The Ongoing Act of Creation

Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures,

and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.”

God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves,

with which the waters swarmed after their kind,

and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.

                         – (Gen 1:20-21) Ascribed to the Prophet Moses (?-1273 BC)

Last week we talked about what modern evidence tells us is true about our one reality. Now let’s look at some important questions. How did all of this come into being? How is it maintained? And what can we learn about the Un-Caused Cause that has to be behind it all?

This reality is all of one piece. Our human predilection to study aspects of it from different perspectives, using different methods and even fundamentally different terms, has fooled us into thinking it even is possible to study anything this way! We long have assumed that all the aspects of reality that we were studying separately were going to fit seamlessly and make perfect sense whenever we tried to put them together. But this whole way of thinking is nonsense. There is not a physical reality and a spiritual reality, a chemical, biological, and physics reality, a psychological reality, a mental reality, a secular, cosmic, and divine reality. Whole books could be written about why this doesn’t work and how none of the pieces now fits with all the others, but here are just four quick examples of the mess that our habit of studying reality in fragments has created:

Origins. The whole notion that this universe exploded into being 13.8 billion years ago and proceeded to work itself out and grow from there has become a part of our cultural knowledge. But even if the Big Bang theory is right, there is a lot about it that doesn’t make sense according to current scientific understandings. And more importantly, the Big Bang cannot explain how so much matter sprang from nothing! As the eminent Rupert Sheldrake has said, the scientific approach to the origin of the universe is “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” As an aborigine who believed the world rides on the back of a turtle said when someone asked him what the turtle was standing on, “It’s turtles all the way down.” The Big Bang theory describes just part of a process, and it does not explain how or why that process began. How did so much something come from nothing?
Physics. The advent of quantum mechanics set off an academic scramble to unify the world of Einstein with the world of Planck. The problem is that quantum mechanics violates some laws of physics as they have long been understood, but it was the basis for some of the twentieth century’s most important developments so it cannot be ignored. Let’s be blunt here. If we must work from within traditional physics to try to understand quantum physics, a unified theory can never be found.
Dark Matter. The fact that 95.1% of what scientists now believe exists is demonstrably not material because it neither emits nor reflects photons of light is a scientific conundrum only because physicists insist that dark matter must be made of particles. Putting aside the fact that “dark” matter cannot by definition be made of material particles, the notion that inside a material universe that is breathtakingly efficient and highly calibrated, 95% of what exists is random particles with no discernible function is nonsense. To a hammer, everything looks like nails. To a particle physicist, everything looks like particles.
Life. Watching the scientific community try to figure out how life emerged from some chemical mix struck by lightning would be humorous if it didn’t feel so tragic. What they are doing makes no sense! But they must follow their set protocols, so this is all that they can do.

There is just one reality! The fact that our human limitations make it easier for us to break up that reality and try to study it piecemeal doesn’t mean that such fragmentation is useful. It is the intellectual equivalent of looking for our car keys under the street lamp even though we dropped them in the dark, simply because the light would make it easier for us to spot them… if they were there. It may have been necessary over the centuries to study reality using separate disciplines because our knowledge and our tools were limited. But we know enough now to be able to use the bits of apparent truths that humankind has gradually assembled and demand that they come together and make sense or else be thrown away. If we put together what open-minded researchers have learned in just the past few decades, here is how we might solve the four puzzles given above:

