From: Ozodi Osuji <ozodiosuji@yahoo.ca>
Date: Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 5:19 PM
Subject: [NaijaPolitics] SCIENCE AND GOD (Download the attachment, 41 pages).
Abstract:
This paper endeavored to show that despite the discoveries of science the idea of God is still valid. To make its point it first reviewed pertinent aspects of science that would seem to invalidate the idea of God. It said that sciences' ideas neither proved nor disproved the existence of God. However, science disapproves what extant religions say about God. The paper says that looking at the Christian idea of God could lead a rational person to conclude that there is no God. God could not have engaged in the pathologically narcissistic behaviors delineated in the Christian bible. The paper posits a different view of God, one that says that it is an insane aspect of him and his sons that invented this separated world of space, time, energy and matter and that the sane aspects of them are still in their unified spirit state. The empirical universe, the papers says is the dream opposite of the real world created by God.
GOD AND SCIENCE ARE NOT IRRECONCILABLE
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
On first blush it would seem that the idea of God and science are irreconcilable. However, upon further thinking they are found to be quite compatible. To reach this happy conclusion we have to clarify our terms, explain what we mean by God and science. Science is a methodological approach to understanding phenomena that insists on accepting only ideas that can be observed, verified and falsified (Popper, 1963). Science embraces induction and over deduction (Hume, 17...to avoid breaking the reader's concentration inserting appropriate sources of the information I am paraphrasing, I will provide a list for further reading at the end of the paper). The scientific approach to phenomena has clarified many aspects of the universe. However, it seems generally applicable to physical matters (energy, matter, space and time) and less so to those aspects of our being that cannot be easily observed, measured, experimented on and verified. For example, science has told us a lot about our bodies, a physical system, but has not told us anything worth a penny's consideration about human consciousness, the mind and when it tries, such as the efforts of neuroscientists to prove that thinking is epiphenomenal, is a mere product of the arrangements of atoms and particles in the human brain and not extraneous to the brain, it seems laughable (Crick, 1995). Let us begin this discourse by examining our body. Our bodies are a compendium of certain elements, mainly nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen (and traces of many other elements, such as sulfur, potassium, magnesium, sodium, iron, zinc etc.). These several elements formed into molecules and those formed the basis of biological existence. Each element is composed of a nucleus (containing protons and neutrons…except hydrogen, the lightest element, which does not have neutron in its nucleus; however, its isotopes, deuterium and tritium have neutrons) and electrons. Electrons, as it were, are congealed photons (energy congealed into matter). Neutrons and protons are made of quarks. Quarks are made of photons (radiation). Photons are light energy without mass that congealed into matter with mass in quarks, protons, neutrons and electrons. And what are photons made of? They are made of nothing. Apparently, during the Big Bang that 13.7 billion years ago got the universe going something came out of nowhere and got inordinately hot (heat energy) and gave rise to light (light energy). Something that we do not know what it is became hot and produced light energy (radiation), space and time. Whatever it was that became hot exploded and produced photons (energy), matter, space and time that constitute our universe. Apparently, within the first second of that gigantic explosion radiation (photons) transformed itself into quarks and electrons, space and time. In the same all important second quarks combined into protons and neutrons (no one has actually seen quarks outside their encasement in protons and neutrons; outside their tomb they immediately decay to photons). It should also be observed that according to what physics believes that it knows about phenomena, the big bang ought to have produced equal number of matter and anti-matter; equal number of quarks and anti-quarks, equal number of protons and anti-protons, equal number of neutrons and anti-neutrons and equal number of electrons and anti-electrons (positrons). If that had happened matter and anti-matter would have attacked and annihilated each other and returned the universe to pure radiation and the universe of matter as we now know it would not have come into existence. Somehow, the expectation of physics was thwarted and for every one billion particles of anti-matter produced a billion and one particles of matter was produced. Thus, when matter and antimatter fought it out some matter survived to continue the evolution of the universe to what we now know it to be, a universe of matter (and as Albert Einstein pointed out, matter can be converted to energy and energy to matter; matter and energy are the same thing in two different forms of being). What made it possible for more matter than anti matter to be produced? Was it pure fortuitous chance that this happened? As we shall see there were several such seeming accidents to dismiss them as mere random occurrence hence some physicists now refer to them as the anthropic principle; this principle states that from its moment of birth it seems that the universe arranged things as if it wanted to produce biological forms of life, human beings included. That is to say that there seems teleology, purpose to the existence of the universe? Some physicists, of course, argue that the universe is an accidental one and that it works as it works and produced us and that there is no purpose, meaning and point to our existence (the universe is understanding itself through us). Since Nicolas Copernicus in 1543 observed that the earth is not the center of the universe (folks had hitherto believed that it was) and Galileo's 1610 demonstration with his telescope that the sun is the center of the solar system ( Galileo's empiricism was added to by Johannes Kepler, Tyco Brahe, Huygens and Isaac Newton) physicists have been on a mission to demonstrate that man and his world are insignificant entities in an insignificant part of a spiral universe (the goldilocks section of the Milky Way where it is neither too hot nor too cold) and that to nature he does not matter at all. It seems that many physicists are on a warpath with the goal of reducing human beings to the nothing they believe that they are, to disabusing them of their delusion of specialness (alas, unbeknown to them nothingness actually means everything, so if people are nothing they are everything!). (But why do many physicists have this obsessive-compulsion to prove that human beings, their earth, the solar system and the Milky Way Galaxy is not only not the center of the universe but nothing? Every mental disorder, such as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, has a cause. Let us just note that despite the efforts made through SETI…search for extra-terrestrial intelligence… no one has found biological life forms on any other solar planets or extra-solar planets; it may well turn out that our earth is special after all, that in the entire universe it is the only place where biological life forms exist! Our war against ourselves, I mean the war against religions teaching that man is special, ought to be a balanced war, not the irrational behavior of mentally disordered persons bent on proving their belief that could turn out as irrational as the seeming irrational conception of man by religion they are fighting. It may well turn out that human beings are special after all, that the entire universe evolved to produce them! Let us move on.) By the end of the first minute of the universe's existence neutrons and protons had combined into the nuclei of the simplest elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. The strong nuclear force (physics has four forces: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity and electromagnetism) holds protons and neutrons in the nuclei of elements (the weak nuclear force is responsible for their decay). Thus, we now have nuclei, electrons and photons in space and time. Space expanded at what Alan Gutt called inflationary scale (more rapid than the speed of light…which is 186, 000 miles per second, a speed Einstein had argued nothing could go faster than). Apparently, this rapid expansion prevented the just produced matter and energy from re-collapsing back to whatever they came from. Gravity ought to have pulled matter and energy back to their source hence aborted the nascent universe's existence but to cheat gravity inflation came into being. (It should be noted that inflationary theory is an after fact explanation: some folks had observed that at mere speed of light energy and matter would not have escaped the gravitational force pulling them to return to the initial state of singularity before the Big Bang explosion, so something extraordinary must have happened to make the incipient universe expand hence exists. Alan Gutt provided his theory to silence the perception that the universe should not have expanded hence should not have existed. Whether his theory is true or mere conjecture remains to be verified.) During the next 400, 000 years the universe was composed of nuclei, unattached electrons and photons in a dense soup called plasma. Light could not leave this dense state. Somehow, at the 400, 000 year mark nuclei captured electrons to form the simplest elements (hydrogen, helium and some lithium). Electric forces held electrons to nuclei. Apparently, that event led to space occurring in the hitherto dense plasma and light escaped and sped off (it is that light that Georges Gamow called Cosmic Micro Wave Background Radiation, light verified by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965). The verification of that cosmic microwave background radiation seem to have conclusively proved that the universe began in a big bang and laid to rest Fred Hoyle's hypothesis of steady state, the idea that the universe has always been around, with particles of energy and matter popping out of nowhere to increase the quantity of energy and matter in the universe. During the next 200 million years the universe was composed of 75% hydrogen gas and 23% helium gas (to the present the universe is still composed of 98% hydrogen and helium with all the other elements a mere 2% of it!). At this point another anthropic event took place. Clumps of hydrogen separated from each other (that is, space occurred between clumps of hydrogen). This asymmetric occurrence apparently led the force of gravity to pull the various clumps of hydrogen gas into themselves until their inner cores ignited into stars. Stars are thermonuclear factories where hydrogen is fused into helium. In the core of stars hydrogen atoms (composed of one proton in the nucleus and one electron outside the nucleus) combine to form isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium, tritium…in isotopes there are more neutrons than protons; in the case of deuterium there is one proton and one neutron and in the case of tritium one proton and two neutrons in the nuclei of hydrogen atoms) and those in turn combine to form helium (which has two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus and two electrons in its outer shell). The fusion of hydrogen to helium (a process called nucleosynthesis) releases heat and light. That heat and light work their way from the core of stars and in millions of years get to the surface of stars and eventually escape as the heat and light that reach us from stars. Each star is composed of six regions: the core, the radioactive zone and the convective zone (these three are the interior region); the photosphere, the Chromosphere and the outermost part, the Corona (these three are the visible surface of stars). Stars produce sunspots, wind and magnetic fields (elaboration of these concepts is beyond the scope of this paper). The original stars were massive in size (several million times the size of Solar, our star, the Sun). Those massive stars did not live long before they exhausted their hydrogen fuel supply and begin their death and dying process. Stars begin to die when their hydrogen supply is diminished and they begin fusing helium to carbon (which has six protons and six neutrons in its nucleus and six electrons cycling them); the process continues to fusing oxygen (eight protons and eight neutrons and eight electrons) and when it reaches iron apparently the heat in the star is no longer sufficient to fuse iron to heavier elements. At that point stars increase in size and eventually explode in supernovae. During star explosion, aka star death enormous heat is generated and that heat synthesize heavier than iron elements. Apparently, the other elements on Chemistry's periodic table (there are about 92 naturally occurring elements and over twenty artificially synthesized elements in laboratories that live and die in seconds) are synthesized during star death. All these mean that other than hydrogen and helium the elements (those were produced before star formation…helium is also produced in stars) we find in the universe and for our present interest, the elements that compose our bodies were made in stars. We are literally the products of stars; we are star dust! If stars did not produce the elements that compose our bodies we would not exist! (And this is a reason for us to study astronomy, astrophysics, astrochemistry and astrobiology. The quest to know who we are takes us to the stars, galaxies etc.) Since we need many of the elements produced in stars and star death to make life on earth possible it follows that the existence of stars and star death is an anthropic occurrence. It is as if nature planned for our existence by first making stars to exist and produce the elements it would later use in forming our bodies! The explosion of those initial massive stars showered into space the various elements. In time the cloud of elements (gas) were acted on by gravity to form new stars, this time not so massive stars, such as our sun. Smaller sized stars last much longer than the initial massive stars. And this is good for us for the long duration of our star has made it possible for biological life to evolve over the past four billion years on planet earth. Our sun, a medium star, was formed 4-5 billion years ago from the debris of dead stars. Along with the formation of smaller stars planets were formed from the debris of dead stars. The nine planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Plato…you could also add smaller planets: Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris) orbiting our sun were formed at the same time that our sun was formed from debris from exploded stars. The formation of planets is pretty much like the formation of stars. Here, debris from dead stars gather, first, as small affairs and in time more debris is pulled to them by gravity into small planets called planetismals. The planetismals grow in size by attracting other debris and eventually reach the sizes we now see them as. Not all debris from exploded stars is pulled into planets; many of them orbit the sun as asteroids and comets (in the Asteroid belt, the Kuiper and Oort belts). Our planet earth formed around the same time as the sun, 4.5 billion years ago. As noted before, it formed through the aggregation of star dust; the initial dust was then bombarded by others and they were conglomerated into what we now call our terrestrial, rocky planet (some planets, such as Jupiter, are gaseous; some people consider Jupiter a star that failed to ignite, a brown dwarf star). The initial earth was very hot; it was churning melted rocks. Apparently, in time the heavier elements, such as gold, diamond, uranium, potassium sunk into the inside of the earth (the radioactive decay of uranium and potassium provides the earth with internal heat, heat that we living on the earth's surface need to survive…of course, we also receive external heat from the sun and the other stars). The inner core of the earth is composed of solid iron; the outer core is composed of molten iron, which is followed by a plastic, viscous mantel and rocky (silicon) crust (the surface). It is speculated that comets carrying frozen water (and dust) kept striking the nascent earth, cooling it; that the hot earth melted the frozen ice in comets and in time that led to the accumulation of water on the surface of the planet. The earth's surface is 70% covered by water. There are other speculations as to how water came to be on planet earth; some say that the hot planet was busy combining the various elements on it into compounds, spilling out hot lava and lava sending all kinds of chemical mixtures into the earth's atmosphere and that in time those gases transformed into liquid, water and fell back on the earth (water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen). The jury is still out as to how come water is on planet earth and not on the other solar planets; let us move on. The earth is surrounded by a gas bubble; that gas bubble acts as an atmosphere for it. The atmosphere makes it possible for biological life to exist on earth for without the atmosphere ultraviolent rays from the sun would char the earth's surface into a burnt thing, as on Mercury and Venus, for example. Nitrogen (78%) is the most abundant gas in the earth's atmosphere (air) followed by oxygen (21%), argon (1%); traces of carbon, hydrogen and other elements also exist in the earth's atmosphere. The earth's atmosphere has different regions; each region is characterized by different levels of the various gases, temperature and pressure. From the ground to about nine miles into the sky is the troposphere (where we live); that region is followed by the stratosphere (it is here that we have the ozone layer; ozone is an isotope of oxygen that prevents ultraviolet rays from the sun from burning us to cinders), then the mesosphere and finally the thermosphere. About two hundred miles from the ground the earth's atmosphere gradually slides into space (space is very cold and not congenial for human habitation; apparently, our atmosphere is designed to produce just the right temperature that makes biological life forms possible on planet earth hence is an anthropic principle). The earth, like the other planets (except Mercury), has satellites, some of which are moons. We have just one moon. The earth's moon is about 250, 000 miles from earth…it takes light a little over a second to reach the moon from the earth; it takes light a little over 8 minutes to reach the earth from the Sun 93 million years away; it takes light about 2.5 years to reach the earth from its nearest non-solar star in the Milky Way Galaxy, Alpha Centauri; it takes light about 2.5 million years to reach the earth from its nearest galaxy, Andromeda. About 3.8 billion years ago the various elements on planet earth configured themselves into molecules (especially organic compounds) that made biological organisms possible. So far, only planet earth among the nine planets around the sun seems to have biological life forms (the search to find biological life forms in solar and extrasolar planets so far have yielded no dividends). On planet earth the various elements organized themselves into organic compounds (carbon based life forms as studied by organic Chemistry) whereby carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen and traces of other elements are mixed to form the basis for biological life forms. First, these compounds produced single celled organisms in the waters on earth and in time those combined to form multicellular organisms, such as plants and animals. After billions of years of evolution, biological permutations led to the production of the king of the predatory animals, human beings (who gratuitously call themselves the wise ones, Homo sapiens). About two and half million years ago, in the jungles of Africa some great apes (related to chimpanzees and gorillas) began to walk on two legs (became bipedal). This event freed their forelimbs to be used to manipulate their environment. Thus, came into being human beings tendency to technologically manipulate their environment hence more effectively adapt to it. About 50, 000 years ago those African apes, having migrated out of the jungles and into the savannas of Africa transformed themselves to what we now know as human beings. Some of these modern human beings later spread from Africa to all over the world (to Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia). Apparently, people have not changed in fifty thousand years. In the Fertile Crescent (especially Sumer, Mesopotamia, today's Iraq) human beings organized themselves into permanent societies and invented the wheel and the art of writing. Later civilization spread from this core to Asia, North Africa and much more lately to Europe (and now to black Africa, Oceania and Australia).
