Okay, so on Tuesday, Samhain, I mentioned that "a lot of theological and metaphysical puzzle pieces just fell into place for me." It hit me with an obviousness and clarity that I have only experienced once before. Calling it a revelation is not an overstatement.

I said then that I needed a bit of time before talking about it publicly.

I am certain that now is the right time. Thread below, behind the cut.

So okay. Starting with the basics, the material world as we understand it is a small corner of all that exists. Concepts such as matter, physical space, and linear time are fake concepts that our physiology assumes and finds necessary to interpret the world.

This much I already knew.

Second: we, our consciousnesses, are a temporary instantiation of beings much larger and less limited.

We instantiate into this material world because there's value in limitations such as perception of linear time and space, individuation, growth, temporariness. We're here to learn and have experiences.

When we exist outside of this instantiation, we exist as individual but de-individuated beings. Parts of a whole exists, but thoughts and affect are shared, and together we form a collective.

My best metaphor is individuals are like it's lobes of a cumulus cloud -- real and individual, but existing blended together and with divisions drawn between them being somewhat arbitrary.

We exist in this state as non-material, atemporal beings.

This is our true existence. Our material instantiation is a deliberate choice, but we don't choose what circumstances we're born into.

We instantiate over and over again (reincarnation). We come in a bit different each time, as a result of the blending process of the collective.

I want to be very, very clear on this point: I do not want this to valorize human suffering.

We're here to learn and experience, and a lot of different kinds of experience have value, but that doesn't make privation or cruelty in any way okay. We need to do what we can to make this world give us the most meaningful experiences possible, for all of us.

So I can call our existence as a collective under a whole lot of different names. The ones that I've thought of so far are Collective, All-Mind, One-Mind, Link, Continuum... the actual name doesn't really matter, but I should probably pick one. It's a picture in my head, not words.

Anyway, certain lobes of the collective are stable and can directly interact with our material world without instantiating into it first.

These are what we experience as gods.

Gods are real, and exist prior to instantiated-human thought. They also exist out of fundamentally the same substance as we do, just without the limits of instantiation. As parts of the collective, the boundary between gods,is inherently fluid and as much as question of labeling than it is of ontology.

Before and after we die, we join the collective and exist as part of the same state of being as gods do.

I am *pretty sure* that experiencing music is one of the ways we can come closest to what it feels like to existing in this state. Sex and drugs, too.

I want to be clear here that all of this is metaphor. The actual, real way this all works is something not fully comprehensible within the limits of our instantiation or language. People have been groping towards different understandings of this truth for as long as there have been people, and the ways we understand it are heavily mediated by cultural context.