Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

A religion is a system of beliefs based in human ideas about what underlies reality. And by that definition, the most pervasive and destructive religion of all is whatever has become of mainstream science! To be frank, this is a problem so obvious, so destructive, and so central to everything that is going wrong in the modern world that the fact that we seem to be almost the only ones who are noticing it makes me feel like the little boy in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Academic scientists parade around in white coats with test tubes in their pockets and continue to assure us that very soon they are going to make progress on our most basic questions, even though it is ever more obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the entire profession of non-medical scientific research mostly stalled out a century ago.

Part of the problem is that the field of scientific inquiry is less hungry than it once was. There were so many world-changing breakthroughs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that even now, a century later, broad societal respect and abundant funds with which to generate more breakthrough discoveries continue to flow into scientific fields that at this point really are not doing much. Nothing radically new and transformative has been produced by mainstream scientific research since Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work in quantum mechanics, and then Albert Einstein won the same prize in 1921, essentially for being Einstein. By now, the scientific community is reduced to trumpeting “discoveries” as irrelevant as stardust older than our solar system, and “advances” as tangential as better methods of gene-editing.

Another part of the problem with modern science is mission-creep. We have come to see science as so reliably productive of an ever-better way of life that we think it would be useful to apply its processes to just about everything. A recent article in The Atlantic calls for “a new science of progress,” saying that “Progress itself is understudied. By ‘progress,’ we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of ‘Progress Studies.’” Boy, talk about suffering an abject loss of focus on what should be the scientific mission!

But the primary problem with science in the twenty-first century is that, like every other religion, it is intellectually frozen in time. It reminds me of Spiritualism, which is a branch of Christianity based in communicating with the dead that was on the religious cutting edge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spiritualism still exists, but to attend a service and sing traditional Christian hymns with altered lyrics from hundred-year-old hymnals feels like stepping back a century in time.

Science has since the early part of the twentieth century been little more than the dead-end religion of atheism. With forty thousand versions of Christianity now fostering belief in their various versions of the Christian God, it is not surprising that a religion would be trumpeting its belief in what we might call “no-God.” Not surprising at all, but still a tragic diminishment of the once-proud field of scientific inquiry.

Mainstream scientific research is governed by the belief that all of reality is material, and that reality therefore can be fully studied and entirely understood using only methods designed to study what are exclusively material processes. I assume your jaw dropped when you read that sentence! By now, it has been pretty conclusively established that even what we think of as “matter” is not solid in any reasonable sense, and such early-twentieth-century scientific stars as Albert Einstein and Max Planck knew and said that matter is illusory, that matter is energy, and that matter has an underlying non-material matrix that ought to be studied. But to this day, those who control the funding for scientific research continue to enforce the matter-based assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain! To read articles about the search for a source of consciousness in the human brain that still are being published in prestigious scientific journals almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century can make you laugh and cry simultaneously. For example, here is an actual pair of sentences from an article published in Nature only three years ago: “What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? Once we can understand that, we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem.” Actually, there are a host of “more fundamental” problems that will never be solved until mainstream science stops its absurd insistence on the dead-end dogma of materialist atheism. As we will shortly see!

Meanwhile, we just ought to note that there was a chance at the turn of the twentieth century for science to establish and assert a modern commitment to the open-minded pursuit of the truth. I noticed early in my afterlife research this odd refusal  by anyone with scientific credentials to even look at the excellent communications from the dead that were being received early in the twentieth century through physical mediums and documented and published by serious researchers. I investigated further – this was decades ago – and I discovered that the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals had begun soon after the start of the twentieth century to enforce what they were then calling “the scientific dogma of materialism.” This was not a new idea. In fact, the absurd notion that what is material and what is not material can be separately studied goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle; but even after more than two thousand years, at the start of the twentieth century that odd dichotomy was still informal. It was only then that the scientific gatekeepers announced and began to rigidly enforce a dogma that was fully as nonsensical as putting scientific consideration of rock-formation off limits, or barring scientific investigation of any phenomenon associated with the color blue. Speculation is that it was the shock of physicists’ discovery that they now had quantum physics to contend with that made them feel forced to concentrate on materialism. Personally, I think it was a worry that they might inadvertently find the Christian God. But in fact, there never was the slightest justification for the scientific community to in any way limit what it was willing to investigate in the reality that it  professed to be thoroughly studying!  

