I'm doing
today's post with a little bit
of hesitation and even
trepidation, and I'll
tell you why. So let me make some outrageous statements,
at least outrageous to theologians and religious
people. Number one, God did not create
the universe. God did not create the universe. Number two, the biblical version of creation,
Genesis, is wrong. Most religious versions of creation are wrong. That's number two. Number three, Richard Dawkins
and militant atheists are wrong. Remember
I just expressing my opinion. You can agree,
disagree. Take it or leave
it, ridicule, vilify or praise
it, doesn't matter. So what did I say? God did not create
the universe. The biblical version of creation
is wrong. Most religious versions of creation
are wrong. Richard Dawkins
and Militant Atheist are wrong. And actually, the genesis of
the universe is much
more interesting.
And the
current scientific version and also the current
religious version, which are
both wrong. When I say
"religious", I mean, you know, organized
religion versions. Okay. So then you read
the Book of Genesis or you read, you know, some other texts,
you come across this idea, "God created
the universe" in the biblical
version, seven days. But how could you
have days without a sun
and a moon and all that, or the stars
of the cosmos? So, you know, days come after. And so it doesn't
sound right. Plus, the biblical
version suggests that the, you know, it's only a few
thousand years old. If you want to read all the arguments against the biblical
version, I suggest you read
Richard Dawkins.
Okay. So I'll tell you why I think Richard Dawkins
is also wrong. And once again, just sharing
my opinions. So, you know, of course, when we were all babies and we asked
the question, "Where did I come from?"
and if our parents were religious,
they said, "God made you and God
made the universe and God
made everything." And then as a child,
you always ask, "Then who made God?"
And then everybody
gets stumped. In a way, Richard Dawkins has used this
argument as well. So if there's
a creator of the universe
where, you know, where did the
creator come from? And you can go back infinitely
asking this question in time. So where, Richard, you know, in my opinion,
is expressing an old fashioned
Atheism, from an
old fashioned perspective of understanding creation or also
the Atheistic views.
Again,
just my opinion. But all of these
arguments are based on a very, I think, outmoded philosophy,
outmoded theology and outmoded
religion. So if creation comes from outside
of spacetime, then there is
no beginning to it and there's no
causality to it. Okay? And right now,
you know, the basic difference
between quantum mechanics and classical physics is just this. There's no causality in quantum
mechanics. Everything is
spontaneous. And without cause, everything is
spontaneous and without cause in
quantum mechanics. And it works. All the calculations of quantum mechanics
are now helping create technology,
even though quantum mechanics does not imply causality or even strict determinism. Okay? Quantum
mechanics applies only possibilities
that reside in a transcendent
realm.
It implies
unpredictability. It implies quantum leaps of information
and energy, which means discontinuity. And to some of us,
it implies self-organization,
self-regulation, self-evolution and total autonomy
and spontaneity. And uncertainty. And creativity. So if you understand
that there is a realm
of existence which is not
perceptual, but the source
of perception, which cannot be
actually 100% be conceivable, but is the source
of all conception; that realm is infinite
possibilities, uncertainty
principle, spontaneity,
quantum leaps or jumps of energy
and information, implying
discontinuity. And if that realm of existence
is awareness, then it also
operates through attention
and intention. So if the
transcendent field, the unified field,
or singularity, or whatever
you call it, the infinite
formless is all
possibilities.
And also
spontaneous, also governed
by the uncertainty principle, also localizes itself
through attention
and intention. Then we have
a solution to where the universe
came from a transcendent realm of all
possibilities. And possibly
self-aware as that transcendent
realm and interacting
with itself through attention,
intention, creating species-specific
experiences or universes that go along in entanglement by the
biological organism that is experiencing
those universes. Okay, so
God did not create the universe,
God as a super hero or a super human did not create
the universe. That version of God
did not create the universe. It's obvious
and common sense. On the other hand, the argument of atheists,
particularly militant, is like
Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens. And, you know,
Sam Harris joined the gang
and many others. They have a very old-fashioned idea of God and the God
they attack is not usually… can't be defended, that God cannot
be defended. So the God they
attack cannot be defended,
but Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens and the gang, Daniel Dennett
never address, of course, Dennett
does, but he says, consciousness
explained, which means
consciousness explained away.
None of these people
address the hard problem
of consciousness, and when they do,
they dismiss it. That redefined
the solution. Basically,
that consciousness is a derived
form of matter. So once you get into
that derived form of matter,
then the argument, you know,
the observer argument
also starts to fail. So I remember
Michael Shermer asking me
a long time ago… by the way, he's
became a good friend and we are good
friends, and so is Leonard
Mlodinow, the co-auther of Stephen Hawking, is
a very good friend. We disagree
on a lot of things, but you have
friends. So but I remember
Michael asking me
what he says. If consciousness creates the universe
or the experience of the universe, are you implying
that there was no universe
before human beings appeared? You know, if the universe is
13.8 billion years, human beings showed up only
200,000 years ago and we developed the scientific method
on these questions, and these
methodologies only in the last
maybe 40,000 years.
So how can you say
that, you know, you need an observer to create
the universe? And, you know,
when Michael presented
this question to me maybe
15, 20 years ago, it seemed to make sense because, you know, if the Observer
is a human body-mind looking
at the universe, then the observer is obviously not
manifesting the universe, as the person is not manifesting,
he or she is not manifesting
the universe.
