Hope You Find It

In the 1980's a popular singer from England named Howard Jones released a song entitled Hide and Seek. The song tells a story which is a kind of creation myth. I listened intently to the song as it revealed to me what I know to be the true nature of God. When I heard the words of the chorus I felt a lump from in my throat and I began to weep.

I often listen to the song and it never fails to move me to tears. However, throughout the ensuing years the importance of discovering why the song had such a profound effect on me never occurred to me. Consequently, I kept this part of me a secret.

In 2001, nearly twenty years after first hearing the song I had signed up for a weekend seminar that promised to help me discover something profound about myself. On Sunday, the third day of the seminar, in the evening, the course leader opened a large book and read a story that I immediately recognized as the creation myth Howard Jones had put to music.

According to the story (creation myth), God fills the universe step-by-step by successively adding increasingly complex organisms right up to the creation of man. However, after each step God becomes dissatisfied and bored with what he/she has created because even man, having been created out of the mind of God, is still controlled by God like a puppet or doll would be controlled by a child by being moved about and given words and thoughts. God is dissatisfied and bored because he/she knows that every move and every thought and every word are actually his own. At this point, according to the myth, God makes a momentous decision. Being God and therefore capable of anything, God creates a game and in that game he will pretend that every thought and word and deed in the universe did not originate with himself and as part of the game God will forget that he is just pretending. The result is that even though God is everywhere in the universe and in everything, this knowledge is even hidden from God. God has thus endowed man with free will and with that free will comes the same power to create as God himself possesses. But because God has chosen to forget that he has hidden himself in each of us in this way (pretending that we are separate) what we create as individuals is a complete surprise to God, thus the title of the Howard Jones song “Hide and Seek”.

Now, I wanted to know what the connection between the Howard Jones song was and the seminar I had taken twenty years later. To answer this question I asked a computer group set up to talk about Howard Jones the singer-songwriter. I put out the question asking if anyone could tell me what had inspired the song Hide and Seek. A man from England who had attended a Howard Jones concert said that Howard had revealed that the inspiration for the song was a book by an English scholar named Alan Watts.

Hot on the trail, I soon found the book by Alan Watts which is called "The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are." Sure enough right in the first chapter of the book you can find the text of the creation myth Hide and Seek.

At this point I still didn't know how the text from Alan Watt’s book had gotten into the weekend seminar that I had taken. It wasn't until several months later, in a discussion with a friend in which I was telling him about my quest, that he told me that Alan Watts had been a professor at Berkeley in California in the 1960's and that one of his students at that time was the creator of the seminars known as “est”. The students name was Werner Erhard. This seminar went on to become the course that I had taken in 2001.

I later learned that Alan Watts was a scholar of Eastern religion and philosophy and that the origin of the creation myth is rooted in ancient wisdom crossing all cultural boundaries.

In virtually all cultures there really is a taboo against knowing who we are. This knowledge is often cleverly hidden in common religious texts. The King James Bible clearly tells us that “The kingdom of God lies within”, Luke 17: 20-21.

As Howard Jones expresses in the chorus of his song (I) “hope you find it, hope you find it in everything, hope you find me in you”, he expresses the deepest longings of my heart, for us all rediscover that we are not separate but all connected, all one, and indeed, we are all God.