From The Perspective of GOD…

I once pondered what it must be like to be "all that is…" 

How would that feel?  

What would the experience be like?  

What would I do?  

Have you ever asked yourself this question?  To most of us this conjures up images of an all-powerful being who can do whatever/whenever/however he wants.  But as I really sat with this question something else ended up coming to the surface of my conscious awareness, and it was nothing like what I had anticipated.

Fathom this for a moment.  You are the complete and total UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS.  You are the ALL-THAT-IS in a very real sense.  There is literally nothing else but you…  What would that be like?

I can only assume that you would be self-aware, but in contrast to what?  What would the word “Nothing” even mean?  

Think about it… Our entire lives are lived and experienced in and through relationships with others.  Everything that has meaning in your life is either in relationship with, or in comparison to, another being.  I would wager that, if you are completely honest with yourself, there is practically nothing you can think of about yourself which is not derived from one of these two concepts.

Where does that leave a single conscious entity who has no one and no thing to experience?  It was then that it dawned on me just how lonely and meaningless existence would feel.  I would probably question why I even existed in the first place?  For that matter, would there even be a concept of non-existence?  What would that even mean???

I asked myself: what would I even do for an eternity completely by myself?  Then I realized that there must have been no concept of eternity, because nothing existed but me.  Not even time…

Who am I? What am I? What is “I,” stripped of everything else?

I know this might sound heretical to some people, but it became very personal to me. I began to feel, in some small way, a glimpse of that loneliness. I could not imagine sitting in complete and utter nothingness, with no other and no end.

Right about the time I was working through all of this in my mind, my dogs reminded me I'd been gone for over twenty-four hours and she had missed me terribly. I had left the day before to drive two and a half hours to my brother's house for a family cookout. I spent the night there and then got up the next morning to drive another two and a half hours to my sister's for her son's third birthday party. By the time I finally completed the three-hour drive back home, you would have thought I'd been gone a month, the way my dogs greeted me at the door.

As the sole entity in all of existence, God would never have had a single moment like that. Ask yourself honestly: is that an existence you would want? I know I wouldn't.

So, what would you do?  

I sat with that question for a while, and eventually only one answer seemed available: you would split yourself into two. But what would that even look like? I suspect even God didn't fully know, in that first moment, because all he had ever known was himself. How do you divide a single, total being into two separate beings? An exact copy wouldn't do it. A perfect replica is still just you, alone, wearing a second face.

This must have been the moment when polarity was born. The only way the split could actually work was if the second version of God did not fully know the first. That's the only way real relationship becomes possible: you have to actually discover who the other person is. So God, in effect, had to intentionally forget himself, at least within the second half. Amnesia, built in on purpose. One became two, and out of that division came the first paradox: the Father and the Mother, the Yin and the Yang, the Alpha and Omega.

Now, at least God was able to know himself through another’s perspective. This must have been a profound moment, but then again, with only 2 points you lack enough perspective for three-dimensional reality, and thus time could still not yet have existed. This still must have been an incredible improvement over complete oneness. I am sure the positive impact it had was so great that the two decided to form a third and complete the first Holy Trinity.

With three, the perspective became whole. Father, Mother, and Child, each able to relate to the other two, and each able to witness the relationship between the other pair. That must have felt extraordinary. But it was still confined to a single plane. The only thing left to do was keep expanding.

With the next split came the third dimension, and with the experience of the third dimension the fourth dimension was realized: Time…  Thus, time and space were born, and the journey of remembrance was catalyzed. Each time a new entity was spawned they would enter the realm with amnesia, so that they could fully experience the separation required to make the experience worthy. The entire point of the experience was the experience itself, and it was the journey to remembrance which made it all worthwhile.

You might reasonably ask how any of this is even possible. How does one being splinter into infinite, distinct perspectives, each one genuinely unique, while somehow still remaining, underneath it all, the One?

Start with an old idea from the Hermetic tradition: the principle of Mentalism, the claim that “All is Mind.” Everything that exists is a mental creation within the mind of the All. Once God began dividing himself into individual points of awareness, existence became something like a vast game of the mind, and we are each simply a unique point of view inside that game. Once that idea really lands, everything else starts to make sense.

Which raises the next question: how does an infinite consciousness actually fracture into countless individual selves? Two things help make sense of it. First, how empty the physical world actually is. Second, what it might mean to move at infinite speed.

We experience the world as solid, as separated by real distance, moving through real time. But physics keeps chipping away at that picture. Zoom in far enough and matter is mostly empty space, and the particles we used to picture as tiny solid balls look more like standing waves of energy than actual “things.” Einstein's own work pointed toward time itself being something closer to an illusion, a block universe where past, present, and future all already exist. Some physicists today go further and argue that time, fundamentally, may not exist at all.

If time isn't real at its foundation, then what would it mean to travel at infinite speed? It would mean you could be everywhere, at every moment, all at once. 

There's a strange little idea in physics that speaks right to this concept. Back in 1940, the physicist John Wheeler floated something startling to his graduate student, Richard Feynman: what if there is only one electron in the entire universe? Every electron ever detected, anywhere, at any point in cosmic history, would simply be that same single electron, weaving back and forth along one impossibly tangled path through spacetime. What looks to us like countless separate particles scattered across the cosmos would really be one unified thread, appearing multiplied only because we experience it through the narrow slit of sequential time. 

Sit with that image for a moment, and something clicks. God, too, could be experiencing every unique perspective at once, all of them, everywhere, while also experiencing the whole. The ultimate observer is God himself. We are but fractal instances of that one consciousness, each of us moving through a temporary experience of separation.

But here's the piece that reframes everything: the separation was chosen. On purpose. So that the fullness of you, specifically you, could be experienced.

People sometimes ask me what is the meaning of life? My answer is always the same: the experience is the purpose, but the meaning is yours to interpret. Then they usually ask why God allows suffering to exist? That is when I usually tell them that suffering is also a chosen part of the full experience. For how can one appreciate the good times unless they have experienced the bad? Once you really grasp the depth of loneliness that must live at the heart of being All-That-Is, you start to appreciate what this life actually is, and what it costs to make it possible.

And once you can hold that concept within your being, you're finally standing close enough to understand what Christ meant when he said, “Before Abraham was, I Am.”

Peace...