I’ve mentioned before that I may very well be at core a Pantheist. I’ve migrated to this position from once having been a Pantheist/Panentheist, though looking at the below, I seem to be exhibiting Panentheist traits. (This is even though I’ve — philosophically — wanted to shy away from Dualism, or a Matter/Spirit division.) Pantheism, to repeat, is the belief that the “Universe” (disregarding the Universe/Multiverse debate; what I mean is the totality of what is) is the body of the Divine. Panentheism is the belief that the Universe is the body of the Divine, but the Divine is also more. In this case, I’m postulating that, “more,” as Awareness (to be inclusive of lifeforms like plants, which do exhibit direct signs of response to stimuli).

If what exists is the body of the Divine, that means everything in existence is a part of the Divine. Life itself exists in and is nurtured by a field of Spirit (which simply may be nonlocal in nature/external to the 4-dimensional reality we live in: 3-D Space + Time). This means we are all part of and inheritors of the Divine; the idea of “soul” references back to this field as a particular instance of the effect of Spirit interfacing with Life.

If Spirit is one thing which gives a spark of Awareness to many things, it follows that a person also has that spark within themselves, and can experience many parts of themselves. It gives a framework for what may happen to the spirit of a plant when it is divided, and its cuttings regenerate into separate plants. It’s no problem; all Spirit is one Spirit.

This also has implications for what happens after we die (absent a supernatural religious explanation), around which I only hear, “Trust.”

Innumerable and exponential increases in the numbers of lives and deaths, and hence the numbers of immortal souls to populate the afterlife, doesn’t make sense: especially when one sees that life essentially recycles itself. Neither does a Heaven or Hell that is focused around personal desires or personal pains, make sense: the world isn’t about any one of us, personally. If anyone is about us, it’s us. Self-generated worlds explain this.

What is outside of us are near-infinite expressions of the Divine (I’m not going to get into the argument that what is “near-infinite” is also infinitely small compared to the infinite; it’s a turn of phrase), and what is inside of us, also has the potential to be plural. That’s natural, and nothing to be alarmed about, in and of itself.

The connection to the Divine means that anyone or anything that could exist outside of us — depending upon our range of life experience and capacity/permissiveness for imagination — we could also experience in our minds. This is where fictional characters may develop. Reading Fiction is a form of guided intellectual play. I think imagination developed as a way to practice thinking through what we would do in potential, abstracted, life situations.

Ultimately, this is the root of where I’m coming from, with my creativity. I had forgotten about it. Then I began writing about it, and the material began to come back to me — complete; or, reasonably so. This is the current status of my, “God Project,” which started early on, when at the prompting of a Counselor, I attempted to decipher what the Divine was, specifically, to me.

I had also pushed this off to the side, because there are a lot of people who really misunderstand this function of the human mind.

But as there’s a Universe outside, there can be a Universe inside which is no less valid. I’ve seen people misunderstand this to mean that, “all stories happen in some Universe,” which I would not endorse. This is because I know what it is to grow a story. It isn’t real. Thinking it is real, is a path to 1) constrained storytelling (how do you edit something that, “really happened?”), and, 2) delusion.

Delusion is, technically, having fixed, false, idiosyncratic beliefs about reality that are held to even in the face of evidence to the contrary. You see the power of religion, there: if a belief is fixed and false but common, it technically isn’t a delusion. And there, we get into Politics, which — as an extension of other people’s institutional power and control — should have no place in Metaphysics.

In my opinion.

As I wrote before, reality is different than Fiction, because Fiction is a creative product. Creativity doesn’t have to match reality. I could write a story about soul transmigration and it wouldn’t have to be literally true to be well-made. It wouldn’t even have to be what I honestly believed: because it’s Fiction.

The point of Fiction is not to be literally true. Often, it is a vehicle to say something beyond itself — and from experience, I know that those messages often aren’t amenable to being directly spoken.

How this topic came to me, at all? When I was younger and thinking I was a baby Medium (I’m not married to that status anymore, but sometimes my own thoughts and history make me pause), I would at times let my “spirits” flow out through my body.

And then, as now, I tell whether they’re here, by how I feel in my body. Right now I have a familiar feeling which happens when I wax poetic about spirituality, outside of a religious context. It’s a really nice feeling. It makes me feel like I’m going to be alright. Whomever I’ve contacted, feels entirely benevolent; this is not true of everyone.

But…I was thinking about this as I was writing about character design. I used to not really associate my personal bodily appearance with who I was, on the inside. This led to an extended period when I would intentionally look at myself when passing reflective surfaces and think, “oh, is that what I look like?” Then I started trying to conduct these specific energies out through my body, to see what they would look like, if they were me — how they would wear this body.

If I’m looking at how a specific, “spirit,” wears, “this body,” (or any body, for that matter) that could give me a clue as to how to draw or illustrate my characters. They don’t have a choice over the bodies they’re born into, or the families or circumstances they’re born into; but they do have a choice over how they wear their bodies, and, how they deal with those circumstances.

And those bodies and circumstances, are up to me, to supply…