Mathematics
Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)
The fact that mathematics is used in creating the structure of material reality is such a gigantic weirdness that it’s difficult to even get our minds around it. Of course, the first question to be asked and answered is what mathematics even is. Is math a natural science or an invented science? If you are sure that it’s natural, then please feel free to skip the rest of this post. But if you suspect, as I did when I was sixteen, that math is as human-invented as a screwdriver, then read on….
I still can vividly recall the moment when I stood in line after Algebra II class and asked my teacher whether math is a discovered or an invented science. She told me, sounding impatient, that math is an invented science. And she moved on to the next student in line. It was a nothing moment for her, but it was a monumental moment for me! People just dreamed it up? Well, who needs that? I never took another class in math. Then there was a moment twenty years ago when I was watching a PBS special on the universe. A young physicist was narrating it. He said in what was clearly a throwaway line, “For some reason, math can be used to study the universe.” And his “for some reason” caught on my mind.
The more I have learned about the greater reality over the past ten years, the more I have come to realize that my insight at the age of sixteen might have been one for the ages! What I am going to write for you today is a doodle. I’ve been doing these every year or two, just taking some concepts that make sense individually and putting them together to see whether a stretch of an idea that seems to be almost unimaginable can begin to make sense when separate sensible ideas are combined. Here are some things that we know are true:
Mathematics as a system is human-made. No one has ever found a piece of slate with calculations in primordial chalk and deciphered them in the same way that the genetic code of DNA was first deciphered. And the fact that human beings invented mathematics and mathematics actually orders the universe is gigantically weird! It’s like finding a precambrian refrigerator.The entire material universe is less than 5% of what scientists tell us exists. Scientists call all the rest of reality “dark matter” and “dark energy” because it won’t interact with photons of light. And scientists assume that the more than 95% of the universe that is “dark” must be full of nothing useful, which fact is absurd on its face! We know that in nature everything that has no function soon atrophies and withers away, and yet scientists assume that fully 95% of the universe is made up of random exotic particles that do nothing useful? Why aren’t scientists even a little bit curious about what makes up 95% of reality? We know what it is. Dark matter is the non-material astral plane, which teems with life. And dark energy is Consciousness energy. Which is life.Time does not run in the more than 95% of reality that is not material. And contrary to what we have been told to expect, living in an endless Now works just fine! In fact, you are living in an endless Now right now. Now is all that exists for anyone. We remember having read the first sentence of this post, but it is only that memory that we ever can own.
All right. So now let’s look at the clockwork material reality that mainstream scientists tell us is where we live. Scientists say this universe began when something came from nothing 13.8 billion years ago in a Big Bang, and it still carries on from there unassisted and within unimaginably tiny tolerances. For the past nearly fourteen billion years, and with no help at all, it somehow has managed to avoid either collapsing in upon itself or blowing apart. Scientists assure us that they are still in the process of figuring it out. Or as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us they are wont to say, “Just give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” But it is going to take a whole lot more than just one free miracle to make sense of the scientific creation story that has to cover fourteen billion years and counting! It is past time for us to accept the fact that the whole scientific fairy tale of creation is impossible. And imagining a religious God Who just says “Presto!” and makes it all happen and keep on happening isn’t really a whole lot better, is it? The plain fact is that both the scientific and the religious creation stories are so vastly unlikely as to beggar belief. They are both myths from a much more primitive time when myths were all that human beings could muster. But we know for a fact that creation must actually have happened. Demonstrably, this universe exists. So, what might we get when we demand a creation theory backed up by some actual evidence?
When I first asked Thomas about creation a year ago, he drew my attention to three popular-science magazine articles that indicate that modern humankind and about ninety percent of all the other animals and plants first came into existence at about the same time, around 200,000 years ago. I blogged about it then. That seems to be astoundingly recent! Whenever he throws one of these ideas at me, I reel with it at first, as I did when he first hit me with his Godhead idea, and with his filmstrip ongoing-creation idea. But I am becoming used to all of it now. And I have come to realize that he is probably right! So let’s juxtapose what I think of as Thomas’s creation story against the theist and atheist creation stories. Part of the evidence we find in that overlooked valley between the theist and the atheist hills is the boggling certainty that material creation is based in and governed by, and can therefore be studied using… human-created mathematics?
And the more I think about it, the more that fact seems to be a kind of magic bullet.
More even than punctuated equilibrium and so many other glitches in creation that you can spot if you look for them, the fact that the universe is based in mathematics seems to show us its actual creator’s hand. And astoundingly, that hand is our own.
Before you laugh, please follow this through with me.
Consciousness is the only thing that is real. Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality that exists outside of space and time.Two hundred thousand years ago as we reckon earth-time, something happened. A Course in Miracles, which we are told was a project led by Jesus, tells us that “the Son of God” had a momentary thought of separation, and since Consciousness is infinitely creative and infinitely powerful, separation happened in that micro-instant. Maybe so. But whatever made it happen, this universe was then created.The universe wasn’t much at first. Think of it as having been nothing more than a dot of Namibian plain that contained the first modern people and ninety percent of the first modern plants and animals lit by the white light of Consciousness itself.Together with that first universe was probably also human-created both the earliest form of mathematics and also its associated Newtonian physics. With no better explanation, we can assume that Newtonian physics was created so our minds couldn’t mess with this reality, and we also can assume that quantum mechanics is the plug that connects this reality with the other 95% of what exists. We do know that in most of reality, even moderately developed minds can easily create stable objects from consciousness alone. We can speculate that Consciousness worked with the most advanced of the beings in that earliest cut-off bit of Itself to fashion the earliest Godhead of our Brothers and Sisters who then could work with the parent Consciousness to rescue the rest of us.Creation in this bit of material universe is not one-and-done, but rather it is an ongoing process. So as people have become more curious over the past two hundred thousand earth-years, it was a simple matter for each new micro-slice of our continuously-created reality to remain ahead of our curiosity. And since this reality includes an artificial past, it has been easy to create that past as well. I have lots of ideas about how our ever more negative present may be creating an ever more negative past, but since that is not the subject of this post we can save all of that for another day!This version of a creation story seems to solve the something-from-nothing problem as well. It’s all circular! And there is an ever more complex history rich with proto-human, proto-mammal, and dinosaur bones to constitute a fabricated evolutionary history and satisfy our curiosity about our past.And as each of us raises our own conscious vibration with the aid of our own spirit guides, we come ever closer to the parent Consciousness, the Spirit, what Jesus teaches us to call our Father. The history of the planet and the universe may be fabricated, but our spiritual growth is a genuine effort. It is only our own ignorant rebelliousness that ever has come between us and God!As you better make sense of how this all has been happening, you should find yourself able to read the Gospel words of Jesus now with more understanding. In truth, I think that our clearing away both the theist and the atheist creation stories may be the biggest steps that we need to take toward finally finding our way to rejoin the Godhead so at last we all can go home.
Okay, so it’s a doodle. It’s a third version of the creation story that has been harvested from the valley of real information between those two false beliefs-based hills. It’s a creation story based in the astounding possibility that we ourselves are the genuine architect of all that we see. We ourselves are the part of God that was separated two hundred thousand years ago, and now we are rescuing one another and elevating one another spiritually so that one day, at last and forevermore, the kingdom of God will overspread all the earth, as if the separation never had happened. Mathematics may be a more important clue than we ever could possibly have known.
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.
Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)
The post Mathematics appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
