In order to understand the design of the universe, we have
to know the ultimate desire of the creator. We will accept that the creator is
a being with consciousness, who has desires, and has the intellectual capacity
to design a place which enables the eventual fulfillment of this goal. We will
also assume that the nature of the original consciousness can be approached by
investigation of the creation, therefore we find that the creator must have
both masculine and feminine characteristics, and that there is both internal
character and external form to this being. The universe itself represents at
least part of the external form.
The motivation is one of love, the desire to experience joy
and relationship with and through another. However, joy experienced in and
through a lesser being would necessarily be a lesser joy, therefore the desire
of god is to create other beings as much like god as possible. Thus we find
they need to be able to create, not just follow along a predetermined path, and
we expect co-creatorship to be a part of the design of the resultant beings.
Through beings created in the image of God, then God can have actual experience
within the created realm, experience with real consequences and thus deep meaning,
unlike experiences solely within the imagination.
Therefore we find the challenge of God in creating is how to
make a being who is both other than God and the same as God, who is like God
but has become like God through his or her own free choices. Thus the growth from
potential to actuality is a necessary part of creation. Time is conceived as
the separation between the organism at one stage of development and the
organism at a later stage, with the organism being both the same and also more
mature. Since we are familiar with growth from childhood to adulthood that is
not a hard concept for us.
However, before the concept of growth, it is necessary to
distinguish an organism from the collective universal oneness into a separate
existence. Thus the concept of space is born as a separation between God and
each created being, as well as between the different created beings. In order
to create space, however, God must create an arena in which this can all take
place, and given that there is nothing outside of God, the way to create
something other can be achieved by making a realm that is finite and thus
limited, which then must necessarily
exist within God’s own internal being while also being different from God’s
internal being.
God would naturally have to be described as infinite
dimensional, which we can think of as either filling all possible conceptual
infinite-dimensional spaces to infinite extent, or as a single point of zero
extension within a potential space of infinite dimensions. To a mathematician
it is acceptable to equate these two in some sense.
Thus in creating a universe, God creates something other
than himself by creating a realm of finite dimensionality. We observe a
universe of three space dimensions plus one time dimension, although our
theoretical models today permit of much higher dimensionality. Thus the
physical spacetime exists as a subset of the consciousness of God, when we
think of consciousness as an extended field that permeates all of reality, and
exists as the “ground of our being”, to use a term common in religious circles.
Thus space within this conceptual place represents the separation of the
organism from the collective, allowing a collective consciousness to be
expressed within a finite, four dimensional realm. Thus a human being exists
both within God and separate from God.
It is necessary to establish the design in accordance with
the desire to give both freedom and direction to the created beings, and indeed
to the whole universe. The universe itself is the manifestation of
consciousness, existing within and totally dependent upon universal
consciousness. However, cocreation demands freedom of choice. There is little
value in a being who reaches maturity simply by making predetermined choices
and consequently growing in accordance with a pattern. If God wants safety and
security, and to avoid pain, then there is no need to go beyond determinism,
but if God wants something more than a robotic creation, then God must accept
the reality of being actually vulnerable to the choices of her created beings. And
God wants as close to other gods as it is possible to make, because great joy
requires great investment of heart and love and trust.
However, God’s capacity for self-expression would be
severely restricted if the only organisms available were bacteria, and so it is
necessary to create a being with the internal mind and external body able to
express the depths of heart necessary to manifest joy and external
accomplishment through self-actualization. God wants the actual experience of
day to day life, of the expression of love between two people, or two
gods-made-manifest. Thus there has to be some way for God to guide the process
of evolution so that God’s desires and original purpose can be accomplished,
while at the same time safe-guarding the free will of the created beings. Both
internal and external natures develop through the process of evolution.
Thus the universe is created to respond to desire of the
created organisms, from elementary particle to human, because everything
participates in universal consciousness by virtue of its very nature. Consciousness
here is seen as a field underlying everything, undifferentiated except through
the process of tying it down to an existence within the finite dimensional
realm.
