Godliness: Building Your Own Cosmology

Self-satisfaction is what makes it good to be a god. You may impress a few others with your godlike demeanor, but not your spouse or nineteen-year-old child. However, you can rely on your own opinion – your own good opinion – almost always and increasingly.

I have thought of myself as a god for a great many years, but was judicious enough not to say it aloud. I was a covert god. Then, in the early nineties, I decided to become a cruising live-aboard and sail around part of the world. To that end, I bought an auxiliary sailing yacht and named it Cosmos. As Captain and Owner I was Master of that vessel. I began to sign my name:

“Charles... Master of the Cosmos”

Eureka! I became an overt god just like that. Out of the closet at last. I have since sold the boat and added “(ret)” to my title.

Let me interject here that the proper honorific of address for such a god is “Magnifico.” It is proper because I say so. I like it because it has nuances of sham, flimflam and obsequiousness. It derives from Latin and works well in English and the romance languages. It sort of means “big-shot”, or that other phrase you get by transposing the vowels. Since those great many years ago, whenever people ask me what I prefer to be called, I answer, “Magnifico.” They may use the form at times, yet only one person – a woman, but not my wife – ever so addressed me consistently. Maybe they merely wonder if I want to be called Charlie or Chuck, but I don’t much care for either nickname.

A god, according to my definition, is any being who can do impossible things while fully understanding that what is being done is impossible and not of this real world. To do magic without understanding its unreality is not godlike. A common woods nymph might turn cucumbers into sunlight by making time run backwards. But if she doesn’t realize that’s not possible, she’s not a god. Being a god is often confined to working with one’s mind.

I became omniscient when I turned into a god. It’s too bad that, like all great gifts, omniscience came with a catch. I now have a rotten memory. So although I know everything, I can remember only the tiniest fraction of it all – a fraction that grows tinier every day.

In this little tract, I am going to set forth a few of my own biases, a general precept and a complex cosmology to illustrate that general precept. If you are able to stick with it and grasp the cosmology, you will become a god. You don’t have to buy a yacht…