HOW WOULD THE UNIVERSE END?
How will our lives end? Our star, solar, sun apparently has enough hydrogen to keep fusing into helium for the next five billion years. Apparently, in about two billion years it would begin running out of hydrogen fuel and begin fusing helium to carbon etc. At that point it would begin its death and dying process, a process that would culminate in its death five billion years hence. Since the sun is a medium sized star, its outer region would expand and engulf Mercury and Venus and then is sloughed off. What remains, its inner core would become a white dwarf star and burn, sort of like amber from dying fire, before it finally flickers out and dies. But before it gets to that point the earth would have long since gone. During the period of the sun fusing helium into carbon and the consequent increased temperature of the sun, the earth would be made unbearably hot, sort of like present Mercury and Venus. Waters would dry up and all biological forms would die. Ultimately, the earth would be a dead piece of rock floating in space (a kind of asteroid). The over 200 known galaxies (each galaxy has over 200 billion stars, some with planets) would in time flicker out and die. Some of the large sized stars would die in supernovae. While their outer parts are exploded out and sent out as debris (nebulae) into space, their inner cores would collapse to form black holes (black holes are so dense that light cannot escape from their event horizons) or neutron stars (where all the elements in them are compacted into neutrons and they spin so many million times per minute). The other forms of stars, such as quasars, pulsars etc. would also meet their fate in death. Everything that exists in form, is composed of many things must decompose and die. (We are born to age and die; what tragic figures we are, the ancient Greeks say…or are we comic figures?) For our present purposes, the salient point is that in trillions of years to come all the galaxies, stars and planets would be dead. The stars and planets would decay to their component elements (as noted, which are mostly hydrogen and helium). Those in time would decay to their component parts (protons, neutrons and electrons). Those particles in turn would decay to quarks and photons (protons would be the last to decay). In time everything would return to pure radiation, photons. The universe would be one empty space filled with swirling photons. Photons need a source of heat to exist and since stars (their source of heat) would be gone the photons would decay to nothingness. The universe would, in effect, return to the nothingness from which it began during the big bang. There used to be an earlier hypothesis that may be all matter and energy would only expand so much and then collapse to itself into whatever they began from; this was called the big crunch. Apparently, that idea is no longer tenable. The discovery of the existence of dark matter and dark energy led astrophysicists to this conclusion. Dark energy (which constitutes 73% of the universe) apparently speeds up the expansion of the universe and dark matter (which constitutes 23% of the universe) is trying to hold the galaxies together and that is not enough to prevent the over expansion of the universe. (There is a hypothesis that the universe would collapse back to itself and then Rebound into another universe and that the process repeats ad infinitum.) Simply put, the galaxies are said to be on a trajectory to over expansion and consequent loss of heat hence coldness everywhere. The universe is now seen as destined to die a cold death. Thus, a universe that began 13.7 billion years ago in a fiery birth would in trillions of years-time die a cold death; whatever has a beginning has an end, they say. Our ride through energy and matter (which Einstein told us via his famous equation: E=Mc2 are mutually convertible) space and time would end. (Some scientists hope that when our planet earth dies we move on to other planets (say, Mars) and when those die we move to planets in other galaxies and keep migrating from one galaxy to another and ultimately before all galaxies die we would have found a way to tunnel our way to other universes (worm hole our way to them). These people believe in the reality of body and ego and cannot imagine other circumstances where we live in spirit and not body hence they keep looking for places where they would keep living in bodies. Religious people can imagine nonphysical places where we live. In the meantime scientists play with such ideas as M-Brane, Superstrings and Quantum Physics that give them the impression that other universes exist.) Talking about Albert Einstein, what else did that incredible man teach us? He taught us about special and general relativity theory (general relativity and quantum mechanics are the two major twentieth century contribution to science; both transformed physics from Newtonian classical to modern physics). What is general relativity? Suffice it to say that Isaac Newton had posited his three laws of motion and gravitation (in his book Principia mathematica in 1687). Newton actually does not make sense for he has not explained why objects do not crash into each other. Consider. The sun is out there. The earth is over here; if gravity is what it is said to be, with larger objects pulling smaller ones to them, how come the larger sun does not pull the earth to it; how come the earth merely orbits around the sun? Going along, how come all the objects in space: galaxies, stars, planets, moons, asteroids and comets do not crash into each other and form one humongous ball in space? That is what commonsense would suggest from the law of gravity. This question has been raised by many astute minds, right from the time Newton posited his theory of gravitation. At age thirteen when I took my first physics course (Mechanics) at secondary school and was taught about gravity I asked questions about why things do not crash into each other. My teachers gave me explanations, the type that has been given by physicists since Newton. I was not satisfied and am still not satisfied. And when I am not satisfied by any explanation you could stand on your head and talk until you go blue in your face and you would not persuade me. Moving along. In 1916 Albert Einstein published his paper on General Relativity. Among other things, he said that time and space are not discrete entities but are related and that space is curved. He attempted to show how light bends when it goes around objects in space (in 1919 Eddington and his crew went to Equatorial Guinea in West Africa and actually observed light bending during a total eclipse of the sun, thus verifying Einstein's original mathematical extrapolation about the behavior of space, time and light). It would seem that Einstein's general relativity improved on some of the shortcomings of Newton's theory of gravitation. I am still not impressed; I am not convinced despite million hours devoted to trying to make sense of it all. Einstein's equations have ways of predicting whatever a physicist wants them to predict for him (even when Einstein himself does not see it so). In the early 1920s, the Russian mathematical physicist, Alexander Friedmann building on Einstein's general relativity equations concluded that the universe must necessarily be expanding. General Relativity, in effect, predicts the expansion of the universe (and also predicts time travel to the past and the future!). Strict interpretation of General Relativity predicts all sorts of things that no one has found in nature, including the existence of infinite universes! Where is the evidence for the universe's expansion? Friedmann had none but simply stated that if Einstein's mathematics is correct that the universe must be expanding! If the universe is expanding it must be expanding from a point, right? In 1927, George Lemaitre posited that the universe at some point must have all been in one spot. He posited what he called the cosmic egg origin of the universe. The universe was in one ball, that ball exploded and expanded to everywhere. Lemaitre was merely making inference from Friedman's notion that the universe is expanding; he had no proof for his hypothesis. The American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, in 1929 believed that he found the proof of the universe's expansion. Studying what is now called redshift light behavior he showed that the galaxies are moving away from each other. If the galaxies are moving away from each other, it follows that they must have been together. In the 1940s George Gamow picked up the ball and ran with it trying to show that the universe began in one spot and expanded out. Fred Hoyle said, no. It was actually Fred Hoyle who in a BBC broadcast (1951) employed the term big bang for the first time in reference to the hypothesis that the universe began in one humongous explosion. Today all sorts of evidence and pseudo evidence have been amassed to prove that the universe originated in one spot and is expanding; we have already alluded to Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The postulation of dark energy in the 1990s seems to have given that thesis further boosting (no one has actually seen dark energy and dark matter; the race is on to know what they are). Is the universe expanding? If so where is it expanding to? Is the concept of universe not everything that exists already? How can what is already everything be expanding; where is it expanding to that is not already part of everything? Is it expanding to new space that it is creating? Was there vacuum that the big bang and the stuff it spilled out are expanding to? I do not understand what is going on here. As noted before, if something does not add up for me you can go blue in your face talking about it all you want and I would not be persuaded. All the expert talk on the big bang that I have heard has not laid my doubts to rest. Talking about the Big Bang explosion, how exactly was that possible? To explode there must be a vacuum for something to explode into. If there is not already existing vacuum something cannot explode into it unless it first creates the vacuum it is exploding into. If there is no vacuum there can be no sound made during the supposed big bang explosion. If there was nowhere already existing it follows that that one lonely particle that exploded created space, time, energy and matter. One little particle the size of a millionth of a period on this paper created this entire ginormous universe? It seems mind boggling! Listen; when something does not make sense to me I accept that it does not make sense to me. I do not force myself to accept what does not make sense to me. I am not persuaded by the authority and so-called credibility of whoever says something. Something said must make sense to me (derogatorily call this self-reference) or else I would not accept it. I read the Christian bible perhaps a hundred times and it did not make sense to me thus at age fourteen when I read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and it made eminent sense to me I threw away the bible; I concluded that the bible is a bunch of fairy tales told by a primitive Jewish tribe and left it at that. I understand the literature on the subject of how the universe began but it still does not make sense to me. Let me therefore just repeat the conventional talking point that says that the universe began in one spot and according to Alan Gutt's inflation theory expanded at a speed greater than the speed of light to avoid collapsing back to itself and since then has been expanding. The Big bang supposedly invented not only space and time but energy and matter. The world we live in is the product of that big bang. We are also told that in the future the whole shebang would end. Christians have their own story of how the world came into being (narrated in the three or so contradictory stories of creation conflated in Genesis part of the bible) and how it would end (Christian eschatology as explicated in that schizophrenic write up called Revelation, and the prophecy of Daniel). Astrophysics has its own ideas on how the world began and would end; ideas no less schizophrenic than the Christian story of creation and how the world would end. Let us just say that all these ideas are interesting. One would not be surprised if tomorrow they are junked and new ideas are posited on the origin and end of the universe. In the meantime we shall work with what we are given. The great game in contemporary physics is to find a way to unify the four forces of physics (the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism) into a theory of everything. Albert Einstein tried and failed. Strings theory thinks that it has found the answer. A Nigeria, Oyibo, even thought that he found the answer in God. God holds the four forces together. Who knows what the truth is!
PROBLEMS WITH SCIENCE'S PHILOSOPHY OF MATERIALISM AND RANDON EVOLUTION OF THINGS
Scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists etc.) tell a straight forward story of how we came to be on planet earth. They see us as part of the material universe; they say we were produced by the universe, are of the universe and would die with the death of the universe a couple trillion years hence. But this is not how we look at ourselves. Life would be a lot simpler if we looked at ourselves as scientists tell us we are. We look at ourselves differently. The reason is that there is an aspect of us that refuses to subject itself to easy scientific analysis; I am talking about consciousness, aka mind. Physical scientists, of course, try telling us that consciousness is produced by the permutation of particles and atoms in our brains. Somehow we refuse to accept that matter could think about itself, that matter could become an agent understanding the universe; such an event seems incredible; in fact, it seems more magical than the stories told by the various religions. Imagine atoms writing this paper! There seems something at work in people's lives. What that something is I do not know but let me briefly tell the story of religion before I try to tell you what I think is going on in our lives.
