The Other 96% - 2: Million Dollar Questions

“Cognito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.” – René Descarte

In The Other 96% - 1: Inroduction to Non-ordinary Reality, I wrote of how the weird world of quantum physics opened up my mind to the possibility of the existence of God. In this article we’re going to jump right in at the deep end and look at what God is, how it came to be and how it began the process of spiritual emanation which led to the creation of the material universe of which we know so little. I feel it necessary to discuss this matter early to put later articles into perspective. Now, I don’t have a fixed definition of what God actually is, but I have spent many years trying to figure it out and discussing the matter with friends and family. My perception of God, or a phrase I prefer to use is The Great Architect, is of an all-unifying force or energy that binds matter together and influences the movements and processes of everything in existence. When I say energy I use the word loosely, for energy in scientific terms is a bi-product of existence rather than the creator of it; but in the same way that most energy is completely invisible to human perception despite having massive potential for initiating physical change, so too is the Great Architect. In fact the energetic nature of God, as seen in the day to day synchronicities and fortunate coincidences which we know as “fate” could even be seen as the physical manifestation of what God really is… a concept.

The Oxford English dictionary defines a concept as “an abstract idea” or “a plan or intention”, even going so far in its devaluation of concepts as to call them “an idea or invention to help sell or publicize a commodity”; but the etymological root of the word is in two Latin words, com – meaning together, and capere – meaning take. Combined they form concipere, which translates as to create. From this we have words such as conception and conceive, which relate directly to the initial burst of creative energy in an organic structure resulting in the development of a living organism through the process of mitosis, in which new cells emanate from older ones. Thus a concept can be defined as the first point of creation, or in the case of God, the first creating thought. Some people might read this and think, “God is a concept, therefore just an idea in the mind”; but this, in my opinion, is misguided and lacking in understanding. Concepts are different from ideas. An idea is something which is formed by one or more minds from bits and pieces of pre-existing information and requires manual alteration in order to develop and generate new ideas; whereas concepts exist independently from any mind and seem to be wholly organic in nature, springing from somewhere, though no one can identify where, then growing and evolving out of themselves with no external influence (like cells through mitosis), then further evolving with each new idea that they help to create in the minds of those who experience them. A prime example of this is mathematics. Numbers are entirely symbolic and have little to no actual relevance in the natural world thus making them an idea formulated in the minds of humans. However those numbers are entirely based upon the fact that everything in the world is not alone in its existence, that there is always another of something somewhere. This fact is the concept which helped to create the idea of numbers, the true mathematics behind and before the numbers. If we lived in a world where there was only one of everything then we would have no perception of “more” and so numbers would not be developed as an idea. Both concepts and ideas can create and consist of a collection of thoughts, for thoughts are concepts and ideas in their own being, but group together to form greater concepts and ideas; so while a number of concepts can develop individually and be utterly disconnected and meaningless on their own, they can merge to bring the greater, true concept into being, similar to people formulating ideas, but in a completely organic way with an almost gravitational quality, like attracting like and absorbing only that which makes it stronger and more coherent. The thing about concepts is that they are conscious, that is to say capable of making decisions, choices, sacrifices, and even possessing morality. Concepts as consciousness can decide to manifest in different ways which aids in the diversity of subsequent ideas and physical creations; so the phrase mind-over-matter can be equally apt when changed to mind-before-matter. They can decide what form to take and how to present themselves to an individual, which is one reason why people can perceive the same thing in infinitely different ways.

