Our language is peculiarly ineffective if not outright obstructive when it comes to understanding or conveying certain ideas. ‘I had a dream’ is a good example. It certainly doesn’t mean literal possession, although there is a connotation of this present since we now have a memory.

In this case ‘had’ means something like ‘experienced the happening of inside me’, as in ‘I had an itch’ or ‘I had a warm feeling’. But what a dream actually is must be far stranger than our language implies. Indeed, if we could properly indicate what a dream is, we might begin dreaming. But we may at least say this: a dream is an inward experience of an alternate reality which emerges as an expression of our minds’ nature and activity.

The story we bring back to waking consciousness, which is, in effect, another universe, is not what the dream was. It is a description, and has been erroneously linearized and abstracted for mastery and manipulation by the waking mind. The dream is not the description. It was an experience of something we might call liquid identity (constrained by both the character of the experience and the interpretive filters that transpose it into coherence in consciousness). It was like a heartbeat or a flash of insight; the records that come after are not only not the experience, they actually stand in place of it.

I will prepare you here: I am going to transpose this concept of the sudden, brief yet profound experience of liquid identity to a more familiar context: spirituality. What I would like to suggest, after all of this, is that our original experiences of ‘god’ were like this. They were flashes of relation with liquid identity in waking life, which we abstracted into representations of the forces involved and sustained. Eventually even that wasn’t enough: we formalized them, set them up in competition in human cultures, and sacrificed our minds and lives and world to them.

Originally, any experience of ‘god’ was a moment of direct contact with the living power as liquid identity in and as (and above) nature. It was absolutely incomprehensible precisely because it is an order of experience beyond all categories and whose novelty is effectively explosively self-expanding. -This- is what we are made ‘in the image of’, and not the bizarre tokens that can be ‘had’ or worshiped, praised or attacked. No. Novelty like holy lightning whose essences and powers are beyond all possible imagining and description. -That- is our likeness. Not the fetishes left over from attempted possession of god. A dream that the whole universe becomes directly involved in. As our lives. As our minds. As our hearts in communion and our works.