The result of that foolish century-old decision to limit what scientists can professionally believe has led to a mostly wasted scientific century. Think of all the effort that has been stupidly spent on seeking a source of consciousness inside the brain! And consider all the basic research and the endless speculation that has been invested in making sense of ideas that never will make any sense because they are based in nonsense. For example, here are just three of many core areas of research that can never be productive in a thousand years until the mainstream scientific gatekeepers turn modern science into what it always should have been: an open-minded search for the truth.

• The origin and nature of life. Most research being done in this field is laughable. The plain fact is that for life to begin and be sustained in even the simplest organism would require so many different fortuitous developments that have no other purpose that no materialist scientific theory ever will get us there.
• The true origin of the universe. The notion of a Big Bang might comfort us with the thought that we have learned something important, but in fact it tells us little. We still don’t know what existed before the Big Bang, nor where whatever that was came from, nor what caused it to explode in the first place.
• A Theory of Everything. The current standard model of particle physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Max Planck’s quantum mechanics are all well-studied and demonstrated, and they also are in some ways incompatible with one another. Since of course this makes no sense, the search for what must unite them is underway! And so far, it has turned up goose-eggs.

The sorry religion of atheism, which is what mainstream science has been for a century, is as useless as was the long-ago worship of Moloch. Sacrificing first-born babies won’t make us any more divinely favored. And taking care to make sure that, whatever research we do, we never are going to find a Christian God is an exercise in useless silliness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican friar and revered Medieval thinker. In his most prominent work, the Summa Theologica, Aquinas said, “Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause. This leads to a regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.” Every religion seeks to find that uncaused cause, and then it worships whatever it finds. For the religion of atheism that is modern science, the declared answer is that there is no “uncaused cause,” so everything that exists has happened randomly. And you and I know that notion is completely ridiculous on its face!

Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right.
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.
Here comes the sun!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

Pigeon collisions photo credit: FotoGrazio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94075184@N00/48922186542”>Pigeons collisions</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

Last week we discussed our need to better understand the Godhead so we can explore the history of humankind’s relationship with God from something like God’s perspective. It is clear from the response to what we said last week that for us truly to take the Godhead’s point of view, even just as an exercise, is going to be something of a stretch! So I hope that if you still are troubled by some of what we said last week, you will pause and read that post again. And if anything still feels like a sticking-point, please ask your questions in the comments below. If you are confused, then there are others, too, who will have those same questions in mind.

In order for us to come even close to taking the Godhead’s point of view, we first must fully internalize the fact that this universe is a pure illusion. Everything about it is freshly created in each micro-instant of artificial time, including what we think of as “the past.” You and I are eternal beings who chose to come here to have emotionally stressful experiences that will help us to learn and grow spiritually There is a lot more to know about who and what we are, but right now our focus is on coming to understanding God enough that we will be able to imagine something like God’s point of view. And to do that, we’ve got to get out of the way!

We now know that this material universe is neither very large nor very old. Evidence strongly suggests that it was created together with the first modern people, animals, and plants about 200,000 years ago. This universe has never needed to be more than a large enough habitat that the people in it would never find an edge, and it always has been freshly made in each micro-instant of its own artificial time. It may not even have been a planet at first! It might not have had a sun, but it could instead have been lit as the astral plane is lit, by the Godhead’s white spiritual light. But then of course those first people would have started to wonder where the light was coming from, especially as fire was added as a tool for human use and people witnessed their first naturally-occurring fires and learned how to make fire happen. They would have thought there must be a big fire somewhere! So to preserve humanity’s investment in the illusion, a simple solar system would have been born. And every change would have been at once part of an ever-more-complex built-in history, so it would “always” have been there.

Do you see how this apparently worked? We have no way to know how creation happened in what we might euphemistically call real-time, since time is not real and any later enhancements that were needed to keep us believing in the illusion were built into each new instant of this reality as if they had been there forever. But there was no need for the Godhead to begin with figuring out how to generate the Big Bang. And the way that it almost certainly happened would likely have produced an ever-growing Godhead Collective of Perfected Beings, just as the human need grew for ever more creative complexity.

