The authentic lover of God faces many obstacles in a secularized society. I don’t speak of the church-goer, who is simply anachronistic, or those who tick the religious boxes on the decanal census, who are simply conformist, or those politicians who pluck transcendence and package it in sound-bites, who are simply opportunistic, but those who writhe insomniacally in bed each night, longing for God. The God who has elusively escaped incarceration in dogma, institutions, texts, sacerdotal vestments, rites, icons, even thought and visions. The God-lover knows the gods who claim divinity but remain in the cages of man are not gods, but simply archetypes of schoolmasters, priests, professors, and dictators. The giant schoolmaster in the sky with that infinite chalkboard and really big piece of chalk. But no real God would claim divinity; no real God would need to claim it. This real God is what the lover awaits those sweaty bucking nights.
I don’t need to enumerate the obstacles: the God-lover will know them, the sensitive secularist might be able to imagine them, and the others won’t have read thus far. I enumerate only the techniques, to expose the charlatans, detract the timid, and occupy the scholars.
| | Technique | Required Skills |
| 1 | The god-lover stays fully and persistently in potentiality and creation, delaying the movement of what he creates into the world’s industries until after his death, in faith that they will move there should they be required. He does not do this because he does not long for such movement but because he longs more for God and God, he knows from experience and intuition, hides at the edges of creation and in the murkiness of possibility. | Pride Stubbornness Desolation Vision Faith |
| 2 | Ability to readily move between states of energy. A master of the art of transition management, which is a sub-discipline of the grand art of energy management. So the god-lover reaches the excess of one state (e.g. debauchery), only to long for and achieve the excess of mystic quietude. The chief technique is learning how to recognize these as simply different forms of energy and thus move between them seamlessly; whereas the one who does not love god stays in one state his entire life, objectifying it … and the one who wants to love god but fails breaks moving from one state to another, or breaks others. | Melting, sublimation, freezing, evaporation, deposition, condensation, ionization, recombination |
| 3 | Becoming a leaf, accepting all things. The god-lover, rather than imposing his proclivities on the world, allows the world to exist on its own terms. He seeks to become the world and, in so doing, to become a subject of the spirit of the world—a subject in both senses of the term: a vassal to the world’s power and a discipline of the world through the reflection of the world in himself. All truths are valid except the truths that claim to reduce the world to themselves. | Schizophrenia (not as disease, but as the robust celebration of psychic diversity) |
| 4 | Passport-collector, mask-collector. Most generally, the god-lover is a collector of all things: ideas, emotions, sights, smells, sounds, textures, tastes, sensations, perceptions. But the two techniques most required in the collection of all things are the collection of passports and masks—closely related, for they both require the appearance of legitimacy and ease in all situations. The god-lover mingles with kings and bums, the wise and foolish, the articulate and bumbling, savages and sophisticates, the beautiful and ugly, without discrimination. He easily and knowingly adapts his language, gestures, fashion, attitude, and thinking to whatever context he finds himself in … and he finds himself in all. | Forger Nomad Model Thespian Thief |
| 5 | Waiting for God in the knowledge that for God to be God the waiting must not be fulfilled. Placing oneself fully in the space between this waiting and knowledge and God, allowing that space to be populated with the children of God and the waiting and knowledge. So the waiting for God becomes the waiting for that space between to be populated. And so as that space is populated, the god-lover describes the children and the desire for God grows. So the waiting for God becomes waiting for that space to be populated which then becomes waiting for the description of the population to emerge. Regardless, it almost all is waiting and the god-lover waits and in this he excels. | Impossible patience Vain hope Ecstatic futility Infinite desire Imaginative reconstruction of necessity |
| 6 | Aligns himself wholly with the poets, mystics, madmen, and prophets of God in all its forms. Refuses all manifestations of money, power, fame, validation, security and pleasure if they should in any way interfere with his essential alignment. Refuses all alignment with any temple, movement, or force other than the temple of the universe, the movement of all things, and the force of the flower. | Impecunious Constant Transchronological, transpolitical, transideological, transcircumstantial, transsensual Lunacy Perspicacity |
| 7 | Sees shadows as senses and senses as shadows—the dull round of savings and shavings, seduction and factories, fame and loss. | Solitary Hapless Desolate Iconoclastic Non-programmatic Feral Enthusiastic Comic Paraomniall Perpetual comfort with loss Dystopically utopian |
| 8 | Wholly committed to establishing a new soul-world order through not establishing a new soul-world order. | |
| 9 | Ability to walk through mirrors. For there are the lovers of the false gods of mirrors, who show only what the viewer wishes to see—and there are the lovers of the true gods of mirrors (which is to say the true god), and these can walk through, knowing in their genitals that vision births reality and their vision is stronger than the apparent hardness of glass. |
