The God Game

By Dan Wick

Are you bored much of the time? Do you frequently feel anxious or depressed?  If so, perhaps you should try the consciousness altering exercises of the God Game. Drawing upon ancient wisdom and the latest scientific research, the God Game provides you with practical step by step instructions on how to achieve thirty-seven different profound alterations in consciousness, culminating in the Hermetic rites of theurgy in which you literally achieve a godlike state.

The God Game is the earliest human religion, originating in the Paleolithic Age.

Our ancient human ancestors communed with the gods on a completely democratic basis.

As human culture evolved, God Game specialists, shamans, priests, etc. came to dominate, interpreting divine messages to the rest of the tribe.

When civilization (written culture) began, the shaman-priests had already evolved elaborate ceremonies for invoking, controlling, and briefly becoming the gods. This came to be called (by later specialists) "theurgy".

The God Game is universal in human culture, East and West, North and South.

The greatest sages and religious figures of the ancient as well as the medieval and modern worlds played the God Game: Buddha, Moses,  Pythagoras, Lao-Tse,  Plato, Jesus, Iamblichus,  Muhammad, Moses de Leon, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, William Blake, W.B. Yeats, and Aldous Huxley all played the God Game which has been summed up so beautifully in the phrase of the Elizabethan poet, Edward Dyer: "My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is".

The God Game is in no way sacrilegious. Christianity draws upon both Catholic and Protestant God Game practitioners, including St. Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhardt, among dozens of others. The Sufi tradition in Islam, the Kabbalah in Judaism, a variety of meditative practices in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the shamanist rites in hundreds of native religions attest to the piety as well as the universality of the God Game.

The rise of a scientific, rationalistic world view put the God Game out of business  (except for a very few practitioners) for two and a half centuries.

But it is now making a comeback. Ground-breaking research in cognitive psychology, including the exploration of a variety of dream states, trance experiences, and meditative practices has yielded startling results which strongly suggest that the traditional Western model of consciousness, with its fixed, stable waking state, punctuated by regular periods of unconsciousness during sleep is deeply flawed.

Rather, consciousness  is emerging as a continuum. We are never truly unconscious. We are merely conscious of different things at different times. Consider the metaphor of shining a flashlight in a dark, well-furnished room. Whatever the flashlight illuminates at any given time - a table, a chair, a painting hanging on the wall - is what we are conscious of. Whatever remains in total darkness is what we are unconscious of  but only for the time being. At any time, we can bring anything in our minds that is not currently illuminated by the "flashlight" – if we are trained in the correct techniques.

Too much emphasis is placed by many occult practitioners on achieving "cosmic consciousness" (or some synonymous term)  The fault here lies in the terms themselves. They are catch-all labels applied to every variety of ineffable experience.  They cover not one, but many higher states of consciousness.  Such states cannot be described, they can only be experienced.  Nevertheless, there are methods for reaching them, ranging from Cabalistic magic to Zen Buddhism. Unfortunately, the problem with these methods is that in most cases they have grown too formalized.  Emerging, in many instances, from the experience of a single individual, such techniques attempt to stereotype in advance the experience which is sought.  The God Game breaks down these categories by suggesting, not a single method, but a variety of approaches to altering consciousness.

Modern psychology has thoroughly democratized the experience of spiritual transcendence.  No longer is it limited to an esoteric elite.  All human beings with sufficient motivation can aspire to experiences available in the past only to those specially indoctrinated as initiates  into the Higher Mysteries.

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