This earth-habitat that was being gradually enriched with an ever-increasing size and an ever more complex past had just one purpose, insofar as we can determine. It was designed to facilitate the spiritual growth and enrichment of Consciousness itself. And of course that raises the question of why, as parts of the same Consciousness as the Godhead, we are not already perfect. Why was there ever this sudden need to do more? Some people, too, have asked me where the Godhead came from and how the Members of the Godhead developed spiritually before there even was a material reality. A lot of these questions can make your head spin! And with access to just our limited earth-minds, we will have to simply accept the fact that there are things that will not make sense to us until after we have died and gone home. But I think that something like the answer to most of these origin questions can be found in what A Course in Miracles suggests happened, which is that the whole need for our spiritual growth in this universe is the result of one stupid mistake. In that scenario, the brief thought of a separation within infinitely creative Mind led to an instant of actual separation, and that created the necessity for that separated part to rescue itself and figure out how to reunite with the Whole. And it may well be that since time is not real, the first Members of the Godhead were developed just as that separated part made the first bit of universe, and then They “always” were there. Do you see how weird the lack of objective time can make things seem to us?

So we know now that humanity – and probably the universe itself – all originated no more than 200,000 earth-years ago. And there would have been no need at first for the Godhead to reveal Itself. Indeed, for that to have happened so early would have interfered with early man’s emotional investment in the illusion! But still, from humankind’s very beginning the Godhead was deeply involved in the life of each individual person on earth. Everyone is born with both a guardian angel for physical protection until a chosen exit point is reached, and a spirit guide for internal guidance in helping us to make the most of our life-plans. For the helpless prey animals that we were then, these invisible helpers were miraculously important! And probably almost immediately the most spiritually sensitive members of the first human tribes were feeling and hearing their guides enough that those folks likely became our first shamans. Their spirit guides were the inspiration for our first gods.

Evidence of religious practice has been found that is many thousands of years old. It seems likely that the first human-made gods date to the advent of the earliest people, when life was tough and most of us never saw the age of thirty. Those earliest folks had no energy to spare for anything that didn’t feel essential to their survival, and yet many thousands of years before it first occurred to anyone to invent an alphabet, domesticate dogs, or even plant a seed, people were inventing gods and putting considerable effort into trying to build cooperative relationships with their gods. And all of this happened long before there is any surviving evidence that the Godhead was actively intervening in human history! Indeed, I will here go out on what feels like a fairly solid limb and say that prior to about five thousand years ago, the Godhead’s involvement in human affairs consisted of just three things:

Maintaining This Ongoing Creation

From what might at first have been nothing more than a grassy plain surrounded by a ring of forest and full of animals that you and I would recognize today, and the earliest people, created as adults, who gave birth to and nurtured the very first children, right down through a split-millisecond ago when the same illusion consists of nearly fourteen billion years of invented history and a hundred billion light-years of space, the Godhead’s patient and loving effort at perfectly preserving this illusion and continuing to build it so we will never find an edge still goes on.

Although a few scientists suspect that it is all an illusion. They just consider that suspicion to be The Truth That Cannot Speak Its Name until they have become so highly respected that they can frankly state it, as did the two greatest physicists of the twentieth century. Just a few decades into that century, Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental…. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He added in 1944, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” And Albert Einstein was wonderfully insightful when he said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Maintaining the Afterlife and the Greater Reality

Insofar as we can determine, the astral plane which is our eternal home is much bigger and more substantial than is this entire material universe. It still exists within Consciousness, true, and it is variously lit by the Godhead’s white light, but it is populated by people who know the basics of what is actually going on. All the real-seeming places in the astral plane are also mind-created, and the people themselves can choose to create and enjoy their own illusions. Most importantly of all, they know that only Mind exists, that they are part of that Mind, and that they are eternal. Everything else is beside the point.    

Guiding Each Individual on Earth

Every primary spirit guide is someone who has lived on earth fairly recently, has achieved the upper fifth level developmentally and therefore doesn’t need earth-stress to achieve more spiritual growth, and now continues to grow spiritually by guiding someone else. Our primary guides sign up with us before we are born, help us with life-planning, and then assist us in living out our plan and getting the most learning from each lesson. And they do this while they are in direct contact with the most advanced beings, including the Godhead Itself. Through our primary guides, each of us has constant intimate contact with God.

So God has always been involved in the spiritual progress of all humanity, and intimately concerned about the spiritual welfare of each precious human being. But for those first 195,000 or so earth-years of humanity’s existence we were spiritual infants in this playpen of an expanding illusory universe, just trying to learn how to sit and stand and bashing one another with anything handy. And then something amazing happened….