RELIGIONS STORIES OF HUMAN ORIGINS
Everywhere human beings are found they believe that they came from somewhere else; they do not see this world of space, time, energy and matter as their real home; they see themselves as strangers in this world. Are we aliens in this world? You be the judge of that one. What is empirical is that every group of human beings posited what it called God; it told a story of how that God created its members and postulated rituals through which people estranged from that God could reconnect with it. (What makes all people the same is the fact that they all tried to understand their origin and told stories of how they came into being; if there is a group of people without a myth of creation they would not be human beings as we know them. Actually, our current cosmological story of how the universe came into being is no more than that, a myth for no one has verified its factualness despite all the noise made by deluded scientists pretending to know it all.) Religion is the rituals people undertake in their efforts to reconnect to a force they believe they came from but are now disconnected from. In this paper I do not find it necessary to talk about all religions or review all of them (although I have made it my business to study them, especially African religions, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism); what is salient is that people always posit God and ways to reach him via their religions. Does God exist or is it a figment of human imagination? In his book, the Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud told us that human beings are like children who feel terrified by the impersonal forces of nature and seek a father to protect them. People posit a father figure who they believe exists to protect them from the attacks nature launches at them. Nature produced us but does not seem to care for our welfare. Consider that diseases from bacteria, virus and fungi kill us at will; natural forces like tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, tornadoes etc. kill us as if we are flies. Nature certainly does not see us as special; it treats us as it treats other animals and trees. We are born, suffer diseases, age and die. When we die our bodies, bodies we enslaved ourselves working to provide for rot and smell worse than feces. Our dead bodies are eaten by bacteria and other organisms, and those in turn are eaten by others. We eat other animals and other animals eat us; there is a kind of macabre poetic justice here? It figures, does it not! In Hamlet's colorful words, we are food for worms. We are composed of the various elements and decay back to them, from sand to sand, from atoms to atoms, from photons to photons, from nothing to nothing. Upon death your beautiful body could be cremated and reduced to a couple pounds of ashes. Add water to the ashes and heat them some more and they are reduced to gas (mostly nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen gas) and evaporate into the air. Your body returns to the nitrogen, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen it is made of. Those in time decay to particles and particles in turn decay to photons which finally decays to nothingness (nothingness means no particular thing; which actually means everything!). If you think about our fate, you must acknowledge that it is scary. No wonder Freud told us that that was the reason why folks posited religions to enable them deal with the mind and body numbing awareness of their future death. Old Freud tells us that we used our fertile imaginations to construct nonexistent gods and worship them hoping that in flagellating ourselves before them we would get them to protect us from nature's onslaught. Alas, those gods do not exist and therefore no amount of praying to them would make them listen to us or help us. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor of biology, recently wrote a book he called the God Delusion. As he sees it, there is no God. God is a product of our imagination. Because it does not exist and we say that it exists we are deluded. Delusion disorder is a psychosis in which some people believe what is not true as true and act as if their belief is true. Christopher Hitchens said amen to Dawkins' cogitations and added that God is not great. How can God be great when he does nothing for us; we might as well banish God from our minds and accept that we are alone in this wide universe and do whatever we can do to help ourselves. Theism, Atheism, Gnosticism, Agnosticism and other Isms on God suffuse our lexicon but Hitchens asks us to do away with them and simplify see ourselves as alone in this wide universe. There are no gods helping us; we have no rescuer; Jesus Christ is a charlatan if he ever existed; there are no miracle workers, only medical doctors can heal our bodies. The man said his bit and then died of cancer. As William Shakespeare said in Macbeth, we are like actors on the world's stage; we play our roles and then buzz off like flies. Hitchens played his part in the universal play and moved on to, as he would say, oblivion and finitude; so, do not cry for him, for he does not care for your crocodile tears. Does God exist? Does God not exist? If we accepted the logic of science the answer is very simple. The universe produced us and that is all there is to us.
EXTRAPOLATION FROM QUANTUM MECHANICS
Alas, even science itself has lately complicated the story. Whereas classical science, I mean the stuff we all studied in high school (physics' mechanics, heat, electricity, light, sound; chemistry, biology, earth science etc.) would seem to give us a straight forward answer to matters theological but quantum mechanics says: not so fast. The universe seems more complicated than classical physics would tell us. There are forces at work that seem amazing. Whereas it would be stretching it to say that they prove the existence of divinity yet quantum mechanics postulations seem incredible. I do not believe that physics, chemistry and biology can prove or disprove the existence of God. At any rate, I do not look for evidence of God in physics. Nevertheless, for the sake of completion let me briefly summarize quantum mechanics and show how its finding could lead one to believe that there is more to life than, as Shakespeare's Polonius told his son, Horatio in Hamlet, is taught in our philosophy (what science was called in the 1600s when Shakespeare wrote). I will give a brief history and explanation of aspects of pertinent quantum physics. By the end of the ninetieth century some scientists believed that they had pretty much known all there is to know about phenomena and that the rest is a matter of mopping up, providing details. In the 19th century we had a good handle on mechanics (beginning with Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Huygens Tyco Brahe, Thomas Young), Heat, sound, electricity and light (Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and Joseph Thompson seemed to have exhausted the hitherto intractable nature of light) and in chemistry the findings of Boyle, Dalton, Lavoisier, Laplace, Davy and others seemed sufficient; in biology we had pretty good understanding of human anatomy and physiology thanks to Harvey and many others. It seemed as if we had known just about all there is to know about matter and energy and the rest is playing around with details. Then all hell broke loose in 1900 when Max Planck showed that light is not just wave, as Thomas Young seemed to have demonstrated in his double slit experiments in 1803 but quanta (another name for particles of light…Einstein later re-christened it photons). In 1905 Albeit Einstein pursued Planck's idea (and Brownian puzzles…why do still waters seem to be moving) and showed that photons (particles of light) knocked off electrons on hot objects (he called it the photoelectric effect of light); in effect, he demonstrated that light is particles (Young had seemed to prove that light is wave in his 1803 double slit experiments…interestingly Newton actually believed that light is particles, he called it corpuscles but folks listened to Huygens idea that light is wave). Ernest Rutherford, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry from his contributions to the study of radiation (Becquerel had shown that certain atoms decayed and gave off radiation; Marie and Pierre Currie had studied uranium and showed that they decay (radiation); Rutherford discovered that the atom was not the smallest part of elements (as Dalton had said and the Greek Democritus had long ago speculated about). Shooting light particles on gold foil and having some of them bounce back led him to believe that in the middle of atoms is something he called nucleus. This was in 1911. In 1920 Rutherford surmised that the nucleus contains protons and neutrons. In 1932 James Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons. Thus, we now know that the atom is composed of electrons (which Joseph J. Thompson had discovered in 1897), protons (which Rutherford discovered in 1911) and neutrons (which Chadwick discovered in 1932). In 1913 Neils Bohr showed how electrons orbited nuclei (like a cloud moving around the nucleus). In 1924 Louis Broglie played with Young's double slit experiment some more and showed that electrons, as well as light, go through the double slits (for both left their interference marks on the screen behind the slits). In effect, electrons behaved like photons, both behaved as waves as well as particles depending on what you want them to do. Thus, now we say that particles are wave-particle in nature, not either or but both; they behave as you want them to behave, as wave or particle but not as both at the same time. If a photon or electron could behave as wave or as particle if one asked it to do so, does it have a mind, consciousness that enables it to understand when you want it to do so (how does it know when you want it to go through only one of the slits or to go through both slits)? Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Max Born and others provided the mathematics of wave-particles behavior (their cumulative efforts is now called quantum mechanics). Heisenberg showed that you can know the momentum or the position of a subatomic particle as it moved around the nucleus but not both at the same time (this is called the Uncertainty Principle); Bohr showed that wave and particles are complementary in their behaviors. Dirac speculated on the existence of neutrinos (which later was shown to be a product of nuclei decay…as we speak billions of neutrinos are going through our bodies; neutrinos are released in stars during nuclear fusion; these particles go through mountains and everything; as it were, they do not recognize obstacles! Here is a question for you: our bodies are made of particles so how come we do not move through mountains as neutrinos, which are particles, do? Perhaps we could and do? There are people who claim to do out of body travel; who, while lying on their beds, claim to visit other places). In the 1930s our understanding of the atom really took on dangerous turns. Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Strassman showed that the nucleus could be split (nuclear fission) if bombarded with neutrons to elicit chain reaction and release enormous energy. At The University of Chicago Fermi showed that this is doable. During the Second World War, fearing that Germans would beat every person to the development of atomic weapons hence use it to defeat the Western Allies, Einstein and others wrote President Roosevelt to organize the Manhattan Project to work on splitting the atom. Robert Oppenheimer headed that project. In August of 1945 the first uranium nuclei was fissilized, exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico and later such bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan and that led Japan to surrender hence end the Second World War. By the 1950s we had learned not only how to do uranium fission bombs but also how to replicate what happens in stars, fuse hydrogen into helium and release energy (hence hydrogen bombs). The Soviet Union fearing that America would use such bombs to overrun it naturally worked to acquire its own atomic and hydrogen bombs. The nuclear race was on and many countries strived to acquire their own nuclear weapons (as we talk Iran is working had to do so). Those without nuclear weapons fear that those with such bombs could blackmail them into submission, into doing what they do not want to do; powerful nations do intimidate weak ones, so scholars of international politics tell us that all nations who do not desire servitude to others must strive after balance of power with others. If you are strong no one would attack and subjugate you but if you are weak strong predators would attack and push you out, enslave or even kill you and take your territory. Just look at the fate of American Indians; strong Europeans massacred them and took their lands; indeed, Europeans enslaved weak Africans and used their labor for free to develop the land they stole from Indians! Such is human history, so do not cry about it; get even, become strong if you do not want to experience the fate of the weak. This is called realism in politics (political realism). Political realists do not bother listening to those teaching nuclear non-proliferation while retaining their own nuclear weapons. Thus, realistic Iranians want to have their own nuclear weapons. And soon realistic African nation states would do the same or they would continue to be screwed by the white men who have such nuclear weapons and use them to intimidate Africans, arouse fear in them and out of fear of harm and death do what their white masters ask them to do. (Unless we disarm all nations such as America, Russia, France, England, Pakistan, India and Israel and other nations who possess nuclear weapons…there is a fat chance of this happening, political realists tell us.) The genii are let out of the bottle and there is no going back; nature itself produces nuclear reactions that kill people so all we are doing is replicating natural processes. As long as we have the desire to understand how nature works we will understand these things. And if we use such information to destroy all humanity, well, good riddance, after all sixty- five million years ago another predatory animal, dinosaurs were eradicated from the surface of the earth. The earth would continue with or without human beings. At any rate, and before we get sentimental, in a few billion years the earth itself would be destroyed by natural forces. C'est la vie, such is life. Grind your teeth, head help up and chins jutted out and take life as it is, no sentimentality, real politics teaches. We learned how to split the strong nuclear force holding protons and neutrons together in nuclear fission and in the process release enormous energy. That energy could be used destructively to destroy people and cities or productively if captured in nuclear reactor plants and transformed into electrical energy (which now supplies many countries with electricity). Our understanding of the nuclei has increased in leaps and bounds. We now know that there are other subatomic particles other than the major three; we know about quarks (which Murray Gell-Mann organized into up and down quarks), muons, gluons, meson, leptons, Higgs and a veritable zoo of other subatomic particles. The European Superconducting Supercollider Laboratories (CERN) in Geneva Switzerland aim at accelerating the speed of particles (such as protons and neutrons) aimed at each other so that they smash each other and release what they are composed of; the hope is that through these efforts we shall learn about what happened during the first second during the Big Bang; we are trying to understand creation. As long as we ask the question: where did we come from, such efforts as are made at CERN will be made. Human beings are inquisitive creatures and will not stop until they have understood their world. In 1957 building on Quantum Mechanics, especially Schrodinger's cat experiment (if you placed a cat in a box and attached a radioactive material that had a fifty-fifty chance of decaying and releasing radioactive energy that could kill the cat and then came around to open the box you could not predict whether the radiation had been released hence the cat is dead or alive), Hugh Everett wrote a dissertation for Princeton University (his thesis supervisor was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the giants of Quantum Mechanics) in which he said that a strict interpretation of Schrodinger's wave equation and cat experiment suggests that the cat could be dead in one universe and alive in another universe; in other words, that there are many universes (many worlds was his term). The cat is neither alive nor dead until the observer looked at it. It is the act of observation that collapses it to the state that the observer wants to see it. Before observation it is in quantum superposition, a state that is neither here nor there but ready to be collapsed into any state that the observer seems to want it to be. Everett said that there are many universes (in fact, infinite universes) and that the act of observation and measurement produces an outcome in the universe that the observer is in (or thinks that he is in). Hugh Everett was saying that things are in a sort of no man's land until our observation, our wish, our consciousness, our mind, our instruments and our measurements make them appear where we want them to appear. Without observation nothing exists in any permanent state. This seems to answer the old philosophical question: if a tree falls and there is no person to observe it fall did it fall or was sound made. Everett says that a tree falls only when an observer is looking for a fallen tree. The observation could make the tree fall in what seems the past (say, millions of years ago…we see bones of dead dinosaurs that died sixty- five million years ago; Everett would say that they died sixty five million years ago now for us to think that we saw such fossil evidence hence convince ourselves that the past is real). As Everett sees it, a strict interpretation of Quantum mechanics says that only now exists, that the past and future are in super-position states to be collapsed for us to see or think that we see to prove our presuppositions that the past is real or that there is a future. The future does not exist but if we want it to exist it would seem to exist for us. If we believe in the past and future we can do time travels to the past and to the future and even Einstein's equations ask for such travels to be doable. We live in an Alice in Wonderland world, after all; things are whatever we want them to seem like to us, otherwise we do not know what things are; put differently, whatever things are they have the potential to become whatever we want them to be for us. Our minds, our consciousness plays a role in the existence of the world we see! Everett asserts that strict consideration of quantum mechanics leaves him no option but to conclude that there are many worlds, infinite worlds, actually, and that our wish for things to appear in our extant world makes them to appear here. Even then they may appear in different forms in other universes. Put differently, your mind, your consciousness, your wish to be in this particular universe, this particular place called planet earth plays a role in your being here. And that is not the end of it. You are here by your choice yet you are in other universes. There are infinite yous in the other universes. In every imaginable form a you exist in other universes. Everything that you have ever wanted to do, a you are doing it, or have done it in one of the infinite universes! There is a me here in front of my computer typing away. There is another me jogging in another universe (I want to go run and would do that as on as I am done with this freaking typing). There is a me doing everything my mind can conceive in other universes. Hugh Everett said that this is the inevitable conclusion of Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's relativity theory. If we take physics conclusions, especially its mathematics seriously, he said that we must accept the thesis that there are infinite universes, infinite us, infinite you and me, infinite your cats, trees etc. (There is a universe where black folks are screwing white folks instead of white folks screwing black folks as they do in our world…that would be an interesting universe, after all as a black man I am sick and tired of being screwed by white men…my own personal hope, however, is that there is a universe where we love each other and not screw each other.) Many other physicists have added to Everett's original paper on many worlds (some call it parallel universes, others call it multiverses). David Deutsch of Oxford University vociferously says that we simultaneously exist in many universes; Bryce Dewitt tells us that the existence of parallel universes is a scientific reality. If, as quantum mechanics says, consciousness affects