Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 17, 2026
I put on The Who's Tommy again this week, and got to the end of it, which is the part that has always undone me.
The finale does something strange musically. After two hours of a rock opera about a boy sealed inside himself, the whole thing opens out — the pleading refrain, and then the great ascending line that answers it, addressed to a "you" the album never names. It should be sentimental. It isn't. It lands like something being handed over.
And it set off a thought I have carried privately for years: that we might be here to be looked through. That God sees by way of us, hears by way of us, tastes a meal and catches a chord through us — and that this is not a poetic flourish but something close to the job description.
If that sounds like mysticism, notice that you have almost certainly met the secular version and found it respectable. Simulation theory — the argument that any sufficiently advanced civilization would run ancestor simulations, so we are probably inside one — is the same shape in a lab coat. A mind outside the world. A world that exists in order to be observed. Our sense of being fundamental turning out to be a local effect. I will come back to it, because what the modern version leaves out is the interesting part.
I had kept my own version fairly quiet, because I assumed it was exotic. It turns out I had the geography wrong.
Pete Townshend found the Indian mystic Meher Baba in 1967 and has followed him ever since — decades of it, a song named for him, an autobiography that does not walk it back. And Tommy's central conceit is Baba's: the boy's deafness and blindness were never really about a boy. They are about us. The claim is that ordinary people are sensorially intact and spiritually insensible, catching fragments and calling it the world.
So the finale is not a character resolving. It is a prayer, and the unnamed "you" is God, and the audience, and — in Baba's system — not finally separable.
Baba's cosmos opens with God asking, in effect, Who am I? Infinite, entire, and unconscious of it. To know himself he divides into countless finite drops, and consciousness climbs up through mineral and plant and animal until, in some human being, it wakes and recognizes what it has been the whole time.
Creation as a mirror. God makes something able to look back, in order to be seen.
A reader who has been through a few of these will have noticed that I circle.
Christopher Alexander has now turned up in four. The mirror is on its second pass and I doubt it is done. Attention has been either the subject or the smuggled cargo of nearly everything I have written this month.
This section is called Musings, Meanderings, and Loops, and the third word is the one doing the work. I don't write these to settle things. I circle them. An idea arrives, I set it down, and it comes back a week later in different clothes asking a harder question than it asked the first time.
I used to take that for a failure of discipline — the suspicion that a serious person picks a thesis and defends it, and that circling is what you do instead of concluding. I have come around. An idea large enough to be worth having does not yield to one pass, and pretending otherwise produces essays tidier than the thought behind them.
Which suits this subject, because in Baba's account the mirror does not arrive clean. It comes tarnished and gets polished — slowly, by experience returning to the same surface again and again until the reflection stops being fragmentary. Nobody polishes anything in one stroke.
Here is what I got wrong, and it took me some reading to find out.
I had been treating "we are part of God" as the dangerous idea — the thing you pick up from Eastern mysticism and smuggle into a Christian life hoping nobody checks your bags. It is not. It is sitting in the middle of the tradition, in plain sight, stated more boldly by the people who founded it than by anyone who worries about it now.
It starts on the first page. Genesis has us made in the image — not issued a copy of it, not assigned one, made in it. Whatever else that means, it means the resemblance is structural rather than decorative.
And Paul does not hedge either. He tells the Corinthians they are the body of Christ, and members of it individually — not like a body, not a helpful analogy for organizational cooperation. He tells a crowd in Athens that in God we live and move and have our being. The second letter of Peter says believers become partakers of the divine nature. Athanasius, defending the Incarnation against people who found it undignified, wrote the sentence that has never stopped being startling: God became man so that man might become god.
And the Eastern church built its whole account of salvation on it. Not a courtroom where a debt gets paid, but a hospital and then something further — theosis, real transformation, genuine participation in the life of God. Maximus the Confessor taught that the divine Word planted an inner principle in every created thing, and that human beings stand at the junction of matter and spirit as a kind of priest, gathering creation into conscious praise.
That is not a fringe position smuggled in from somewhere else. That is the mainstream of Christian thought for its first thousand years, and it is considerably bolder than what I had been keeping to myself.
So the line is much further out than most people assume. You can go a long way toward the mystics — much further than a nervous modern Western Christianity tends to admit — and still be standing well inside the tradition.
There is a line, though, and I want to be exact about it, because I nearly stepped over it without noticing.
It is not participation. It is need.