The physical universe exists as separate “droplets”; even
space and time are not infinitely small, but have a smallest extension, a
granularity. Physics of the twentieth century discovered this when it looked at
the smallest scales, and found the quantum nature of everything. The smallest
length and the smallest time are known as the Planck length and time, after Max
Planck. Thus reality can be considered to consist of tiny grains. The essential
nature of all creation is that of change or growth, not static existence. In
accordance with A. N. Whitehead, we can suppose that the whole universe is
recreated, or made manifest, at every instant of granular time, so that it is
recreated every moment on a different basis, since it recreates itself in
accordance with its own nature, which reflects how much movement there has been
towards its own growth.
Consciousness within a four dimensional manifold is not
fully expressed immediately, but rather this expression develops over time, it
grows in manifestation according to the desire of the beings within the created
world. Thus it is both God’s
consciousness and becoming God’s consciousness, just as a baby is both being
herself and becoming herself.
God has now become totally vulnerable to the lowest
expression of consciousness, because there is nothing to pull the elementary
particle towards anything higher except for the fact of its own participation
within consciousness. If the elementary particle decides to remain solely an
elementary particle for all eternity, then that is how God will be forced to
remain in his self-manifested form. However, the nature of consciousness is
such that God has confidence that sooner or later an elementary particle
somewhere will find the desire within to experience more. It will not be a self-reflective
thought, it will not be expressed in words, but it will be a felt desire, a
wondering in some sense if this is all, an urge towards growth and greater
meaning.
We experience the internal nature of the elementary particle
as its tendency to behave in an ordered pattern, which we describe as obeying
the laws of nature. Obviously this is not the same as the internal nature of an
organism, higher or lower, but it is also not nothing.
Now God has designed the world exactly in such a way as to
respond to desire, because that is the meaning behind everything in creation.
As soon as a particle desires to grow, even the tiniest leaning towards growth,
there must be a mechanism to respond. God cannot respond to his own creation
from outside of it, since that is how God designed it, to be completely
self-determining, and there is no mechanism for an insubstantial being to
interact with a substantial being. However, clearly this is of great priority,
so in order to respond God had to have created also a world which can reach
down to the desire and offer a path whereby such a desire can be substantiated.
Even for a particle though, that path is not absolute, it can still choose.
Generally choice increases as the organism grows in complexity, but to be consistent
we must recognize that even a particle has some element of choice in a
response.
Most particles are fine with remaining static, with
remaining in their law-like behavior, but there is now one particle that has
discovered a desire to allow the greater expression of consciousness, that has
found a desire to move towards life, albeit unknowingly of course. Given that
the universe recreates itself at every instant of time, at the next instant it
is already a different universe, it is on a different foundation. We know from
quantum entanglement that once a state has been chosen, determined by the collapse
of the wave function into an actual choice of how to substantiate, then this is
immediately, instantaneously, communicated to all other particles that have ever
been in contact with this particle, which of course at this point we can take
to be the whole universe.
Thus the particle aspect of the created being has influenced
the internal distributed wave-aspect of reality. This influence then makes it
somewhat more likely that other particles will make that same choice, will
resonate with the desire for greater internal expression, and given that there
has probably been already a very long time of existing as a lower level
creation, the universe exists in a state of preparedness, so that it is likely
that the desire can spread rapidly and create a sudden discontinuity in the
state of matter in the created world. This brings to mind the idea of
archetypes within the collective unconscious which affect the thought and
behavior of humans, according to the theory of Carl Jung.
Teilhard de Chardin expresses this as a discontinuity in
state, leading to the growth of the elementary freedoms in accordance with the
growing synthesis of atoms and molecules subtended by growing consciousness. As
greater consciousness becomes substantiated, so a greater complexity is
manifested within the universe. And this in defined by the choices of the
created beings themselves, not dictated by God.
How can a choice be reinforced without taking away from the
freedom of choice? How does this differ from God simply dictating the next
step?