what happens does it follow that consciousness brought the universe into being, created the big bang? Many physical scientists are not willing to go that far. John Gibbon believes that perhaps people in other universes, advanced civilizations probably used their consciousness to invent our world, perhaps intelligently designed its parameters hence seeming anthropic principle and project it out (perhaps into a black hole…for all we know our universe could be taking place in a black hole, expanding to nowhere, just as black holes are expanding to nowhere while those in it think that it is expanding…black holes are not black; the white man calls whatever he does not understand black or dark hence black hole and dark matter and dark energy, stuff we have not seen). Since all these talk about many universes is theoretical and no one has seen any other universe other than our own, naturally some people dismiss the whole business as fruitless. Instead, they take those aspects of quantum mechanics that works to do work. Just about everything we have in the electronic industry is based on quantum mechanics: Radio, TV, telephones, Computers, Internet and Email are predicated on quantum mechanics. As it were, the idea is to use what has practical value in quantum mechanics and ignore the rest of it; take from Schrodinger's wave equations to send your email but ignore that it predicts the existence of many universes. Alas, some people have hang dog mentality and do not let go of any seeming true idea hence persist in talking about parallel universes. John Bell, an Irish physicist working at CERN in the 1960s made an astonishing observation. He observed that when particles are entangled, contacted with each other, and later separated, regardless of the distance now separating them they seem to know what each other is doing and instantaneously (going beyond the speed of light, supposedly that nothing could go faster than). Even if you place the two particles one at each end of the universe 13.7 billion years apart (and gazillions of miles apart) they would respond to each other as soon as one is stimulated. This greater than light speed response of entangled particles has been verified in many experimental situations, Alan Aspect did, so we are not talking theory here, we are talking reality. Indeed, efforts are taking place to build computers based on quantum entanglement. (Think about it; your body is composed of particles; those particles are entangled with the particles in your mother so you respond to her thinking even though she is thousands of miles away from you; that is the point being made here, in case you have not got it yet…some people call this phenomenon telepathy and the more scientifically oriented look to the day we can do teleportation, travel instantaneously to all sorts of places.) Are there parallel universes? I do not know. The idea is, however, interesting. If there are parallel universes and we are in many of them it follows that we do not die out and that we keep living in other universes. That is the idea, anyway. Alternatively, do all of the yous in the infinite universes die when the you on earth die? From religion's point of view we could say that some of the universes are like what those who have experienced out of body experience (see Robert Monroe's books on journeys out of body) and near death experiences (see Mrs. Eddy's claim of visiting a world where she saw her dead relatives). These folks claim to go to worlds were they see their loved dead relatives or to different worlds. It may well be that when we die we keep on living in other universes. Why not, if there are infinite universes? Finally, if there are infinite universes surely one could be what religionists call heaven, a place where folks live eternally? I can imagine a place where folks are not in forms, are not in bodies, are pure ideas, pure disembodied intelligence (I wish to be pure disembodied intelligence; I do not like to be in the human body) and pure consciousness and live in each other person, in a unified state. You never know.
AN ARGUMENT FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE
The above summary of ideas in aspects of science that might have a bearing on God may or may not appeal to your way of thinking. I just felt a need to summarize them to set the stage before I make my argument for the existence of God. From now on I will rely strictly on my own experience and only using other people's insights as springboard to expand on my own ideas; I do not have any need to root my conclusions on God on other persons' conclusions. I do not recognize any external authority on this matter for we are all equal here. There are no experts on God, no authorities that we all should obey (except self- proclaimed authorities, who often are charlatans, quarks and frauds deceiving folks with their snake oil ideas). I was raised a Catholic Christian and necessarily have the Christian world view in my sub-conscious mind and it influences my thinking. I have studied other religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism; I studied Helen Schuman's A course in miracles and the Gnosticism that shaped it; all those studies no doubt influence my thinking. Be those caveats as they may, the following material is my understanding about God. Take it or leave it; I am just stating what makes sense to me. What makes sense to me does not have to make sense to you, for in the phenomenal universe we inherited different bodies and had different social experiences and see things differently. I must hasten to add that I have no need to say that what I say is true because it is what other people, such as my African folks, believe is true. I could care less about African religion or culture or any other religion or culture; what matters to me is what makes sense to me. Let us then dance to my songs. And it is about time people danced to music from African minds rather than always dance to the mostly gibberish European minds dish to the world as the truth.
What is God? Is God what is delineated in the Christian bible? The Old Testament God is a pathological narcissist; he wants to be the center of attention and admired by all people and if you dare disobey his often foolish views he feels angry and flies into rage and not only destroys you but entire cities and the world (as in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Flood that saved only Noah and his family). I have no use for such an angry God. That is not the God that created our real selves. The Old Testament God has been referred to as the false God, the demiurge, the god that separated from the real God and invented this world of sorrows (or laughter, depending on how you look at it). My conception of God is not the same as traditional Christian conception of God; it is somewhat in line with Gnostic conception of God (although I do not have any urge to fall in line with everything Gnostics say about their God; I say something about God that makes sense to me and if it happens to seem like Gnostic conception of God so be it). Gnostics believe that there is a God that created us and that one of his creations out of pride rebelled against him and separated from him to go create his own world in opposition to God. The separating god has been given many names including demiurge, Lucifer, Ladabot etc. The Gnostic story of separation that makes most sense to me is the one Helen Schucman delineated in her poem, A course in miracles. Helen, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, New York, wrote in verse, in poetic form hence lends herself to different interpretations. What I will do is write in the form I am used to, prose and provide a story of creation that may be akin to Helen's story. If we diverge here and there so be it; I do not have any obligation to follow her reasoning; I follow my own light. I should observe that Helen wrote from her stream of consciousness (she said that Jesus or the Holy Spirit is the source of her writing); as it were, she shut out her conscious mind and allowed information in her subconscious mind to stream out (and saw it as coming from another person; persons with multiple personality disorder, aka dissociative disorder do this all the time). This is pretty much like what happens when we sleep and dream and our subconscious minds produce information that we did not know that we have in our conscious minds. Because she wrote from her subconscious mind she wrote in the language of dreams: symbols, metaphors, similes, figures of speech etc. Her writing is not straight forward; its symbols need interpretation. As we all know, when two or more persons interpret the same symbolic writing they tend to end up with different interpretations. Thus, already cottage industries have sprung up each claiming to have the true and only true interpretation of what Helen wrote. I will just state what I see as the truth and leave it to the interpreters to do their thing. I write from my conscious mind, not subconscious mind (although as Freud correctly understands even our conscious minds are suffused with information from our unconscious minds).
THE HUMAN BODY
Look at the human body; what do you see? What you see is an animal's body; it is not that much different from the body of a dog, cat, cow etc. Our bodies are animal bodies. They are exquisitely put together alright and our brains can do wonderful things including understanding the world we live in. But when all is said and done the human body is exactly what it is, an animal body. It lives (perhaps, up to 120 years), ages, suffers weakness and dies. When it dies it rots and smells worse than feces. Ultimately, it decays and returns to the chemical elements that organized themselves into it: Nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen etc.; those return to their kind in nature and are absorbed by other biological organisms and exist as part of them. In time those decay to their constituent protons, neutrons and electrons and those in time decay to photons which in turn decay to nothingness. Simply put, our bodies are nothing, and we all know it. It is because we know that our bodies are nothing that we struggle mightily to make them seem important in our awareness. We even invent gods that tell us that our bodies are important. Indeed, the pretense of importance is carried forward to death. When we die we pretend that our bodies are still important hence surround burial with all sorts of ceremonies. But, alas, upon death our bodies decay and return to the nothingness from whence they came. Now, if a person put nothingness together, crafted a body that is ultimately nothing, invented a universe in which that body lives, a universe that science has accurately pointed out is made of matter, energy, space and time and a universe that would ultimately die a cold death and everything in it return to nothing has that person done a great job? If someone created our bodies and world and those are nothing had that someone done something important? Of course not. In fact, that someone is insane for why take all the trouble to construct a seeming marvelous machine that would decay and return to nothing? As Christopher Hitchens said, if God created our bodies and our universe he is not great, in fact, he is nothing, too. A god that took all the trouble to create our bodies and this world did nothing and is insane. Only an insane god could have created this world for it is an insane person who does something knowing that it is nothing and would return to nothing and take pride from that nothingness or feel powerful from nothingness). Christians run around thanking their god for creating their bodies and for keeping them alive in bodies; they are thanking god for making them live in body and in a world destined to die a cold death? To me that is incredible. If, in fact, a god created such a world he ought to be crucified for he cursed people to live a pointless existence, an existence destined to end in death. An intelligent god could not have created this world. It is better that we did what scientists do and see our bodies and this world as something that blindly evolved over billions of years and leave it at that than to say that a god designed our bodies, as proponents of the idea of Intelligent Design say. If God designed our body he designed nothing of worth and is a poor designer! (While at it, I would design a permanent body!) Scientists' insistence that this world is a product of evolution, not creation is probably rooted in their awareness of the nothingness of their bodies; they know it is a grand joke to say that a god created their bodies, created nothingness. In America when white Americans become vaguely aware that their bodies are food for worms, instead of using that opportunity to become thinkers they run into the mind dead notion that somehow their bodies are better than black bodies. They fancy that they are a superior race. They look around and see what seems to them great accomplishments of Western civilization and use them as benchmark to rationalize their wishes that they are a superior bunch of predatory animals. They are so superior that in a few years they would die and their bodies eaten by worms and eventually transformed into nothingness. It is when a human being becomes aware that his body is nothing of significance (if you cremated a white person's body, or a black person's body you would reduce it to three pounds of ashes that have no monetary value and ultimately you would return it to gases and finally to nothing) that he is capable of philosophical thinking. At first he may feel depressed (that is, see life as worthless and meaningless, feel no energy to do anything human beings do to adapt to their world and feel tempted to give up and kill himself) but if he persists in asking questions he would learn the eternal truth that there is a force behind this mad dance we dance on earth. When one is aware of the nothingness of one's body and ego self and ask serious questions one would then learn that there is an aspect of one that has eternal worth, one's spirit. Instead of engaging in philosophical thinking, white Americans seek infantile answers to the quandary of being, pseudo answers that mask their existential angsts from the realization that their bodies are nothing. For example, a couple of years two mind dead white children (those two never attained adult thinking and as such were children to be helped to grow up) called Richard Heinstein and David Marry wrote a book called the Bell Curve (before them an over grown brain dead child called Arthur Jensen did the same thing). In it they methodically showed that black folks score fifteen points below white folks at standard Intelligence tests (such as Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales, Wechsler Intelligence Scales for Children, and Stanford Binet); they satisfied themselves that black folks score less than white folks on every test including Scholastic Aptitude Tests, SAT and on that basis concluded that black folks must be genetically inferior to white folks (actually some black folks score perfectly on those tests they are impressed by hence refute their infantile generalizations). Interestingly, these cretins ignored the fact that on IQ tests Asians score more than white folks by exactly fifteen points and also score higher than whites on the SAT hence by their criterion of measurement are superior to white folks! But such inference is not to bother fools. (Cultural factors are responsible for the differences in test scores; Asians are much disciplined students; they are more disciplined than white students; white students are more disciplined than black students.) Now that they have proved to their childish minds satisfaction that black folks are an inferior race what is to be done? They hope that America would relegate black folks to performing menial jobs (return them to slavery) and give meaningful jobs to white folks. In their warped minds they have provided racist America with statistical evidence with which to justify racism and hopefully since they are gods and have spoken black folks would accept their dictates! The racist somehow always thinks that black folks would accept his sick view of them. Fortunately, black folks actually see racists as less than mosquitoes in esteem. The racist is aware of the terrible crime his people committed by enslaving black folks and is actuated by tremendous sense of guilt and tries to expel his guilt by providing what seems justified reason for slavery and racial discrimination, the inferiority of those his people discriminates against; in the process he loads his mind with additional guilt and that guilt ultimately destroys him, for the wages of sin is death (sin is any idea or action that teaches separation; sinlessness, guiltlessness and innocence inheres in any idea and behavior rooted in seeing all people as the same, equal and unified). Mr. Heinstein amused us with his notion of racial differences, ideas on his races superiority (if he was a Jew and Nazis saw Jews as vermin and on that account killed them was he superior or an irritating ant to be terminated) but was so superior that his superior body succumbed to early death and was eaten by bacteria and other microorganisms. So much for the superior vermin! (Murray is still around making his bleeping idiot noises; he is what a human being ought not to be.) How superior can one be if one's body is food being prepared for worms and in a couple billion years ones earth would be reduced to burnt-out cinders and in trillions of years ones universe reduced to empty place. Instead of trying to find out whether one has real worth the foolish racist keeps talking nonsense, trying to find worth based on body, on nothingness. The human body is nothing; worth cannot be found in in the human body. You cannot find worth by predicating your worth on your body. Body has no value and is valueless and worthless; body is nothing. Those who identify with body identify with nothing and are nothing. This world of space, time and matter, as scientists pointed out, is nothing so those who identify with it identify with nothing and by their own judgment is nothing. The material universe began from nothing and returns to nothing so if you see your worth as based on the material universe you are nothing. The level of stupidity that characterizes white American racists is such that when you get to understand them you are tempted to dismiss them as an inferior race. No, they are not an inferior race; they are just a people that do not like to think about reality as it is but instead superimpose their misguided idea of reality, their wishes for ego importance on reality. They are like children under the age of twelve. That is correct; the seeming mighty white race is literally a race of children! They are, however, good at scientific and technological matters and for that we thank them. On matters spiritual they are children. What we need to do is have pity on these children and begin the process of teaching them what constitutes adult understanding of spiritual reality. This teaching begins with the reconceptualization of what is God. The God of the white man (or Semitic man since the Jews who constructed the biblical God are Semites) is not the real God. The god of the bible is an insane god. Only an insane god could have created this world of pain and suffering and eventual death. Even if people resurrect from physical death, as the Jew, Jesus said they would, that does not obviate the fact that it is an insane person who would first make his children die and rot then resurrect them. (Actually, the ancient concept of resurrection means changing one's mind as to one's identity; upon entering the earth plain at first we see ourselves as separated egos housed in bodies that would die; to have such false identity is to be metaphorically dead; one is resurrected from such death when one changes one's mind and now sees one's self as part of eternal unified spirit self. As Jesus Christ told Nicodemus, rebirth does not mean entering one's mother's womb and being born again; it means changing one's self conception, from ego and body to Christ-spirit. Christ is the consciousness that one is part of God; that one is the son of God and that God and his son are love and one loves all beings.) Only an insane god could have created this world. The god of the Old Testament of the Bible that allegedly created this world was an insane god. Gnostics say that the god of the Old Testament is a rebellious god (proud psychotic ego) who rebelled against the real God and was chased out of heaven and came to the world and established his kingdom of darkness; the objective of Gnosticism is to shine light on this world of darkness and in the process enable people to awaken to their truth as beings of light, as members of a light God, not children of a the god of darkness. A loving God is not insane and therefore could not have created this insane hateful world. Only an insane god could have created this world. The question then is whether there is a sane God? The answer is yes.