That universe,
that he or she is
seeing has existed before he
or she showed up. So how could he
or she be manifesting
the universe? Well, there's a flaw
in that argument. The body-mind
is not observing the universe. The body-mind
is actually part of the observation. Only consciousness can observe. Only consciousness
can know. Only consciousness
can experience. And the body-mind and the universe that are being experienced
simultaneously are entangled as objects in the subject that we call
consciousness. So once
you understand that there's
only one subject, only one subject
of experience, but its modes of
experiencing are infinite, only one subject
of experience, its modes of experience
are infinite. Let's take our own body-mind and
universe example. So if you understand the Vedanta and the description of morphogenesis in one version of Vedanta,
not all versions, one version
of Advaita, which is not
religion, which is not even
a philosophy, it's a methodology for exploring
consciousness.
So in that one
version of Advaita, Advaita means non-dualism;
Consciousness first modifies
itself as mind. So consciousness
interacts with itself. It knows itself
as thoughts, as feelings,
as imagination. Let's call
that the mind. And then furthermore,
the mind differentiate
into rationality, which means
it becomes the intellect. Furthermore,
the intellect creates an identity
of itself, we call it the ego. And then from there
magic happens. There's
a differentiation of the five senses,
five motor organs, and these project has the experience
of space-time, energy, information
and matter. Or we can say
the five elements: space, air, fire,
water and earth. Space, being matter,
or what we call "matter",
in its vacuum state. Air, being what
we call matter, in its gaseous
state. Water
in its liquid state.
And earth,
in its matter state. So you see here
consciousness is self-interacting
and differentiating into ego… first into mind, into intellect,
into ego, into the
five senses, into the five motor
organs. And through
acts of attention and intention,
experiencing itself as the body-mind
apparatus that is entangled
with the experience that that body-mind
apparatus cause the universe,
in this case, the human universe.
In similar ways,
other species are entangled with an experience
which would be their universe. An insect with 100
eyes, a dragonfly with 30,000 eyes, a snake infrared, insects, ultraviolet owls, also all different
universes entangled
in a common ecosystem
of universes with leaky margins. And so the traditional God did not create
the universe. The God that I'm
trying to explain is much, much, much bigger, much, much, much more
mysterious, much, much more ineffable, transcendent beyond spacetime,
irreducible, fundamental
spaceless, timeless, causeless
and that formless awareness
is everywhere. So it's omnipresent. It is the source
of all energy and matter; or we can say
the experience of energy
and matter. Source of all,
experience of energy in matter.
So we can say
omnipotent and the source
of all information that is generated through its own self
interaction, which we can call
omniscience. Yes, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent,
but on a much grander scale,
much grander scale than any religion can describe
or has described, or even our current cosmological
frameworks, which include things like the Big Bang,
(which, by the way, no cause can be
ascribed to it); which includes
Planck epoch, 10⁻⁴³ seconds, post time zero where there are no laws of physics;
cosmic inflation, where the universe
triples in size every trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth
of a second, and then
it slows down for inexplicable
reasons. But precisely
fine-tuned for mind, life and universe
and multiverses and can't explain
cosmic inflation. Can't explain
the Planck epoch. Can't explain the source
of the Big Bang. Can't explain the
disparity between the observed value of the cosmological
constant and the theoretical value. A lot of things that can't be
explained.
Black holes can't
be explained and … Not black holes… can't explain
dark energy, can't explain
dark matter, can't explain
most of the universe or what's happening. And there's the standard model,
of course, that seems to
creating technology, but seems to be
totally disastrous for explaining the origins
of the universe. So current
cosmology out, religion out. Dawkins
and his gang, out, as far
as I'm concerned, Does God exists? Yes. God is the ultimate mystery of existence. And God is the mystery
of you and me. And God
is our highest instinct
to know ourselves. God is unimaginable. God is
inconceivable. God is
incomprehensible. God is infinite. God is formless. God is without
cause and God is real.
Anything else,
everything else is unreal. Only God exists. Everything else
is unreal. But unreal means it's happening
in space-time that has a beginning,
a middle and an end, whatever has
a beginning, also has an end. And every projection
of the universe has that beginning,
middle and end. And you and I
are part of that entanglement as impermanent visions of God, in infinite modes of imagination, in infinite modes
of knowing, in infinite modes of
experience and never ending. So does God exist? Yes.
Did God
create the universe? No. God conceived,
constructed, the notion. Notion. That's all you need. It's conceived,
constructed the notion, organized that notion into an experience. And that experience was species-specific and magically,
magically manifested a species-specific
experience of that
entanglement. The biological
organism with this body-mind and the universe
are both objects. The subject is one. The objects are
innumerable minds, innumerable modes
of knowing, innumerable things
known. So thought
conceives, constructs
the notion, governs and becomes
the experience of the universe,
and in infinite modes of experience.
Much, much, much bigger and much, much,
much more grand. And much, much,
much more omniscience. If there are degrees of omniscience,
this is infinite, infinite,
infinite modes of omniscience,
infinite modes of omnipotence,
infinite modes of omniscience, omnipotence
and omnipresence. Where ever you
go, there is God. There is nowhere that God is not. God is not difficult
to find. God is impossible
to avoid. So, reflect on this and I'm sure
I'm going to be criticized,
attacked, vilified, whatever, ridiculed
for these views. But I have been
saying for some time that both religion
and science need a reformation. Let me
know your thoughts..
