The ego is not an enemy to be defeated but a costume willingly donned.

What appears as a veil obscuring God from itself is, at a deeper level, God’s own act of concealment. The forgetting is not a failure in the system. It is the system. To know oneself as God without ever having forgotten would be like reading the last page of a novel without the story. There would be clarity, perhaps, but no drama, no discovery, no lived meaning.

Alan Watts often framed this as the cosmic game of hide-and-seek. God does not lose itself accidentally; it hides deliberately. The ego, with all its fears, desires, and sense of separateness, is the mask that makes the game convincing. Without that mask, incarnation would collapse into a kind of static perfection. With it, there is adventure: the thrill of becoming, the poignancy of loss, the sweetness of love that feels fragile because it seems not guaranteed.

From this perspective, awakening is not a moral obligation we must impose on others, nor a race we are meant to win. Every person is already fully what they seek, even while they experience themselves as incomplete. Even resistance to awakening is part of the divine choreography. God exploring limitation includes God exploring confusion, denial, and the sincere belief in being merely human. To rush that process, or to treat unawakened states as inferior, is to misunderstand the point of the play.

This reframes compassion in a subtle way. Instead of seeing others as asleep and in need of correction, we can see them as God mid-dream, exactly where the dream requires them to be. Awakening then becomes less about tearing away the veil and more about honoring the timing of its gentle lifting. When it happens, it happens naturally, like remembering something you were never truly capable of forgetting.

In this light, spiritual practice is not about forcing realization but about creating conditions of openness, curiosity, and love. And even that is optional. The universe loses nothing if some characters remain deeply invested in their roles. The divine does not panic about its own disguise. It knows it will be found again, because it is the only thing there is to be found.

So there is a quiet trust embedded in this view: trust in the intelligence of the whole, trust in the necessity of forgetting, and trust that awakening is not an achievement but a ripening. God awakens to itself not because it must, but because, eventually, it wants to.