A MYTH OF CREATION
In the beginning (there was no such thing as beginning but let us follow the style of talking about these things) there was God. God is one. He is one self that is simultaneously many selves. God is himself and yet infinite other selves. The state of eternity, aka unified spirit is one God that is simultaneously infinite in numbers. There is no space or gap between God and his sons, the whole and its parts. Where God ends and each of his infinite sons begin is nowhere. God is in each of his sons and each of his sons is in him and in other sons. The infinite selves of God do not live in forms; that is, do not live in bodies; they do not live in space and time, matter and energy. They live in a world where there is no distance between one self and another for all selves are in each other. The unified world of God has always existed; it is eternal and remains immortal. There was never a time when it did not exist, nor a time it would not exist. If you like to talk in terms of creation then put it this way, as A course in miracles did: God extended his oneself to other selves; the other selves are exactly like him and are him. The extender and the extended are the same; God and his children are the same and equal; the only difference between them is that God created them and they did not create God, otherwise they can do everything that God can do. The extender gives all of him to the extended and the extended therefore does what the extender does, extend his self to other selves; that is, God's sons create their own sons but do so with the creative power of God in them; they cannot create by their own powers but by the power of their father in them. This way the kingdom of God has no beginning and no end. Members of God's unified kingdom are always extending themselves to other selves who are extending themselves to other selves. In spirit, you, the reader is creating other spirits who in turn create other spirits (on earth we also do the same thing when we have children and they in turn have their own children). If you prefer Christian categories you could say that God is the father and that his extensions are his children. God the father extends to his sons who are exactly like him. God the father created God the sons. God the sons being like God the father also extend to their own children, create their own children and this way creation has no beginning and no end. Since God the father extends his self to God the son and God the son extends to his own sons they are all of the same age, which is infinite age. God is infinite in age and his children are infinite in age. The state of eternity is the state of perfect union (which must be a state of perfect peace and joy for where all are unified all are in peace and happiness). The state of eternity, aka heaven is a state where God and his extensions, his creation remain as one self and live in perfect peace and joy. Each member of the unified state knows itself to be like others.
ENTER UNION'S OPPOSITE, SEPARATION
In this harmonious unified state an insane idea entered the minds of the children of God. The insane idea is that it is possible for the members who are eternally unified to separate from each other and go their separate ways. Each member of the unified whole wanted to separate from the whole and go live alone. (Jesus attempted to capture this phenomenon by telling the story of a prodigal son; the son was a member of a happy family yet he wanted to leave his home and go live in a far way country; his father did not stop him for God is perfect freedom and gave his children his freedom; the children of God have perfect freedom to do as they like; thus, the prodigal son went on a journey to nowhere, a journey without distance for wherever we go we go in God for God is everywhere, we merely cover our eyes and not see him, experience him; we live in the presence of love and mask it with our hatreds; ultimately, he realized that separation is impossible and returned to the state of union; that is, awakened to the nature of unified reality. When the prodigal son returns home, when the lost sheep is found, God rejoiced and the entire heaven rejoices; in the bible's metaphor, God runs and embraces his returning lost son and throws a huge party for him.) We are all parts of God's unified self and live in his unified kingdom. Somehow the impossible insane idea entered our minds that we could separate from God and from each other. We cannot separate from God and from each other for no one can disobey or break the will of God. The will of God is that he and his children are eternally unified. (To sin is to desire separation; what the bible called the fall from grace, the original sin committed by Adam and Eve is actually a metaphoric tale of our separation from God, the part from the whole. To be on earth is to seem separate from God; to be separate from God is to sin; but since we merely dream that we are separated from God and have not really separated from God we have not sinned; we remain as God created us: innocent. Be that as it may, to see ourselves on earth is to see ourselves in separation hence to believe that we have sinned. In our collective and individual unconscious minds is the idea of sin; we think that we are sinners. Sinful; persons want to be punished. We think that God would punish us. But God knows that we have not separated and have not sinned and thus does not punish us. Not waiting for God to punish us we punish ourselves in lieu of God's punishment. Thus, we accuse each other of sin and punish each other. When we see each other as innocent and love instead of punish each other we reawaken in God. Salvation lies in seeing one's self and all people as sinless and guiltless and loving them all, unifying with them.)
Why did the insane idea of separation enter our minds and where did that idea come from? It is because everything that exists calls forth its opposite. Union exists and calls forth its opposite of separation (if you like to be smart you could say that we live in the world of separation and imagine that there is a world of union, its opposite existing somewhere, that unified state is the illusion and separation, the empirical world is the reality…that was what I used to say, so you are not the only smart pant in town). Whatever is calls forth its opposite. Union exists and calls forth its opposite, the world of separation. Heaven is a place of perfect sameness and equality and calls forth its opposite, a place of differences, inferiority and superiority; heaven is a place of abundance and calls forth its opposite, a world of poverty.
The children of God said, in effect, why not go live in a world that is the opposite of the one they already live in in heaven? They live in a unified world so they wanted to experiment living in a separated world. What is the advantage of living in a separated world? In the unified world of God all are one, the same and equal. In the world of separation each child of God could rig situations in such a manner that he either seems superior to other children of God or inferior to them. On earth it is possible for a person to seem superior to other persons. On earth it is possible to look at the accomplishments of the white race and say that they are superior to black folks since black folks have contributed little to the world of science and technology. On earth some people have more intelligence and or more wealth and political power and conceivably could justify feeling superior to others. The world is designed that way, to enable us satisfy our craving for superiority, to live as the opposite of heaven's equality. (As a kid I was extraordinarily smart on certain subjects and that got into my head and made it swell up and I felt superior to other kids, black and white. The delusion of superiority and its attendant narcissistic personality is found in many persons. Mental health lies in seeing one's self, even if one is objectively smarter or richer or more powerful than other persons, as all peoples equal. Any time the idea of superiority or inferiority enters one's mind one is insane.) Heaven is eternal. Eternity could become boring! Go to a beautiful rose garden; at first it is fascinating but after a couple of days you would be bored; what was beautiful becomes pure ennui. You would not mind putting your hand on fire and get burned to think of something else rather than seeing beauty all around you. So why not experiment with mortality, change and impermanence? Thus, the children of eternity contrived to bring about a world of change and mortality; they arranged things in such a manner that they are born, age and die. The children of perfect sameness and equality (hence perfect peace and joy) desired to separate from their eternal state of union and go create a world where all are unequal and different and some seem superior to others. Their wishes could not be gratified in heaven, in eternity. As Sigmund Freud, that wise Jew (I say wise Jew for many Jews are dumb, they never learn from their sad history; in Europe they were seen as inferior and thus killed but instead of teaching equality they try to please deluded white Americans and say that black folks are inferior hence setting black folks up to be killed by racist white folks; and when white folks begin killing alleged inferior black folks they surely would remember that Jews are Middle Easterners, Semitic folk, not Europeans and also kill them), pointed out, what we cannot gratify in our normal daily consciousness we arrange dreams in which we satisfy them. If a boy wishes to have a smashingly beautiful girl as a girlfriend and could not have her in day life in his dreams he arranges things in such a manner that she becomes his girlfriend. We could not satisfy our wishes for inequality and differences in eternity and as it were made ourselves go to sleep and in our sleep created a scenario where our wishes are satisfied. Our empirical world is a dream, literally, not figuratively (this may not make sense to you until you have momentarily awakened to heaven and experienced its perfect unity, equality, sameness, peace and joy). We, as it were, cast a magical spell, what Hinduism calls Maya, on ourselves and went to sleep and in our sleep dream that we now live in a world that is the opposite of the world of God. The world of God is unified and we now see ourselves in a separated world of multiplicity where some are black and others white, some smart others dull, some rich and others poor, some powerful and others weak. Our world is a place of opposites. Our world began in opposition to the world of God and must necessarily be a world of opposites; it is a world where everything opposes everything; as such it is a world of conflict and war. Does our world exist? To us it exists. If you like, beginning with the Big Bang we separated from God and from each other. We attacked each other (the big bang is our mutual attack on each other to separate from each other) and as a result separated from each other. We invented space, time, energy and matter. As astrophysicists and evolutionary biologists point out, we gradually evolved a universe of separation and now seem to live in it. We evolved as animals, from single celled animals to multicellular animals. Now we seem housed in bodies made of matter. Body is now a boundary separating one son of God from another. (Please pay attention to what physical scientists say for they have a point. If you did not study the physical sciences please go back to school and study them or read up on them; please do so for science is unto something useful; science is gradually explicating the nature of our bodies and the world we live in. In the long run physical scientists would show that the world is a dream and does not exist. Quantum mechanics is already knocking at that door. Just study science, it is easy stuff.) We invented a world of separation to go seem special in it; by special I mean to go seem superior or inferior to each other and to go seem to have created ourselves and each other. In heaven we know that God created us but on earth we believe that we created ourselves, after all we created our self-concepts. Each human being building on his inherited biological constitution and social experience constructs a self-concept for himself. As George Kelly pointed out, each of us is responsible for constructing his self-concept and self-image. (If you prefer the learning theorists angle you could say that given the society and body we have we learn a pattern of behavior, a personality. Pavlov, Watson and B. F. Skinner insist on using the term learning to express the obvious, that we have patterns of behaviors.) You invented your self-concept; I invented my self- concept. For example, in my youth, seeing white folks as the embodiment of evil I felt totally superior to them. That is correct, I saw every white person as evil or at best a child. Whereas they masqueraded around as superior to black folks, I saw them as no more than my dog. I actually did not want to be around white folks. Around them I felt angry. Am I better than white folks? Of course not; all of us are the same and coequal. The salient point is that I invented a self-concept that made me feel superior to other persons. You could also construct a self-concept that makes you feel inferior to other persons. Superiority or inferiority is a delusion. What is real is sameness and equality. There are no accidents in this world; you are doing exactly what you want to do; you are where you want to be; you are with whom you want to be with. You have the job or no job you want to have. Upon birth each of us is born into a unique body, by his choice; given his body he must experience the world as he must and from that experience learn whatever lesson he wants to learn. The initial lesson is war but later we learn peace. (A few days ago I went to a lecture given by a black man, a PhD holder and a principal of a high school. He devoted the two hours lecture telling us that everything white folks have done to black folks harmed them. What he said, of course is, true; who does not know about slavery and the peculiar institution of Jim Crow. He told us that everything good in life was done by black folks. Blacks started Egyptian civilization and good religions before white folks appropriated and corrupted them, he said. Simply put, everything he said amounted to saying that black folks are good and white folks are bad. He gave black folks responsibility for all that is good in life and gave blame to white folks for all that is wrong in life. In his mind he probably believed that he is rehabilitating the damaged self-esteem of black folks; white folks damaged black folks esteem and self-respect by telling them that they are no good and he tried to rehabilitate that esteem by telling black folks that they are all good. Is he succeeding in making black folks have positive self-esteem? If he did how come I felt depressed rather than happy from listening to him? It occurred to me that this man was setting things up for conflict and war. By blaming whites he makes them defensive. Since no one likes to be blamed therefore defensive people often attack those who blame them or dig in in doing what they are blamed for. Racist whites dig in and claim that blacks are inferior to justify their racism. That claim makes blacks feel inferiority. The two races then are in conflict and necessarily live at war. What would seem better is to dwell on the good white folks have done black folks and ignore their bad deeds and dwell on the good of black folks and talk a bit about their bad deeds, such as killing themselves as if they are flies and African leaders stealing from their people. I left the lecture thinking of ways to teach racial harmony. The ego to assuage its guilt from separation and the harm it does to other people makes its self-seem innocent and makes other persons seem like victimizers; we have to figure out a way to teach all of us to live together by stressing our innocence not guilt.) On earth we are not living in the truth of equality; currently we find ourselves, by our wishes, in the illusion of this world and in that world arrange things so that some seem superior to others and some seem inferior to others; it is an illusory world where what we wish we see in our dreams. (In some life times you may make yourself seem inferior and in others make yourself seem superior; make yourself seem led and in others seem the leader; we alternate roles and find those who want to enact our drama for it fits theirs and do so with them.)
