The great irony of life is that most of us spend most of it completely missing the point. And that is the point!

Imagine for a moment that there's a god or gods or Great Spirit, or spirit-that-moves-through-all-things. By definition, this Whole Ghost is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, which means that It is everything and every time and everyone. This Oneness contains and is everything from the Universe to each particle in it. This Oneness comprises not only every planckion of physical (manifest) reality, but every non-physical process, emotion, and happening. Eternity. Presence.

Within Everything, anything and everything can and does happen, forever. There's no up that isn't canceled by a down, no bad that isn't neutralized by a good, no love that isn't destroyed by hate, no death that a new birth doesn't discount, and no great work of art that isn't winked out of existence by the relentless passage of time. There isn't even the relentless passage of time, because from the eternal perspective, it's all now anyway.

Isn't that boring? What's the point?

Something exciting and irritating and frustrating, tragic and incredible takes place as a miniscule aspect of the Oneness that makes all of Eternity worth being here for. This "something" is the Devil.

Into God's whole view comes separation, splitting up, forgetfulness. Into the closed-system of the Universe comes thermodynamics, disequilibrium, and gravity. Now we have particles - pieces of the whole - trying to reunite with one another. We have misunderstandings that can be resolved, we have ignorance that can be dispelled by the light. Glaciers take down the forest, and then the mosses crawl in to humbly begin a whole new world. Into the equilibrated universe we can now experience the joy of union following the despair of separation and isolation. What comfort is safety without first experiencing terror?

In the total big picture, these joys and tragedies all cancel each other out. All the excitement and wonder of life takes place within and especially between the parts of the whole. It's like a fabulous dance in which partners constantly change, and the music and movement shifts from ballet to square dance to stomping jungle boogie and back to ballet again.

Thank you to the Devil. Thank you for breaking the world into a googleplex of possibilities and parts. Thank you for all that work of making the lovers get old and restless and start cheating on each other the minute they finally find each other after years of tragic searching. Thank you for the catastrophe of continents crashing and creating Himalayas; thank you for destroying the Ganges by washing the mountains into the mighty river. I like mud, too.

Thank you for evolution, for succession. Thank you for our wounds that make us stronger. Thank you for killing us and for the endless battle. How else could we be warriors?

There is a reason not to become enlightened. In the enlightened state, your conflicts will likely be resolved, but they will almost certainly become irrelevant - and then what would there be to do? Your dis-eases will wane and your physical discomforts will become at best interesting but at worst also irrelevant - and then what would there be to strive for? Your relationship with your true self will become primary and sufficient (since the Oneness is sufficient unto itself) - and what would be the purpose of all that longing for true love?

Worse than that, what if everyone became enlightened? Nobody would work, there would be no purpose in having a government, the elite would cease to amass billions... in short, our whole social fabric would disintegrate and people would just be instead of doing, striving and longing. Wouldn't that be terrible? Who'd run the compactor at the garbage dump?

The most terrifying thing about enlightenment is that it's available to any one of us at any time. The slightest accidental awareness, the slightest willingness to relinquish our sufferings and - WHAMMO! the dream is all over, suckers.

Luckily, the Devil works in myriad ways. The Devil is at work in our schools, churches, shopping malls, doctor's offices and most certainly on our television screens. The Devil lives in every single one of us as an "ego". The Devil is always there to keep life interesting by giving us one experience after another.

For this I am grateful.