Baba's God begins unconscious of his own infinity and requires creation in order to find out what he is. Carl Jung's God, in Answer to Job, is morally incomplete — omnipotent but unable to see his own back — and requires human consciousness to integrate what he cannot perceive in himself. In Jung's reading, the Incarnation is not God redeeming humanity's sin but God making reparation for his own, having been shown up on moral grounds by a man on an ash heap.
It is a magnificent argument, and Jung was careful in a way his popularizers are not: he insisted he wrote as a psychologist describing the God-image in human consciousness, not as a theologian describing God. Read that way it is a claim about how humanity's picture of God had to change once a man out-moralized it. That is defensible and fascinating. Read the other way, as a claim about God, it is something else.
And notice what both men require. Not that we participate in God — that we complete him. That God was lacking, and we are the remedy.
That is the step that costs something.
Which brings me to the strange thing about Job, and about my own instincts.
I have always read Job as the great statement of God's supremacy. The whirlwind, the unanswerable questions, the parade of creatures no one has tamed — the whole force of it is that God is not accountable to my sense of proportion.
Jung reads the identical text to conclude that God was exposed. And I notice that when I reach for Job, I reach for it the way the tradition does, not the way Jung does. My instincts, it turns out, were more orthodox than my reading list.
Worth saying too: the text does not end with God repenting. It ends with God telling Job's friends they spoke wrongly of him and Job spoke rightly — a vindication of honest complaint over pious defense, which is remarkable enough without making it a confession.
The instrument that makes all of this hold together is a fourteenth-century distinction I had heard of for years and never understood the use of.
Gregory Palamas separates God's essence from God's energies. The essence — what God is in himself — stays permanently beyond any creature's reach. The energies are God's own uncreated life at work in the world, and those you can genuinely participate in. Really. Not as a manner of speaking.
I had assumed a distinction like that existed to hold people back. It does the opposite. It is what lets you go as far as you can go. You are the body. You are a partaker. Something real looks through you when you pay attention, and it is not a metaphor. What you are not is the source, and God was not waiting on you to become himself.
I said I would come back to the simulation.
The thing I find telling about it is that the most materialist culture in human history looked hard at consciousness and rebuilt this entire structure in a server room. People treat that as the hard-headed, post-religious position. It is the same intuition in different clothes — which I take as evidence of how difficult the intuition is to shake, rather than as evidence against the older versions of it.
But notice what falls out in translation. A simulator observes. He does not participate, he has no stake, and he certainly does not enter. If you are in a simulation you are data — expensively rendered, possibly interesting, and worth precisely what the run is worth. Nobody empties himself into a process in order to suffer alongside it.
Which is the whole distinction I have been circling, arriving from an unexpected direction: whether you are being used or being loved.
Because of what it does to the reason any of this exists.
If God needed us — unconscious until we woke him, incomplete until we finished him — then creation is maintenance. He was short of something and built the remedy. That is a coherent story, and a flattering one, and it makes us necessary.
But I have to correct myself in the other direction, because saying God did not need us is not the same as saying he was indifferent to whether we existed, and I have written the first as though it implied the second. Need and want are different words. A man who is not starving can still want dinner with somebody. Wanting is not lacking.
So: he did not need the eyes. I think he wanted them. Wanted something able to look back and recognize what it was looking at — not in order to discover what he is, which is the move that costs, but in order to be known. Those are not the same, and the difference is the whole of it. Learning is what the deficient do. Being known is what love asks for, and it is the one thing omnipotence cannot arrange unilaterally, because a mirror you compelled is not a mirror at all.
Read it that way and the old sentence changes weight. God is love usually gets taken as a description of temperament — a loving sort of God as opposed to a stern one. Take it instead as the answer to why there is anything at all, and it becomes a far larger claim. Love is what remains once need has been ruled out.
That is the whole price of the last step. Take it, and you trade being wanted for being required — which sounds like a promotion and is the opposite of one. Necessity is a much smaller thing to be than a gift.
And then the image does the rest of the work. If the resemblance is to a maker, the way you exercise it is by making. That is why use them on purpose is not a modest instruction — it is most of the assignment. Attention is participation, and so is building the thing, writing the song, running the company as though it mattered how. You are not decorating a finished world. You are an extension of the one who is still making it.
Nobody needed my eyes in order to see. They were wanted, and given, by someone who lacked nothing and made me anyway — which is a harder thing to have been, and a better one.