On earth we live the opposite of our lives in eternity. It all seems so real that we see it as real. Anyone who tells us that the earth is not real and is an illusion, a dream appears insane to us and we tune him out. Instead, we believe those who tell us that the world is real. Okay, let us then see the world as real and study it's as it is, that is, do science and devise technologies to adapt to its exigencies. But assuming that you still want to know about reality, the fact is that the world is not real; I am telling you that the world is a dream, an illusion. The world does not exist, it has not existed, and not for a second has it existed. The empirical world is a figment in our dreaming minds. This is very difficult to believe but when you reach a point in your evolution and recognize the total meaninglessness and the absurdity of living in body that would die and become food for worms who in turn would be eaten by other animals, when you recognize the utter pointlessness of this world you would begin seeking alternatives to it, but until you reach that point, that fork in the road where the road branches to left and right and you must stop traveling on the left you were on and turn to the right, the world seems a good ride and you ought to have a good ride, and while at it have a great time of it. No one turns to God until he is ready to do so. My job is not to make you turn to God but to tell you that God exists and that when you are ready you would do what you must do to return to God. God is sameness and equality; God is union; God is love. If you want to return to God you must see yourself as the same with all people, as equal to all people, as unified with all people and as love; you must love yourself and love all people to return to love, to God. As long as you hate one son of God you cannot return to God; the door of heaven is shut for you; heaven's gate opens only to those who love their siblings on earth. We left in hate and must return in love; we left in twos and must return in twos (you must love one other person totally to be able to return to heaven; no one returns to heaven alone hence Jesus said wherever two or more of you are talking about me, love, I am in there).
Let me recapitulate some of my observations so far. I have said that the traditional notion of God as the creator of this world is wrong, for only a mad God could have created this insane world. The real God is not mad and therefore did not create this world. Who created this world? We did; but since it is a dream world and is not permanent we have created nothing. What is done in dreams have not been done so we should not feel guilty because of what we did in a dream setting. However, we must correct this world. The idea of the opposite of heaven entered our minds (the minds of those in heaven) and while still in heaven, as it were, we closed our spiritual eyes and dreamed that we are in that opposite world. The dream seems real. See, there is a wall in front of you and you cannot go through it so it must be real, a real obstacle. But, alas, in your dreams at night you also see walls that seem obstacles that you cannot go through. You can find out whether the world is a dream or not by doing what God asks on you to do to wake up from the dream. However, you do not have to do so for there is no hurry to wake up. Actually, you are the one who went to the dream and it is you who has already decided when you will wake up. When you wake up and how you do so is strictly up to you. I cannot make you wake up nor can anyone else make you wake up nor can you make another person wake up. Each of us made the decision to go to sleep and dream this world and each of us made the decision when to wake up. Be that reality as it may, there are general guidelines on how to wake up. That guideline could be secular or religious. I was socialized Christian so has Christian metaphors in my mind. Let me employ Christian metaphors in explicating how to wake up (you could employ other metaphors, of course). It goes like this.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HIS FUNCTION IN WAKING US UP
When we decided to tune out heaven, union, God and tune in to the world of separation and went to sleep and dream separation God immediately created another self, the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit was immediately placed into our dreaming minds. Thus, now there are three aspects of God in our minds. First is the mind we share with God, unified mind, aka God self. We always have God and his mind in us. Second are our own minds. We are the children of God; the sons of God have their own minds, the minds we share with God and with each other. We, the sons of God chose to ignore our true self and true mind and go to sleep and dream that we are separated false selves. The separated false self is the individuated self, the ego self and its ego mind. In the dream we are now only aware of our ego selves and ego minds. God then placed into our minds the Holy Spirit mind (and self) to enable our sleeping, dreaming ego minds to remember our true self and mind. God the father (the whole), God the son (us) and God the Holy Spirit (God in the immanent and temporal universe) is called the Holy Trinity, that is, three selves in one God self. (Christians generally believe that only Jesus Christ is God the son; they are wrong; we all share the status of God the son, the Christ). These three selves literally share on self, the God self. We talk about them as three selves for explanatory purposes but in fact all three are one self. If you like you could say that God the father remains as God (unified and in his heaven) and then extended himself to God the son (us) and through us dream that he is separated from himself (which is impossible) and through his third self the Holy Spirit tries to remind God the son that he is always unified with God the father. If you like, you could say that God has multiple personality disorder; he has three selves in his one self. Make fun of God if you like after all you are making fun of yourself. You need to be humorous and make fun of yourself and your God to be happy. I must emphasize that all three aspects of God are the one God. We are parts of one God. But as long as we sleep and dream that we are separated from God we have forgotten our part-ship in God; we have forgotten that we are the sons of God; we now see ourselves as ego selves. As long as we are on earth, living in body, in energy, matter, space and time we have identified with the ego and have denied our God-ship. What we can now do is call on the Holy Spirit to show us our true self. The Holy Spirit is not a person; it is you and I when we think and behave from the perspective that all reality is one. If you see other people as parts of you and love and respect all of them you are behaving from the Holy Spirit part of your mind. On the other hand, if you see other people as separated from you, see yourself as superior or inferior to other persons you are behaving from the ego part of your mind. Holy Spirit and ego are perspectives to living on earth; they are not real persons. The real person is you, the son of you, the Christ self who is one with God. You are the son of God and I am the son of God. It is us, individually and collectively that chose to separate from God and from one another and live as ego selves. When we change our minds and now choose to see all people as parts of us and follow that up by loving all people, using our egos and bodies to love all people, to do what serves social interests we are now living from the Holy Spirit, we are affirming our Christ Self. Love and you are Christ for Christ knows only love; hate and you are affirming the ego self (which is what folks call devil or Satan).
The ego separates us from God; the Holy Spirit returns us to union with God. The Holy Spirit is the voice for God in our separated minds; he is the bridge between heaven and earth, the mediator of heaven (love) and earth (hate); the reconciler of union and separation. Jesus Christ relinquished his wish for separation; he let go his ego and now works with the Holy Spirit in helping us love one another and return to God. Jesus is a son of God but he no longer identifies with the ego, the spirit of separation; he how identifies with the spirit of union, the Holy Spirit and works as his foremost disciple. All the enlightened persons of this world are the disciples of the Holy Spirit. If you choose to love all people you are an apostle of the Holy Spirit. When you consistently allow love, that is, allow the Holy Spirit to guide your thinking and actions you have become a teacher love who is a teacher of God (The Holy Spirit is the world teacher of God; Jesus Christ is his prefect; you and I are apprentice teachers of God). I teach love hence I am a teacher of God; I strive to permit only love to guide my thinking and action (I don't always succeed hence I am not yet a good teacher of God); I strive to permit only the Holy Spirit part of my mind to guide what I do. Let us assume that you have chosen only love (union with all people) and another person attacks you what do you think that love, aka the Holy Spirit would ask you to do? How should you respond to your attacker? To attack you the attacker must have a misguided sense of who he is and who you are; he must see you as separated from him; he must believe that when he gains you lose and that when you gain he loses. He sees us as having different interests and he is out to maximize his interests at other people's expense. Perhaps, he saw you do something that he believes does not serve his interests and he attacks you to defend his interests. So how should you respond to him? Let us be more concrete. White folks attack black folks daily when they discriminate against them. So how should black folks respond to white folks' loveless acts? First, you understand that their acts are based on the ego sense of separation, the perception of blacks as the other, as not part of them. They attack blacks to maximize their interests at the expense of perceived others interests, blacks interests. So, what should you do? You should realize the nature of what they are doing. You should realize that their action is predicated on false information on the nature of reality. The correct information is that we are all one and as Alfred Adler said, should work for each other's welfare. So, you see white folks work for their own welfare at the expense of black folk's welfare. What should you do? Tolerate it? To tolerate injustice is to condone it, to allow it to exist. What you should do is work to teach whites about our shared interests, to teach them to love and respect all people. You should forgive past attack on you, on black folks but forgiveness without correcting the attack, the mistake, is not realistic. You forgive and correct wrongs. You correct wrongs by teaching the right behavior. You teach love and insist that all people love all people at all times. You teach by example, you teach by loving all people. You love those who attacked you while teaching them to correct their behaviors. If you are black you love white folks despite what they did to you but insist that they love in the now and in the future. It is cowardice to tolerate other persons attack and abuse. Oppression is not given up by oppressors when you are meek; it is given up by actively working against it, by teaching alternative to it. I found it necessary to say all these for some misguided persons ask us to forgive those who attacked us without explaining what they mean by forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean tolerating attacks on you. Even though our egos and bodies are dream figures and do not exist but at the moment we see ourselves as bodies and egos and attacks on them make us feel pain. No one has a right to inflict pain on other persons. Only sadists inflict pain on other persons and only masochists tolerate pain from others. Both the sadist and the masochist are sick. Sick persons need healing not toleration. If you forgive a murderer he would keep on murdering people; if you forgive a pedophile he would keep on raping children. The murderer and the pedophile are sick souls and what you need to do is correct their behaviors, heal their sickness by teaching them to love and respect all people. (I know that it is politically incorrect to state ugly facts but I must observe that homosexuality is a deviant behavior. Homosexuals are in ego trips; they are opposing natural sexual behavior. They see what is and oppose it. They act like children with oppositional defiant disorder. Whereas their behavior seem innocuous but many of them want to have sex with young persons. If they are allowed to proliferate like summer flies soon they want to have sex with six years old children…some of them, the North American man-boy association, are already advocating that madness… and tell us that there is nothing wrong with it, that sex is a social construct, not a natural phenomenon. Whereas we should not persecute homosexuals we should not approve their absurd behaviors. The sexual organs are different and fit their opposites. One should develop to the level where sex no longer appeals to one.) Forgiveness does not condone evil albeit it evil done in a dream. If terrorists like Osama Bin Laden attack and kill people their goal is to use force to intimidate people into going along with their weird views of reality. If you allow them they would intimidate you by arousing fear in you. What you need to do is chop off their heads. That is correct; sometimes it is necessary to attack and kill murderers like Osama Bin Laden. Killing such totally evil persons is the best thing that you can do for them; they are too far gone to be corrected in this life time. Those who are not murderers but engage in minor antisocial behaviors should be arrested, tried by a competent court of law and put in jails and prisons and while there taught to love at all times (that is behave in a pro-social manner). It is true that most people who attack you believe that you have already attacked them and that they are defending themselves by attacking you. It is also true that those who attack you believe that they are giving you an opportunity to do one of two things: to counter attack them hence reinforce your mutual separation or to forgive them and teach them love hence reinforces your mutual union. Attack is a call for help and love when love is perceived to be missing. What this means is that you should then love the person who attacked you for what he is asking for is love. As I already pointed out, love does not mean reinforcing attack, love entails correcting hurtful behaviors. You love the attacker by correcting his attack and showing him that love is the best way to live. Love gives us peace and happiness. Jesus was attacked and killed. He forgave his killers but he does not condone their attack and evil behaviors; he is still teaching people to correct their mistaken behaviors by loving one another. To hate is to make a mistake; that mistake has to be corrected by learning to love, for love is the only correct behavior to you and to other persons.
