Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Jul 21, 2010 6:37 AM PDT
This chapter is dedicated to Larry Niven, whose knowledge of science and vision of the possible took me to many previously undiscovered worlds. It is also dedicated to my brother Wayne, who introduced me to the delights of science “fiction.”
The hypothetical cosmology in the essay What if God Were All of Us? describes the physical world as the four dimensional representation of a higher reality that prophets have attempted to describe in the great religions in pre-scientific terms. I have recently spoken to Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist and author of The God Theory, who agreed that my model corresponds with his much more sophisticated formulation of the nature of the universe.
In his book, he postulates a theory of reality based on a deep understanding of religion and the physics of cosmology, both of which he has studied in much more depth than have I. More accurately, his model can be said to describe the Multiverse, an infinity of universes which exist simultaneously in this fifth-dimensional realm in which time has a different meaning.
An interesting property of such a multiverse is that from the perspective of this higher dimension, which can be called Heaven, Valhalla, Nirvana or the eternal One, any member of the Heavenly host or Atman can be conscious of any moment in human history and thus present in that moment. Time is irrelevant in this dimension and thus all is revealed to the observer in that sphere of reality.
Of course, an individual consciousness can still only focus on one thing at a time, since that is a fundamental property of the individual consciousness. Only a higher form of consciousness can be aware of all things at all times and then only through the awareness of the individuals who directly experience the events. To such an entity, time as we know it is irrelevant, since events we perceive of as occurring in the past and future are equally evident to such a consciousness.
Even events occurring at different “times” in the fifth dimension where our higher selves dwell are all known to this hypothetical resident of a yet higher dimension, who is an observer of the angels of our better and darker natures and of their Avatars in the four-dimensional sphere of reality that we call the “universe.’’
I would further postulate that the Gnostics are right in arguing that our fifth dimensional counterparts are aware of and can influence their Avatars on Earth through the dream process. By manipulating the probability of specific synaptic connections to form in the process of memory consolidation while we sleep, our higher selves can influence our perception of reality.
The most perceptive and creative right-brain dominant individuals who are writers, screenwriters, artists and poets are important parts of the mechanism by which our higher selves could thus influence the consensus reality of humans, moving it ever closer to an understanding of the reality that they experience directly. If so, then the most visionary works of the various arts could be clues to the nature of objective reality.
The only way to conceptualize a consciousness that can be aware of all things at once is to postulate that what has been termed God, Allah, Vishnu/Krishna and various other names in various systems of faith is the collective consciousness of the angels of our better natures. My theory of reality postulates that this collective consciousness arises from the individual consciousness of each of us in this higher realm.
Our minds are an epiphenomenon of the fields generated by the workings of our brains. They serve as instruments by which we can filter our sensory experiences and use them to construct a personal model of reality. If we are observant and diligent in questioning the assumptions we make when we try to conceptualize reality, our individual consciousness evolves to correspond ever more closely with the objective reality. When we fail to question these assumptions then we fail to evolve as humans, both individually and collectively.
We can only directly experience the Multiverse if we are conscious independent of our bodies and the physical world itself. Knowledge of scientific models of physical reality is essential to the creation of a mental model of objective reality that is consistent with what is logically inferred about physical reality from scientific observation and experiment. It is not possible to construct a rational model of a higher reality without knowledge of the physical universe to which we are bound.
If we are Avatars of our higher selves then we are born in ignorance of our true nature. It is logical to assume that if we are purposefully incarnated our ignorance is the means to an end. It is my contention that we are born to a “blooming, buzzing confusion” so that we might acquire free will. If we were aware of our higher selves and their relationship to the God that I have argued is the collective consciousness of our higher selves, then we would already know what is expected of us as moral beings. In having the capacity to choose, together we create an infinity of possible realities both subjectively in the world we experience through our senses and in a higher dimension that our higher selves experience directly.
The only restriction on our creations of the various worlds in the Multiverse is that they correspond to the iron laws of logic. We cannot postulate and create a physical world or universe that is inconsistent with anything with which it is interconnected. Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the models of reality that we carry in our individual consciousness. That is why human society is fractured along lines of belief systems that artificially separate us.
It is only through the objective and informed examination of our personal model and comparison of it with those of others that we can begin to approach a personal model of reality that reasonably approximates objective reality. In the same way, the collective consciousness of humanity can only begin to correspond to objective reality if we are able to approach our differences in outlook in a genuinely loving spirit.
This is a collective effort. When enough of us accept a given property of reality, it becomes a part of the collective consciousness. Until then, it abides in the collective unconsciousness of which Jung wrote. None of us are omniscient as individuals. Only together can we begin to appreciate the fuller reality that is the subject of all religious and other spiritual traditions. I would argue that any meaningful conception of God is created through the interactions of the thought fields generated by the higher consciousness of each of us. Thus, we literally create God in this model of reality.