So, if God can be regarded as the first concept or thought, what would it be? This is just one of many million dollar questions, but if I were a formless consciousness in an endless expanse of nothing I know what my first thought would be; I AM. Where nothing exists, the first thing to arise would be the realisation that the nothing is in itself something. God is the “I AM” because it is the first product of non-existence, which when represented as geometry is a dot within a circle to denote oneness and the creation of order from chaos. The next thought would likely be the separation of God from the nothingness, the “if I AM, then what AM I NOT?” this would be symbolised by the Vesica-Pisces, the nexus point between two circles to show that though God or consciousness has acknowledged a separation of itself from everything around it, they are still intrinsically linked by their mutual lack of form or motion. The third thought arises from this recognition of separation on a broader scale, “If I AM and what I perceive is what I AM NOT, then what else is there?” This is the creative pulse, the conceptual big bang, a wave of potential for what could be, depicted in the trinity representing the three primary existential states; being, non-being and becoming, what is, what isn’t and what could be. I believe that this conceptual formula is what the trinity symbolism truly represents on the most fundamental level, though all symbols are designed to have multiple layers of meaning and interpretation as I will discuss in later instalments. With this new expanse of limitless potential comes a new thought or question, “Where did this/I/we come from?” As newborn babies, humans have little to no cognitive or motor function and simply exist with the realisation that we do actually exist. Then comes the separation, the mirror phase where we recognise that we are not the same as our parents or the world around us. Later we ask “mum/dad, where do babies come from?” in order to understand our own being, and even later again in adolescence and beyond we continually ask ourselves “Why am I here? What is my purpose?” This same pattern can apply to the emanations of The Great Architect, as it begins to question its existence, where it came from and why IT IS. This outpouring of contemplation gives rise to what Jung referred to as The Archetypes, facets of the original creative mind designed to interact with one another and explore the composition and exposition of the self; these are the Elohim or Angels of the old testament, the Neters of the Egyptian pantheon, the Old gods of the European pagan theologies. They exist in the outer reaches of the energetic field, but also in the innermost depths of the human psyche, for they are one and the same; “As above, so below. As within, so without.” Each of these potential functions or manifestations of the cosmic mind takes on certain characteristics; active or passive, creative or destructive, fixed or mutable, and the continuous exchange between these facets is the beginning of energetic motion or flow. From here one might gather how this snowballs into the development of a vast ebbing conceptual energetic field, and from there how this field can interfere with itself to form single focused points of energy through the consequent interference pattern, points of energy which we have now come to refer to as matter.

Energy, also, cannot be construed as the energy we are familiar with such as heat or kinetics etc. The energy I speak of is what Einstein termed “subtle energy”, or as Roger Penrose calls it “Non-local quantum correlation” This immeasurable energy is what forms sub atomic particles and ties them together across infinitely vast expanses of space. It is the unifying principle of all existence, that which instructs particles to combine in certain ways to form the building blocks of life, or to vibrate in such a way as to generate heat and light. As it is written in Colossians 1:17 “He Himself is before all things, and all things are held together in Him.” This energy and the infinite variations and vibratory levels of which it is comprised are the foundation upon which many of my ideas and future articles are based. Any attempts to understand subtle energy through the established conventional scientific means of experimentation and testing would be fruitless, for the measurement of any energy can only be conducted where there is a difference in concentration between two locations or states. Subtle energy, however, is so universally distributed throughout the universe and everything in it, that to test for its presence and take measurements would be impossible, just as it would be impossible for a fish to measure the amount of water in the ocean in which it lives. Only when the fish is removed from the water does the water’s absence become apparent allowing the fish to perceive difference; likewise we can only speculate about this energy unless we can somehow become removed from it, but this, like with the fish out of water, would kill us for without it we would cease to exist. So when the sacred scriptures say that we are made “in His image” and that we are all “children of God” and that “God is for all and in all”, they refer to the all unifying field of subtle energy or consciousness from which everything else arose. This, I believe, is what The Great Architect is, and by casting off the iron fetters of the current, rigid scientific paradigm and pursuing an understanding of and connection to this universal frequency, we can crack the existential enigma and move into the next stage in our evolution; Manly P. Hall summed this up when he wrote “Man is God in the making”, for man is a microcosmic model of the greater Universe, which is the mind of God expressing itself through an infinite range of possibilities. Whether or not The Great Architect is transcendent, imminent or even personal is another matter which I will consider at length later on. But, to conclude I will use this quote from one of the greatest and most understated men in history:

“If you want to find the secrets of the Universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” – Nikola Tesla