THE EGO IS SYNONYMOUS WITH PRIDE
The identification with the ego is identification with pride. We are all egotists hence are all proud animals. It is pride that disposed us to separate from God to go become our own boss and not have God boss us around. All people you see are proud persons. If you doubt it do something that disrespects the person who seems amiable and docile and see how he or she reacts. If you hurt peoples pride they experience narcissistic rage and to assuage their hurt vanity would do all sorts of crazy things. A woman (I will call her Pamela) felt that her boyfriend disrespected her and left him; she left with their child and does not want him to know anything about that child. She is willing to raise the child by herself, fatherless just to assuage her hurt pride. All the Women I have been close to (I will call them Lori, Monika, Jan etc.) are proud and did crazy things when their egos were not affirmed and their pride were hurt. Men are the same; men are more likely to act out violently when their pride is hurt. The lesson is to not hurt anyone's pride, to always treat people with love and respect and if they are unfriendly to be courteous towards them. Traditional religions like Christianity serve the purpose of getting people to see themselves as egos and bodies and to treat their egos and bodies with respect; they teach that bodies have worth and enable people to see their bodies as having worth and value. These religions are not meant to enable any one to let go of his identification with body and ego and seek union with God; they are not paths to returning to God. Science does what religion does; it enables people to see themselves as bodies and do what optimizes the pleasure of their bodies. True spirituality sees body and ego as nothing, as having no worth and value and sees our worth and value as inhering only in Spirit. True spirituality does not put down the human body, it teaches folks to use their bodies and egos to love other children of God who are misguided into seeing themselves as egos and bodies. You are misguided into seeing you as ego and body; other people are misguided into seeing themselves as body and egos; very well then let us love ourselves where we are at; let us love our bodies and egos and eventually learn that we are spirits. Does God exist? God not only exists it is the only thing that exists; all else is noise. Our egos and bodies are dream things and in fact do not exist except as dream figures. What exist are God and his sons in their eternal unified state. That God is not the God we normally think of when we think that we are thinking about God; it is not the God that Christians believe created this world; the real God did not create this world, this madness. The real God did only one creation, the creation of his children, you and I. God created us (not the us in bodies but our spirit selves) and gave us his creative power and we create other children of God. We create in spirit. We came to the temporal universe and lose our way until we find our way back to God. LOVE AND MEDITATION
One good way to rediscover the awareness of our true selves is to love all selves and to meditate. Meditation as taught by Hinduism is a good way to regain the awareness of God. In this type of meditation one deliberately stops thinking. Of course thoughts would still enter your mind but you firmly tell yourself that all thoughts that you are conscious of are products of your ego separated thinking hence adapt to the egos world but not to God's world. If what you want to experience is God's world then you negate all ego thinking. Neti, neti, not this, not that thought, said one of the Upanishads. Nothing I can think of, including this paper, is of God. You simply try to stop thinking with the understanding that ego thinking adapts to the egos separated world. Our current thinking is based on separated thinking. Speech and talking is a means of separated persons to communicate with one another and in doing so remain separated. Now what you need to do is give up speech and thinking (for at least one hour everyday) and simply sit quietly. Stop all thinking. If you can train your mind to stop thinking and attain inner silence you are on your way to victory over the ego. (God is known in the silence of our minds; he is not outside us; he is inside us; we think that God is outside us and chase him but he is inside us; we have to tune inwards to experience the God that is already inside us, our real self.) It is at this point that danger ensues. When you attain inner silence you would feel as if you do not have a self and do not exist. That is correct; your self-concept and all that you think about you, other people and the world are exactly those, noise; they are not who you are or who other people are or what the world is. Who you are, who other people are and what the world is you do not know. Thus, when you empty your mind of all ego thinking and attain inner void you feel lost, you feel as if you no longer know who you are. You may feel like you are falling into a bottomless pit, a vacuum and keep falling in. As you fall into that dark vacuum you may experience fear, terror and panic and return to your habitual ego patterns of thinking (you may even go crazy and become psychotic from the decompensation of all your prior ego compensations: in psychosis folks feel decompensated, derealized and depersonalized and panic and construct even grander egos, absurd egos such as seeing themselves as gods and other people as not gods; mystics correctly see themselves and all people as gods hence do not feel superior to any one, whereas psychosis and neurosis are means for feeling superior to other persons). It is useful to have a spiritual advisor while you meditate; a spiritual advisor is some one that you can talk to about your experiences. I talked to my Hindu Swami and he guided me through the rough patches of meditation. Before you meditate make sure that you love yourself, love all people and have no anger towards any one; make sure that you do not bear grudges and grievances against any one, yourself included, and that you do not seek revenge against those who hurt you (correct their hurtful behaviors but do not bear grudges…do so from your Holy Spirit mind, not your ego mind). Love all and then meditate. When you attain inner silence, panics try again. If you keep going at it, at some point you would see a point of light in a dark ambiance. Follow that point of light and as you approach it the light becomes larger and larger until it becomes everything. You would experience your hand held by other people (some call them angels or enlightened persons or their ancestors, call them what you like, it does not matter for they are nameless) and you enter that place of light. In the world of light forms (what Hinduism calls astral world) you would still see our world but our world reinvented, now in pure light form. You see everything you see in our world except that they are now blindingly beautiful. It is the world that the Holy Spirit remade from our world; it is our world purified with love. In it lion lies with lamb and not eating it for they now love each other. You may stop there or you may continue the journey homewards. If you persist you may reach a different level of being, a level where there are no forms, light or dense, and a place where all is formless light and you are part of that light, as every being is part of it. It is totally peaceful, happy and loving. It is bliss, absolute bliss. In it you still have individuality, a you but a you that simultaneously know that you and other persons are unified as one self. Do you see God in it (what Christians call heaven and Hindus call Brahmaloka)? How can you see God when God is everything? Can you see everything? As Jesus Christ said in the Gospel according to John, chapter 14, where you see a son of God, you and other people, are where you see God. God is in his son and those who see him see him in his sons, not outside his sons. Love other people and love you and you love God. God is not outside you, God is not outside us; God is our real self, our shared real self and our shared real mind. As our inner real- self God cannot be seen outside us. No one can really describe eternity for it is beyond description. I only mentioned it because it is real; it is the only reality there is. Those who have not experienced it may doubt it but what do you expect from them? Do you expect knowledge from those who have not acquired it? Some scientists say that there is no God. They do not know what they are talking about. However, if what they mean is that the Christian God does not exist they are correct. But there is another God, the unified self we all share.
As already noted each of us separated from God, from his real self and has made a decision when he would return to it (he made that decision the moment he decided to separate from unified state). You may return to it in this life time or in other life times (other dream times). When you do so is your choice; you set the time when you separated and when you would return to union. I cannot hasten your return to your real self for you have already set the time you would do so, just as I did. There are people who have decided that this present time is not for them to awaken to their real selves. They arrange things so that they do not even remember their real selves. Some people just want to sleep and dream and perhaps have a nice dream. If so then let them have pleasant dreams (by remembering to love all of us). However, if you have decided to awaken to your real self somehow you will do what you have to do to awaken. If part of your efforts to awaken requires you to read this material somehow it would find its way to you, if not it would not. Your mind would attract it to you; but if it is not yet your time it would not come into your world and even if it did you would not pay attention to it, you would dismiss it as rubbish. I have friends who dismiss anything that has to do with spirituality as loads of rubbish; they call themselves scientists. I say to them amen. Many of these folks are using the sciences to justify not trying to find out about their real selves. That is their choice and they have a right to make such choices. The son of God, each of us has freedom and in his freedom choose to seem separated from God (he did not actually do so, for he is merely dreaming). In our freedom we choose to seem separated and that is our right. In time we shall return to our unified state. No one else can choose for us. However, each person's choice facilitates others choices. I chose to awaken to my real self and arranged things to do so. I arranged to have my body pained and weak and thus in childhood rejected it. I rejected my body self and initially, ala Karen Horney constructed a neurotic self-concept (an ideal ego self) and in my thirties realized that to see myself as better than other people is to be insane. Sanity lies in equality. Thus I chose equality. Thereafter, I began my struggle to understand my real self and that took me to intense study of the major religions of the world, Western philosophy and psychology and especially existentialism. I chose to return to oneness. That choice makes me do what I do and doing what I do helps you to rethink your own choices and, hopefully, you would choose to reawaken to our shared one self. We are each other's teachers and each other's students. We are always crucifying each other and at the same time saving each other. You are my crucifier and my savior, my redeemer, my deliverer from bondage to ego; and I am the same to you. (If you reinforce ego identification you have crucified them; if you treat them as Christ you have delivered them from death.)
MENTAL DISORDERS
Whereas this paper is not devoted to talking about mental health (I have looked at the various mental disorders in other papers) let us just state that to be separated from God, from love, from unified state is to be mentally ill. Mental disorder is not only what psychiatrists and psychologists say it is; it is our separation from our true self, our choice to live as who we are not. Our truth is unified formless spirit but we choose to live as separated selves in egos and bodies. Those who deny their real selves and live as false selves are mentally sick. Each of the so-called mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, mania, depression, delusion, anxiety, personality disorders etc. is a particular mode of seeking separation from God, the whole and from other persons; is a unique manner of affirming the ego; is a way of saying that one's egos is important and that unified self is not important. All mental disorders have biological correlations. There are always biological issues in mental disorders. Therefore, we have to treat their medical issues as well as their psychological issues. That being said, the real cure for all mentally ill persons (and that includes so-called normal persons) is for us to return to God, return to love, return to union; this means jettisoning our desire for big ego selves and body identification and accepting the humble selves God created us as. Our real self is the one self we all share. This does not mean that the mentally ill can be easily healed; most of them do not even have the time to listen to teachings on how to heal mental illness; in fact, most of them prefer to live in their mentally disordered state (a manic fellow prefers to live in the delusion that his ego is the most important self in the world; a schizophrenic enjoys his grandiose self-concept, his perception of himself as god and all of us as not god, and us as existing to worship him; the depressed person has his own brand of egoism that expects all people to listen to his issues and feels offended if you do not listen to his issues or talk about issues he does not feel pertinent to his big self; the personality disordered person, such as paranoid and narcissistic personality sees himself as the most important person on earth and wants all people to listen to him but does not want to listen to other people; he gets angry that no one is listening to him). The point is that many mentally ill persons enjoy their mental disorders and do not want healing. If that is the case then we should let them be (give them medications to reduce the bizarre aspects of their psychoses). But if they seek healing they must do what healing asks of them: let go of their grandiose ego selves and return to our shared one self and love all persons. No one can heal the mentally ill; only they can heal themselves with the aid of the Holy Spirit and all of us. They chose to be egos and must choose differently, now to be Christ (love). The Holy Spirit is our earthly psychotherapist; we all are his aids, not the healer. DISCUSSION
Part one of this paper provided a summary of aspects of science that would seem to suggest that there is no God, evidence that presents us as the products of the evolution of a mindless and senseless universe. According to that story, suddenly out of nowhere something the size of a particle appeared and exploded and in fourteen billion years resulted in the empirical world we see and live in and in trillions of years to come would run its course as everything dies out and returns to the nothingness from which they came. We came from nothing and return to nothing. This seems a simple straight forward story of being. However, when we think about it some questions are not answered. Nothingness means not any particular thing that we currently know of; moreover, nothing means everything. Therefore, to say that the universe came from nothing means that it did not come from any particular thing but from everything; we came from nothing and return to nothing means that we came from everything and return to everything. The philosophy of science is the philosophy of the ego; it aims at helping us but actually it creates problems for us. Consider the victimhood philosophy it teaches. If I take science seriously the environment produced me. Nature produced my body and my body produced my personality. If I take the sociological angle I would say that nature produced my parents and they produced me. They socialized me to forming my personality. In so far that I see my personality as not perfect it is not my fault, it is the fault of those who raised me, my parents and their society; that is to say that it is the environment's fault that I am who I am. Sociology urges us to blame our parents, other significant persons in our lives and society in general for our problems for they made us who we are. If you are black you see a white world screwing you and blame it and it all seems rational. The problem with sociology's blaming game is that those blamed have others to blame. White folks, too, have their own parents and other members of their society to blame. Thus, if we embrace the egos philosophy of mutual blaming there is no end to that blaming. Where we blame each other and for our problems the result is that we attack each other for causing our problems. This leads to social conflict and war. Science presents itself as disinterested observation of phenomena but shows us how other persons negatively affected us and in the long run excuses us of responsibility for our fate by pointing out what the environment did to make us who we are; science eventually leads to conflict and wars. The ego wants us to be at war with each other for the world to be a place of conflict, not peace. Part two of the paper presented a philosophy that says that we are not victims of nature by saying that we individually and collectively chose to separate from each other and from our collective whole called God. It places responsibility for the world we see on our laps. To the ego we are each other's victims. I am the victim of my father, mother, siblings and society in general; what they did made me who I am. But when I think about it they too were the products of their own parents, siblings and society so they could blame them. The tracing of victimhood begins from one and runs to many generations in one's background. Past generations did not love us; they abandoned us and made us who we are so we feel angry at them. Having shown us that we are victims of others behaviors the ego urges us to blame them and since our parents did their best even though they made mistakes (they did not see themselves as evil persons and therefore resent our blaming them) they resent our blaming them. Even if they are dead and are now in the ancestors world they still do not like it when on earth we blame them. The tendency to blame others sets them up to be angry at us. The result is a world where people are angry at each other, hate each other and fight each other. This is our world. The spiritual psychology delineated in part two of the paper tells us that we are individually and collectively responsible for our fates hence there is no one to blame. You chose your body and parents, you chose your siblings; you chose the society you are born into; you chose the epoch you are born in; you chose whatever you see in your world and whatever happens to you. If