Origins. There is no objective time beyond this material universe that is only 4.9% of what we know exists. And one implication of a lack of time is that if something real exists now, then it always exists. We are used to the objective time that is a characteristic of this material universe, so we look for a beginning and we imagine an ending; but from the non-time perspective of most of reality the universe never began and it never will end. If this notion makes your eyes cross, you are not alone!
Physics. Quantum physics is a variant of the physics that governs 95.1% of reality. In that 95.1% that we return to at death, all creation is by mind and there is neither time nor space. Quantum physics is a kind of plug that connects the free-form physics of most of reality with the numbers-based and particles-based physics that exists only in this material universe.
Dark Matter. Dark matter and energy are just the non-material astral plane that is our true home. The enormous astral is entirely consciousness-based, relatively much larger than this material universe, and in precisely the same place as the universe but existing at different rates of consciousness vibration. It is full of a kind of mind-created and solid-seeming matter… but that astral matter contains no detectable material particles.
Life. This one will make you slap your forehead! The characteristic that we identify as “being alive” is a primary property of the consciousness which continuously manifests this universe. The bodies of living creatures possess the designed-in genetic and structural abilities to make animating use of the life-force that is inherent in consciousness, and they are alive for so long as their bodily structures needed to support life remain sound. It is that simple.

(Feel free to hold me to these predictions. We won’t know if I was right until long after I have graduated, but if I have hit one of these nails on the head you will hear me cheering in the bleacher seats!)

Unless we will seek reality with as much objectivity as we can muster, we never are going to make the smallest bit of sense about anything! And unless we can really make objective sense of what actually is going on, just the fact that the universe exists and has apparently been stable for 13.8 billion years can tell us nothing certain about how it is going to behave in just the next five minutes. Which is not to say that those deeper and more sensible answers that address the whole of reality can never be found. When we put together lots of random bits of evidence from many disciplines and study it all with an open mind, we find sensible answers to a great many questions, including the ones that began this post. These answers violate many longstanding assumptions, but since those assumptions are based on our limited experiences as human beings and are heavily dependent on sensory input, that is a good thing!

Here is what appears from the evidence to be the current state of play:

The Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings, so God understands us and loves us because God is us. In a reality without objective time, God continuously manifests everything that we believe is real, including what is “in the past,” since in a reality without time there is only Now. The easiest way to envision this is to think of the fact that a filmstrip is individual pictures, but when we run it through a projector our minds will register it as one continuously moving picture. And so does the reality around us seem to move seamlessly even though it is in the nature of a filmstrip, a continuous string of separately created realities! What we call the “astral plane” is most of our reality. The astral exists in probably infinite consciousness gradations, from fear on up to perfect love, and for convenience we divide it into seven general levels with the “outer darkness” at the lowest and the Godhead at the highest level of vibration. We come to earth to grow spiritually up through what amounts to the grade-school level, and we continue the process of elevating ourselves in the astral plane after we have reached an acceptable level of spiritual development here. So it is a reasonable working assumption that the greater reality exists as it does to give us a place to grow spiritually. And according to our wonderful Mikey Morgan, our process of spiritual elevation goes on forever, even beyond the level of the Godhead. But we are urged not to think about that now!

If we are ever to understand what actually is going on, we are going to have to get past the idea that this material universe is important in and of itself. It is useful, yes, but it is only a spiritual classroom constructed in the astral for a limited purpose, and if it ceased to exist then another way for us to begin to develop spiritually would replace it. We will talk next week about the role of the universe and why its physics is so different; but for now, only try to see our greater reality more as it is seen by the people who have gone home ahead of us. They consistently tell us that where we are now is not our real life! Instead, there is a much greater love-based reality that is our eternal home. As we ever better come to know the true Godhead, let’s also seek to better understand how the Collective maintains this universe as a school for Its less advanced brothers and sisters. Next week we will explore our own role in the ongoing act of creation….

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I fear no evil, for You are with me;

Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

             – (Psalm 23:4-5) David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC)

 

Striped rocks photo credit: mypubliclands #mypubliclandsroadtrip 2016: Places That Rock, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument via photopin (license)
Lion in water photo credit: chiaralily Learning to Swim via photopin (license)
Waterfalls photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell Pennell Falls via photopin (license)
Sea cave photo credit: slworking2 The Sunset Cliffs Sea Cave At Twilight via photopin (license)
Fire & ice photo credit: michi_s fire and ice via photopin (license)

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