Some would object to the idea that God is a creation of our higher selves. To them, it is a fundamental tenet of their model of reality that God created the “angels” that are our higher selves. However, the observation that everything exists independently of time as we perceive it reveals that this is in fact not a paradox but a non-issue. The Bible says that God is the alpha and the omega, present at the “beginning” and at the “end” of time.
What is the meaning of that in a Multiverse where time itself is an artifact of observation, not reality itself? The universe may well be closed and unbounded. In such a reality there is no beginning or end, only a point in a figurative “circle” where the “beginning” meets the “end.” If this is true then we will eventually come to a point in history where time will cease to have meaning because the Multiverse will have become one in which the world will be as it was created.
If all this is true then it is our task to recreate the conditions that gave life to Earth and perhaps other planets. Until we “return to the Garden” we are at risk of destroying all we have created, at least from our limited human perspective. All creation stories tell us that the world has been destroyed in our “past.” The Hindus tell the story that Shiva dances to this cycle of destruction and re-creation. At some point we can collectively choose to end this cycle by creating a world together where all live in a rational, sustainable world. This does not require unanimity of thought but a consensus that this is the world that we are going to create together. Such is the nature of democracy.
If God exists then we cannot exist independently of it nor it of us. The fact that our physics do not yet describe the process by which God and the world were co-created only tells us that a model that might describe the process has not yet been developed by theoretical physicists, not that it does not or cannot exist. All scientific theories start with observation alone. When known physics does not adequately explain observable phenomenon it means that the science has to change, not the evidence.
The very existence of the mind cannot be described in terms of known physics at this point. Nonetheless, its existence can be demonstrated by any act of free will. The fact that many people have successfully quit smoking is an elegant proof of the power of the mind over the body’s physical drives. If we were simply sophisticated machines acting only according to our learning and instinct, free will would not exist.
The fact that free will exists proves that life is not deterministic and the apparently predetermined aspects of our individual and collective histories are in fact the result of choices freely made, whether in the dream state that we call life or in a higher realm of existence.
It is not unreasonable to postulate that the consciousness that we dimly perceive with our minds exist in a higher dimension. The implication of this is that if we discover our true natures and each of us thinks and acts in accordance with the consensus reality of our higher selves, we would be in direct communication with what Christians call God and act according to our collective will. Theoretically, we might then have the collective power to determine physical reality as long as it corresponds to the logical rules by which we constructed it.
Imagine traveling at will between the various worlds of the Multiverse, as Jodie Foster did in the movie Contact. If my theory of reality in fact reflects objective reality in this higher dimension, then we may not require the mechanism of wormholes for our physical bodies to travel between the various universes that comprise the Multiverse. The Multiverse may be an epiphenomenon of acting on our collective free will because a new universe may arise every time that we make a decision on what to believe or how to act.
If there is a finite probability that we will choose to act or to select a belief different than that which we are aware of having chosen, then we may simultaneously have made all possible choices, splitting the future into many possible and equally real four dimensional paths in five dimensional space-“time.”
According to the Schrödinger equations that describe the probabilistic nature of the physical universe, the probabilistic behavior of particles can also be observed in the macroscopic world, given an infinite length of time with which to observe it. Just as a cat placed in a box with a divider in it may with a finite probability be found on either side of the divide, so given Eternity can a world arise through individual and collective acts of will in which reality itself becomes a collective act of creation, with an infinite number of universes existing side by side.
Each of these universes must of course conform to logical rules or risk annihilation when a particle of truth collides with a fiction from which the universe might be created. Like matter meeting anti-matter, the chain reaction that results would destroy such a false universe and everything in it and Shiva would continue his dance of creation and destruction within the universes that remain in the Multiverse.
Due to the butterfly effect, the decisions our minds arrive at are based on a virtual infinity of factors beyond our direct control. Given the thousands of decisions about what to think and how to act that each of us faces in our lifetime, the billions of other decisions that others make and the unfathomable interactions between these events, the result is an infinity of universes that all exist within one reality. Many of these universes are so similar that their differences are imperceptible to the human mind, but the effect of this continuing process is to create widely different universes where the course of human history takes startlingly divergent paths.
When our collective consciousness mirrors that of our five-dimensional selves, there may be no distinction between the four dimensional world of the universes that comprise the Multiverse and the five-dimensional world of “Heaven.” Thus, the achievement of evolving into a species with full awareness of itself and that understands and acts upon the collective will of our higher selves that is God may cause the collapse of the distinction between the physical world and the next dimension. The effect would be to bring the “Kingdom” of Heaven to Earth. By this means, Mankind could in theory collectively answer the Lord’s Prayer by doing our will on Earth as we do in Heaven.
It is beyond my understanding why atheists reject this as even a possibility. It seems to me that even the more prosaic ideal of creating an imperfect version of this higher world would be sufficient to raise their sights to a higher aim. Perhaps it is not a lack of faith in God that limits their vision, but a lack of faith in Man’s ability to perfect itself. In my mind, the seeming improbability of human perfection is no reason not to try. If life had no inherent purpose, could we aspire to any higher?
