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?

*

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.

*

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

9 thoughts on “Parallel Lives During Wartime: The God Game Vision from 2002 to 2020, Who Knew?!”

  1. “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.”

    When I was a kid, I tried to express similar but not the same, strange but not a stranger, concepts in a story, that human life goes to a faraway recycling depot to remove the contaminant “stuff” of human lifetimes. Eventually, because of humanity’s longing, a life was formed that could save a world undergoing apocalyptic collapse. However, that life was presently unconscious in the back of speeding ambulance…

    The free event is now 70% full or 30% free.

    Did you look at the event posters on the Mysteries’ window in the photo?

    Reply
  2. In many ways, This story is structurally identical to carlos castaneda’s. Even more so now than then. Maybe a dream never escaped?

    Reply
      • Not the whole thing, mind you. So yes, somewhat of an exaggeration because the surface is also the structure, and if you stop digging, the surface is the structure and the under layers are created by the investigation. As always, I mis’spoke’ in this most shallow of mediums.

        (The intellect has been having clever contests on the internet since at least 2003).

        But anyway, Mythology can share a structure with totally different paint. Not identical maybe but Is it not obvious that Dave is the nagual? In dialogue about the impossible-to-state-obvious with The man who knows in his mind and imagination what his body forgot for real.

        Did I need sex to feel love? Or was it already there? Did I actually lose contact with love via sex? When Dave jiggles my true self and interpenetrates me with oneness, did I find a love that will be discovered as lost, similar to sex?

        At one point in my life, I thought that people would benefit from any contact with my depth. They seemingly did. And actually did, but the narrative was warped and degraded around the characters experiencing shared benefit.

        I mean were you of all people able to change anything in the quest to stop changing anything?

        I was musing the other day that we don’t escape the culture we are formed by, we can only transform it or redeem it. Give it the correct center rather than leaving it.

        Still being right in the middle of the past would make the present location more in the center of the old story than the past ever knew itself to be.

        I’ve never seen a character escape their narrative except in fictional stories. I’m open to it happening, but it has that whole black hole physics feel to it.

        Reply
        • Did I need sex to feel love? Or was it already there? Did I actually lose contact with love via sex?

          the hot-topic of the week, the day, even the hour, as maybe you were aware if you followed the links to DOmain? More to follow at this blog, Inch’allah.

          Your voice is oddly familiar, or perhaps it reminds me of myself. Is Thomas still doubting? it seems so.

          I mean were you of all people able to change anything in the quest to stop changing anything?

          A trick question, but like asking the Cretan if everything he says is a lie, you end up tricking yourself out of an answer.

          I’ve never seen a character escape their narrative except in fictional stories. I’m open to it happening, but it has that whole black hole physics feel to it.

          Why be so sure you would know it if you had (seen it)?

          Do you think in koans also?

          Reply
          • Given:
            “I’ve never seen a character escape their narrative except in fictional stories.”

            This is expected:
            “Your voice is oddly familiar…”

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