For this we can look to the idea of morphological fields, as
described by Rupert Sheldrake, among others, as a mechanism for the development
of shape and behavior of the organism over time. Everything that exists in
separated form within creation also participates in the universal oneness
underlying it, so the internal nature of everything can be described also
mathematically, as scientific fields, like the electromagnetic field, or the
gravitational field. Ultimately of course these reflect and participate in the
field of consciousness. Thus a change in an organism from one generation to the
next is also reflected by a change in the holistic field within which the
organism participates. The organism has both “wave and particle” nature,
although this needs better vocabulary on the higher end of the evolutionary
scale.
Thus, within a field, there exists waves or vibrations that
reflect or carry the change that has occurred. Choice begins the change, and
substantiation strengthens the change.
Let us suppose that God has some idea of the eventual bodily
form of the human, (whether this is the ultimate creation or not), and let us
place this idea within the imagination of God. So there is a goal of evolution,
there is some teleological aspect of evolution, but free will is preserved if choice is still honored. There can be no
mechanism for direct influence of the physical world, other than through the
internal nature of the created beings, so the ultimate goal of the form of the
organism must lie in some other realm, which leads us to postulate that there
must be a realm which has been variously described by many people throughout
history where the ultimate form exists already in perfected state.
We might postulate that the perfect horse is already
manifested, along the lines of Plato’s perfect form, but there is no absolute need
of this to explain the directed nature of evolution. Each step occurs on the
basis of a resonance between the vibrations within the morphological field
within the physical world, and vibrations in the corresponding field in the
spirit world. However, each step is already completely contained with the
ultimate endpoi nt of creation, which we will for now take to be the human. And
so if the perfected human form exists within the spiritual substantial
creation, there will be vibrations corresponding to every step towards that, at
least on the level of morphic development. Every step is seen in the physical
world as being on the path towards this external form, but not continuing on to
the completed form. Thus everything in existence is patterned after the human
form, but is not necessarily going to go all the way to that end.
From this, we can suggest that the reason for the existence
of angels is to be that perfected form of the eventual human, or at least to
manifest that form so as to set up the vibrations necessary to resonate with
the developing organisms within the physical world. This does not conflict with
the desire of God to confer freedom of choice, because the spirit world does
not exist as the pinnacle of God’s creation, only the ultimate destiny of the
matured, or completely manifested, human. It seems likely that each spiritual being
has both a physical body, and a spiritual body simultaneously, since the most
natural mechanism would be resonance between the two bodies of the same person,
while the spiritual body of a person generates a field which resonates with the
morphic fields within the spiritual realms.
The spirit world then exists as a lesser manifestation of
God, until the human reaches the state of spiritual accomplishment or
manifestation that was originally desired when God created. Thus even though
humans may be the ultimate pinnacle of creation, there is still a long way to
go, because it certainly looks like humans have made some wrong turns along the
road of evolution. And of course cocreatorship allows that to happen. At this
point, we mostly assume that the angels are higher beings than we are, but
ultimately it would seem that we are destined to be greater than the angels in
that we will have created ourselves. We will have become manifestations of the
nature of divinity by self-creation, as opposed to being created already
completed.
Humans like to think of themselves as the final goal of
evolution, and there are some reasons to think this might be so, but there is
certainly no proof of this. In order to be the pinnacle of creation, then
humans would have to demonstrate a divine capacity, which they seem far from
demonstrating at this time. However, humans are still evolving. One reason why
we might think that humans are the end point is that they have filled the whole
space available for them without morphing into two or more species. Generally
once species attain their final state, as they expand and experience the same
forces of gradual change as before, sooner or later they have split into more
than one species.
God incarnate will be gradually be more completely
manifested through the process of evolution, and every step will be by free
will, from the bottom up. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight, especially
since we are only just on the verge of escaping from the earth itself and
exploring out into space. We are in fact in a very primitive state, and even
most likely in a state very backward from what God might reasonably have
expected.
God cannot know the choices that will be made. God chooses
self-limitation in her relationship with her children, and God goes through
every step of the way, suffering and rejoicing with her children. However, the
ultimate fate of these children is to be very like God, and God is confident
that ultimately humans will tire of exploring all the negative avenues, and
will decide instead to make positive choices.
Religion has been both a vehicle for communicating truth,
and a disaster that has created a huge gulf between people and their God.