Death has been defined as the absence of change. In a living, breathing Multiverse free will is a necessary perquisite to life itself. This suggests that our ultimate purpose is to find a way that we can achieve a common understanding of how to live together so that the Multiverse itself can continue to evolve, conscious of its nature. This is just another way of saying that God itself will evolve and we as individuals will never die. I have tried to imagine what reality might have been like for a hypothetical before the Universe was created and decided that “In the beginning, God was bored…”
There can be no higher purpose of life than to try to create a perfect society where every citizen of the world is considered to be endowed by his or her Creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In my cosmology, there is no distinction between acting according to the collective will of humanity or of God, since we are One and the same.
If we are five-dimensional creatures who can collectively see the past, present and future, then we have a vantage point by which to see the events which collectively have driven human destiny throughout time. If humans are but Avatars of their higher selves, then we can exercise our free will through our Avatars, who are not aware that their destiny is predetermined by choices we have already made “prior” to their birth.
This apparent predestination is the result of the fact that we make all possible choices when faced with a significant choice about what to believe or how to act. Thus, the consciousness of which we are aware itself splits into different aspects of the Multiverse and we are entirely unconscious of the process. If we make a fatal mistake, we will never know it as we will continue to exist in the remaining universes of the Multiverse of which we are still a part while that aspect of ourselves will simply remain manifest in our higher, five-dimensional self.
In this way, free will can exist in both realms, since our higher selves can lead us to opportunities that give us the opportunity to choose our paths in life. It seems to be a feature of human nature that we are drawn to the “thin spots” where we can feel the presence of the next dimension even while trapped in the prison of four-dimensional space-time. Perhaps we are drawn to these “vortices” by following the guidance of our higher selves.
The “prison” of the transient world that we can perceive directly is indeed a golden cage for those of us born into the luxury of a secure existence, where access to the essentials of life are readily available. It is not until we fully accept that the lives we lead are dependent on maintaining our advantages through the subjugation of others that the horror of what the world has become as a result of our choices becomes apparent.
Americans grew fat and happy from the spoils of WWII and enjoyed the blessings of a liberty that few now enjoy, even in the birthplace of modern democracy. How soon we forgot that the war was fought to end the threat of world-wide fascism, a threat which through our moral and intellectual sloth we have again let loose on Earth. The “Greatest generation” reaped the spoils of victory but is holding on to what it has amassed so tightly that they and their children are prepared to deny the blessings of our hard-won liberty to their children and grandchildren.
After the war, the United States magnanimously rebuilt Germany and Japan from the ashes that they had left them. Having learned the lessons of WWI, where the vengeful Treaty of Versailles led directly to the Second World War, the government and the People of the United States were determined to see that they made friends of their former foes. How soon they have forgotten that none of us are free while others are not.
In this interdependent and globally connected world, we face a clear choice. We can collectively submit to the fate that the international corporate terrorists have chosen for us, or we can choose the only path to freedom by simultaneously freeing the rest of the world from the threat of fascism even as we restore representative democracy to the United States. The stench of incipient fascism is everywhere in America today and the only alternative to democratically restoring freedom in the United States is a bloody uprising with the potential to destroy not only America but human civilization.
Fortunately, there exists in every human heart the spark of the divine, the better angel of our nature that allows us to in the end see our duty. If we reject the dark angel of selfishness and covetousness, we can prove what I have always believed: Good is stronger than evil and we are essentially good.
Ayn Rand is well dead and it is time that her sick ideas die with her. We are not by nature selfish, at least in the sense of putting our individual interests over those of others. This is learned through our families and our cultures. As we grow we create a reality in our minds that we foolishly believe represents objective reality.
Those of us who have evolved beyond our animal nature understand that our own interests are served in the long run only when we act in the best interests of all. We created ourselves to respond to instinctual drives that assure not only our individual survival but by necessity, our collective survival. Collective survival depends on a conscious collective awareness of the interdependent nature of all things with one another.
Those with inadequate Superego (conscience) to put a check on their Id (instinctual drive toward pleasure) do not fully utilize the gift of reason that is the Ego, or self. We are in reality not fully individuals because we are bound spiritually to the Atman, or Holy host whose collective consciousness gives rise to God, the Eternal One, from which we are derived. We create our own Egos because we have free will. When we succeed at modeling ourselves after the better angels of our nature, the darker angels of human nature will have no power over us and we can enjoy eternal and ever-varying life, at One with one another and with all of Creation.
Once more, in the words of John Lennon:
Imagine there's no Heaven.
It's easy if you try.
No hell below us,
above us only sky.
Imagine all the people
living for today.
Imagine there's no countries.
It isn't hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for
and no religion too.
Imagine all the people
living life in peace.
You may say that I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
and the world will be as one.
Imagine no possessions.
I wonder if you can?
No need for greed or hunger,
a brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people
sharing all the world.
You may say that I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
and the world will live as one.
Rick Staggenborg, MD
Drain, Oregon
