Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/06/26/documentary-about-people-who-h.html
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What if one or more of them is right?
But none of them are, (just ask me how I know! 
Ok, fine, all kidding aside, they all are, as art thou!
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Tell it to The Five Percenters, a.k.a. “The Nation Of Gods And Earths.”
Aww, yea!
Preach it brutha!
(Actually just read their Wikipedia page, never heard of them before but seem to be a rather interesting group!)
I suspect that people who have realized they are gods are closer to the truth than most people who use religion simply as a club. The whole idea of intensive disciplines and practices is to transform the self, how one thinks and feels and even how one approaches self-hood. This is also why most organized religion outlaws mysticism - leave it to the professionals and pay up! In the non-Abrahamic world, the idea of being god is commonplace. It only seems weird to those who think they already know what a “god” is, which is probably shaky ground. It’s only grandiose if one assumes that it isn’t also true for others.
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“The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964) is a book-length psychiatric case study by Milton Rokeach, concerning his experiment on a group of three paranoid schizophrenic patients at Ypsilanti State Hospital… To study the basis for delusional belief systems, Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus Christ and confronted them with one another’s conflicting claims, while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group.”
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¿One hour? I’m an impatient god, so, are they or are they not?
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Ass! What a Christhole…
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Watch an awesome Peter O’Toole as “God” in The Ruling Class (1972). His character concluded he was god after praying and realizing that he was just talking to himself.
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Or the flipside:
“Two men say they’re Jesus . . . one of them must be wrong”
- Dire Straits
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A lady I once met told me that she was Eve and seemed quite troubled by the fact. Having had my own fair share of trans-personal experiences, I had to agree but with a proviso. “In the way that you are, so is everyone else.” It seemed to pique her interest, if not provide any calm.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the realisation that you are Eve, or Jesus, or God or the universe or the Tao leaves you in the same place and time as you were before that flash of insight, and no different except in perspective.
Best to make a cup of tea.
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I have no issue with those who have intense feelings of spirituality or supernatural experiences as long as they do not push it on others. However, I have known someone like the folks in the film and typically these people are completely non-functional in modern society and simply cannot relate to others on a basic day-to-day existence in our physical world. Their minds are operating at such a higher plane of consciousness that they usually cannot hold a job, have alienated all friends and family, are depressed and often are hard-core substance abuser as they struggle to live among us spiritual neanderthals.
Having grown up with such a person I did not view this documentary with fascination but rather with profound sadness for these poor souls.
Or the end of John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974). A malfunctioning talking bomb gets into a philosophical discussion with a crew member, decides it’s God, but then declares, “Let there be light”.
“I’m not Pinback”
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Was everyone standing around chanting “three gods enter, one god leaves”
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So…
These folks are exactly like Jesus,
sure they are god, are not.
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The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
—William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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Been such a long time since I thought of this song.
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