exhibition of paintings and the film of the event, thereby turning it into a means of self-publicity. The programming got us: the matrix told us who we were ~ again. 

 

Congruent with this shift, I wrote Matrix Warrior in May 2002, published in May 2003. When I finally met Dave in 2007, I gave him a copy of the book. It was inscribed to “Dave,” but it was a different Dave, a Dave who hadn’t read the book so I had asked for it back. I told Dave this as I handed him the book. I don’t recall what I wrote in the book, for Dave 1, that ended up being a message for Dave 2. Or should that be Dave 0? I hope it was somehow appropriate.

Dave read the book in a day or two, and liked it enough to suggest to Watkins that they carry it. He mentioned it over the years to a number of his participants (one of whom I just met). It was probably a big part of the reason he asked to meet up with me privately in 2007. One of the things he wondered, during that meeting, was if I really knew what I was writing about in the book, or if it was only an intellectual exercise; or more precisely, what was the ratio between body knowing and mind candy? He probably still doesn’t know that ratio for sure. I know I don’t.

And now I am wondering the same thing about The God Game: How much did I know back then that I didn’t know I knew? And how much were Dave and I embarked on the same mission, at the same time and the same place? Were we so well-disguised that we didn’t even recognize each other when we passed, in a city dark in the daytime, living our parallel lives during wartime?

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In a further piece of strange looping, yesterday I spoke to Mike LaBurt (my collaborator on The God Game) about a short film he is working on depicting a kind of energetic possession by an alien virus. Besides an odd chance encounter that went nowhere a year or so ago, this was the first time Mike and I have really spoken in many years.

I hope some of you get the point, finally; because I am starting to see that maybe I haven’t been stating it clear enough. This isn’t: “If you are into what I am doing, you should be into what Dave is doing.” That’s the luxury perspective of an illusory fragment of a larger reality. If you are (really) into what you think I am doing, then you are already in on what Dave (you think) is doing, even if you are clinging fast to your hairstyle and tie, in the hope of not getting rumbled.

The real question is, who do you think you are fooling?

It’s not rhetorical, either.

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Dave’s free-for-all Meet & Greet event for April 4th, is now 62% full. Sign up here ~ and don’t forget to send a follow up email to Dave.

The game’s afoot! Neurons of the body unite! You have nothing to lose but your ungodliness.

See also: Invitation to a Brainstorm: Divide & Conquer, Corona-Style