we choose everything in our world, chose how it began and how it would end then there is no one to blame for our fate. We have only our bad choices to blame. Spiritual psychology teaches that our choice to separate from God and from each other is a mistake, a mistake that led to the chain of mistakes we see in this world. It urges us to choose differently. Before, we chose a world at war with itself but now we can choose differently and choose a world where people love each other and stop blaming each other, and the result would be peace and happiness. Spiritual psychology tells us not to blame other people and see ourselves as victims; it teaches that there are no victims and victimizers. For example, if black folk listened to science, especially sociology (which they like to study for it shows them their supposed white victimizers) they would blame white folks for all their woes after all white folks do in fact discriminate against them and in the past enslaved them. White folks, of course, do not want to be blamed for they can easily show that perhaps less than one percent of their ancestors ever had black slaves. In the present less than ten percent of white folk discriminate against black folks. Therefore, they feel justified in believing that black folks blame them unjustly and feel angry at black folks. The result is the continuing mutual attacks by white and black folk on each other and the world of conflict and hatred they live in. Spiritual psychology teaches that evil is found in all people, black and white and that one must not categorically blame one race as evil. The black man should not blame all white men as evil for if he looks around he would see that there are many evil black people. Look at Africa and you see criminal Africans in government screwing their people, stealing most of their people's monies while the people live in poverty. There are foolish black folks and there are foolish white folks; what we need to do is study why they are foolish (it all stems from our desire for separation and specialness, our desire not to love the children of God) and then love all people (forgiving and correct their mistakes). Spiritual psychology teaches us not to hate any one or blame anyone, especially not to blame any race. I personally cannot hate any person or any race or blame any race for my woes. Whenever I try to hate white folks I immediately see black folks that do evil things hence seem hate-able. The logic is for me not to hate both black and white persons but to forgive both and correct their behaviors. I am beyond hatred of human beings. That is the pattern of living of enlightened persons who choose to love all people, for they know that all people are parts of unified love, God. Clearly, the philosophies taught by part one and part two of the paper is different from each other. So which one is correct? Both are correct in their terms. When you are in the world you must assume the reality of the world of space, time, energy and matter and study them as they are. The parameters of the world are physics so we must study physics, chemistry and biology. You cannot wish away the reality of the space and time world we live in. We live in bodies and bodies are part of matter and have their own logic, a logic only biology can study and manipulate. That been said we have another part to us, the spiritual part. There is spirit in us. In fact, that spirit is not in us. Spirit is always in unified state, in God, in heaven, in eternity. While still in God (for it is part of God, an idea in God and ideas leave not their source) spirit, as it were, chose to separate from itself, closed its spiritual eyes and went to sleep and in its sleep dream this empirical world we see. In the dream it projects out everything we see in our world. Each of us, a spirit, identifies with one figure (person) in the dream. I sleep-dream at night and see many people and see one person that I call myself. But when I wake up in the morning I know that I am not the dream figure that I had seen as me. In this world we are all dream figures projected out by our real selves, the sons of God. We are not our dream selves; we have different selves, selves in spirit; selves which are eternal and are not in body and form. It is difficult to believe the teachings of spiritual psychology since there seems no proof for it. What there seems empirical proof for is ego secular and scientific psychology, the type of stuff they teach at universities. Alas, we all know that all the teachings at psychology and psychiatry departments of this world do not change any one. Secular therapists do not heal any one of his neurosis and or psychosis. I know what I am talking about. I practiced that art for over twenty years and eventually realized that secular psychotherapy is largely useless and let it go and sought alternatives to it in spiritual psychology. We have to combine insights from both secular and spiritual psychology to heal people; for example, you could do personality testing, figure out a person's personality type, say, dependent personality disorder, and explain it to him and then use secular therapy to help him become independent and where that fails, as it always does, add spiritual psychology that teaches that we are all creators of our fate hence no need to be dependent on others to take care of one, teach need to return to love for all persons etc. Secular psychologists and secular scientists often make fun of spiritual science and easily dismiss it as rubbish that does not predict anything. Good for them. What I say is study the physical sciences as well as the spiritual sciences. Both are useful for those who wish to live on planet earth. That is how I see it. In the long run planet earth, the sun and all the stars would die. The material universe began in anger (our mutual attack, big bang) and will end in peace (the cold death of the universe). When it ends we find that cold cannot exist if there is no heat. The much anticipated cold death of the universe would be seen as return to the peace of God that no human ego understanding can explicate. All that would happen when all matter and energy dies is that we awaken to a world that is neither hot nor cold, to a world that is as God created it, a peaceful world of light. As I see it, God and science are not irreconcilable, they are not mutually incompatible; yet each operates with different parameters, different frames of references. As long as we are on planet earth we need to study both, not either or but both and use both to make our living on earth a happy dream. Beyond earth there are no space, time, energy and matter hence no needed for secular science; beyond earth is the world of God. But we are not yet aware of that world so whereas it is a real world it does not seem real to us. We are currently here on earth or believe that we are here on earth and must do what the earth calls on us to do, study science and use its framework to adapt effectively to the challenges of the earth and when we think that we die (no one is born or dies, except as in dreams) we know that there are other worlds and then live according to the framework of those other worlds. There are infinite universes in which the sons of God dream their infinite dreams that they are separated from their real selves and from their father. Ultimately, there is only one real universe: the unified spirit state; that unified state is our real home. Eventually, we must return to that home, experience its peace and perhaps go out to other journeys without distances. It is our nature to experiment, to try to experience the opposite of what is. Our truth is union, love and peace so we create universes that present us with opportunities to experience lovelessness, separation and sense of specialness. Whenever that delusion enters our minds off we go to experiment with it. The good news is that we always return home to the state of union where we always are while dreaming that we are in one or all of the infinite false universes we invent to experiment in.
A course in miracles teaches a philosophy that says that this world is no good and that folks should negate it and escape from it (Hinduism did the same) and allow the Holy Spirit to show them a better world, the world he has already reinvented, the world of light forms, which it variously called the gate of heaven, the happy dream, the bridge between heaven and earth, the real world. A course in miracles does not make efforts to adapt to the exigencies of this world via science; in fact, it makes fun of it calling medications magical pills used to pretend healing magical illnesses (it teaches turning our lives over to the Holy Spirit and prayer to heal our sicknesses; this is pretty much what Christian Science taught its followers). The Holy Spirit is an interpretation; regular Christians interpret it to mean an agent that helps them make the most of this world in a loving manner, not an agent that takes them out of this world. My philosophy is not escapist. I accept that this world is totally meaningless and pointless (as existentialism taught us and my experience showed me), yet I want to be in it, study it with science and devise technologies to make the most of it before we leave it. I am not in a hurry to leave this world. Western psychology and psychiatry are science and as such accept that people are evolved animals; that their brains are biological and produce their thinking. Thinking and so called mind is epiphenomenal. Therefore, Western secular psychology does not aim at transforming people to angels; it does not pursue ideals; it sees pursuit of ideals as unrealistic neurotic and or psychotic behaviors to be given up. To it, the world and human behavior cannot be made perfect. It wants to help people make the most of the imperfect world as it is and live with imperfect selves. It sees spiritual psychology and religion as a bunch of hooey, nonsense that promises people perfection (heaven) that does not exist. The salient point here is for one to understand the parameters of secular psychology and accept them as they are and not mix them with the hopes of spiritual psychology or the ideals of neurosis; secular psychology is tough minded and does not see its mission as changing people but merely understanding them in a dispassionate, impersonal and objective manner. CONCLUSION
When I first encountered science, especially after reading Charles Darwin's seminal book, the Origin of Species it made enormous sense to me. Thus, I began my doubt about the utility of religion and its God hypothesis. From about age fourteen to thirty four I considered myself agnostic. In my mid-thirties I had an obsessive-compulsive desire to understand religions and find out if God exist or not. I began by studying my inherited Christian theology and read up on the founding fathers of the Church (such as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Anslem, Erasmus, Meister Eckhart etc.). I proceeded to read about Christian mystics (see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism; William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness etc.). I then graduated to studying other religions, such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. I found Hinduism (especially the rational aspect of it, Vedanta) to my liking (my philosophical mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer also found Vedanta fascinating). At some point I read up on what is generally called New Thought religions (the writings underpinning Christian Science Church, Unity Church and Religious Science Church) and new age spirituality. New age spirituality took me to reading Helen Schuman's A course in miracles, a modern rendition of Gnosticism. I studied them all and at some point realized that I had to make sense of all that I had studied, that only I can offer me a theology that appeals to my mind. I am not the kind of person who accepts what other persons tell him is the truth; only I can ascertain the truth for me. Thus, I began writing on spiritual matters. This paper is part of my writing on spiritual matters. It says that we must study the physical sciences and also study spiritual science. It says that whereas physics and metaphysics operate with different parameters they can both be studied and used to make our adaptation to the exigencies of the world smoothly. The reader should take what makes sense to him from my writing. I am not figuring on persuading him to any particular world view; I am merely stating a view that makes sense to me. I find peace of mind and body in the type of philosophy articulated in this paper. If it gives the reader peace fine if not he should keep trying until he finds what gives him peace (only that which gives us peace and joy is good for us; throw away a philosophy if it does not give you peace and happiness). As I see it, we all left heaven and will return to heaven in manners only us determine but hopefully we learn from the ways others used to find peace (which is what haven is all about). Heaven is not a place; it is not out there; it is a state of mind that recognizes the union of everything and loves all people to experience peace. Living in love and peace with all people, one occasionally experiences what Helen Schucman aptly called Holy Instant (aka spiritual union with all, Samadhi, Nirvana, Satori) in which one leaves this world and experiences the unity of formless heaven, and then return reinvigorated to deal with the realities of this world of separation. Whatever gives you peace in a world at war with itself cannot be too shabby. If this writing gives you please then explore it further but if not throw it away. Christians have what they call Christmas and Easter. Christmas is the metaphorical birth of our new self, the dawning of Christ consciousness in us. Easter is the resurrection from ego-body consciousness to Christ consciousness. The second coming of Christ is when we remember that we are Christ. The first coming of Christ was when we manifested on earth as egos in bodies. Then we die to that awareness and are reborn to the awareness of Christ in the hypothetical day of Easter when Jesus resurrected from death (death is living as the ego). The Day of Judgment is the day each of us judges the ego and body as not his true identity and chooses to let it go and embraces his real self, the Holy Son of God, the Christ, the unified self. Each of us makes that judgment at different dates hence judgment day is not one set day for all people but different for each of us. The New Jerusalem or new Israel talked about in Revelation is the day we choose to stop living hateful existence and start living loving existence. When people choose to live loving lives they are living in the metaphorical New Jerusalem and new Israel; they are now the new man; the old self is dead and the new self is born; they are now living in the kingdom of God, living the will of God not their ego wishes. We can go on and on reinterpreting Christian metaphors but the point is that we are urged to move away from separation and move to union, from hate to love.
FURTHER READING
Psychology, Politics and Philosophy: Adler, A. (1964). The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Adler, A. (1979). Superiority and Social Interest: A Collection of Later Writings. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1994), Washington DC: APA Press.
Anselm. Walsh, Michael, ed. Butler's Lives of the Saints. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Aristotle. Jonathan Barnes, "Life and Work" in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (1995). Augustine. Confessions (Confessiones, 397-398) The City of God (De civitate Dei, begun ca. 413, finished 426) On the Trinity (De trinitate, 400-416) Beck, A.T., Emery, G., and Greenberg, R.L. (2005).Anxiety Disorders and Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective. New York: Basic Books.
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Berkeley, George (1713). Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous.
Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind is the title of a 1901 book by Richard Maurice Bucke.
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Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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Diderot, Denis. Wilson, Arthur McCandless. Diderot (1972), the standard biography.
Eadie, Betty. Embraced by the Light by Betty Eadie (1992). One of the most detailed near-death experiences on record.
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Ozodi Thomas Osuji March 26, 2012 Dr. Osuji can be reached at 562-612-0294/213-330-5497; ozodiosuji@gmail.com
*To Africans: If you are an African reading this paper I recommend that you make copies of it and give them to your friends, siblings and children to read and later discuss the content; if possible, organize workshops where you teach the material in the paper; this will help expand you and your folks minds a bit. I say this because whenever pseudo-educated Africans confront perplexing issues of being they feel confused and seek refuge in what they call their peoples cultures and religions and what those said about phenomena. Cultures are social-biological organisms; they are dynamic and grow and are not supposed to be static. Africa's misfortune was that it was cut off from other cultures hence did not have diffusion from other cultures hence remained stagnant and irrelevant in explicating phenomena. You can talk about African cultures and religions all you want but the fact is that if they are not scientific they are useless and would not help you adapt to the exigencies of the extant world. Taking refuge in the primitive past is the scoundrel's effort to avoid facing the amorphous and ambiguous realities of modern living. It is now time for Africans to jettison their superstitious past and embrace the real world. Where that real world is not sufficiently explained by science they should attempt to use their own minds to do so, as the second part of this paper tried to do, rather than flee to a superstitious past that can only hold Africans down. I do not want to hear about African this or that; what I want to hear is about reality as the individual understands it. Those of us who embraced modern scientific concepts of reality found Western education rather ridiculously easy while being perplexed that many Africans score at Intelligence tests as if they are mentally retarded and generally do poorly at Western schools. You can find Western schools easy by paying attention to science matters and using your mind to improve on the Christianity and Islam we received from Europeans and Arabs, rather than talking rubbish about African religions. African religions, like African cultures, do not embody verified facts about phenomena; what counts, as Karl Popper tells us, is what is verifiable and falsifiable using the scientific method. What we cannot yet explain is speculated on without the illusion that our speculations are facts. Part two of this paper is not factual but mere conjectures that you can refute if you may?
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