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly Day by day.
– Stephen Schwartz, “Day by Day” from “Godspell” (1972)

O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

If we hope to achieve some level of understanding of how the Godhead works in the world, we are going to have to find a way to see things more from God’s perspective. And doing that is going to take a lot more humility than we have yet mustered! So as we begin, we ought to pray for God’s help in better understanding God. St. Richard’s prayer, the end of which is above, was said in Latin by the then-Bishop of Chichester on his deathbed. Praying in gratitude affirmations puts the power of our own minds into our receipt of the gift, so now in beginning with you this effort to come to better know the genuine Godhead, I pray, “Dear God, I thank You that I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, follow Thee more nearly every day.” Amen. God’s Will be done.

Before we make our attempt to know God outside of all religions, let’s first reassure ourselves that we have the Godhead’s permission. There is so much fear-based superstition surrounding religions that the notion of trying to find and know God independently makes some people afraid. But Jesus urges us to ask questions and to seek the truth. And the plain fact is that God is real! And the God that we are coming to perceive as we study the greater reality is much nicer and more loving than the Christian God, who is frankly the fantastical relic of thousands of years of fear-based human ideas about gods. It has occurred to me that what we are learning now about God might be the genuine Godhead’s direct revelation, else otherwise why would so much new information be suddenly so easy to find?

Our quest to come to know God better is easier now because in recent decades there has been an explosion of new information about what really is going on. Insofar as we can determine, the bounty of evidence that we have come to take for granted began with a concerted attempt by elevated beings not in bodies to make their presence known to us; and that effort seems to have had its beginnings about two hundred years ago. We’ve got to stress the fact that none of this new information was available to the builders of any religion! And in making a fresh effort to understand God that is rooted in these modern facts, we are doing what we should have been doing all along. We are putting God first. One fact that is abundantly obvious to every researcher of the greater reality is that God is even much more involved in each separate moment of our existence than any religious person in human history has heretofore imagined!

We could not possibly know any of what follows if it were not by divine revelation. And here are some things that we now very strongly suspect are true:

• THE ONLY THING THAT EXISTS IS CONSCIOUSNESS. When the eminent physicist Max Planck discovered that consciousness underlies everything, he in fact began for all of us the process of finding the genuine God.
• THE GODHEAD IS A COLLECTIVE OF PERFECTED BEINGS. Oh, how I have fought this idea! But it fits with so much else that we have learned about how things work at the highest levels, and Thomas is telling me now to just get over my squeamishness. There is no One Big Guy on a Throne with a Long Beard and Thunderbolts, far away from us and looking down on us. There is instead an infinitely powerful Collective of what is actually Us Perfected. No wonder God knows us and loves us so well!
• WHAT WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY IS IN THE NATURE OF SHARED THOUGHT. Our own thoughts feel ephemeral and private to us, but the Godhead’s “thoughts” are as solid and public as the hand in front of your face.
• MATTER, ENERGY, SPACE AND TIME ARE NOT OBJECTIVELY REAL. We can accept this fact about everything but time, since we can think about the universe (for example) as solid and gigantic when we know the thought of it has neither substance nor size. But without time, doesn’t everything just happen at once? Doesn’t even a thought require time for you to think it? As difficult as this is for us to imagine, objective time simply is not real. Welcome to eternity! If something real exists in this moment, then it always has existed and it always will exist. And the only thing that exists right now is Mind. Your own mind is inextricably part of that one Mind, so you are eternal. By definition.
• OUR REALITY IS NEWLY CREATED IN EACH MICRO-INSTANT OF NON-TIME. Here is another notion that I have been fighting, but no other theory makes so much sense. Reality can best be understood as something like a filmstrip, which is a series of pictures in which tiny changes are made from picture to picture. When those pictures are run in quick series, we experience it as one continuous reality. And the same is true of the reality around us now! Each “picture” in this ongoing reality includes all of what we think of as the past, which means that our past can be freshly revised or augmented in each instant. And apparently our past is being created to be steadily more complex, as human beings become both more curious and better able to figure things out. The Godhead wants to stay ahead of us in order to preserve this illusion! I understand how impossible it seems to us for each instant to be freshly created with tiny changes for each of more than seven billion people, many trillions of animals and insects, and even many more trillions of galaxies, each containing no-number-is-big-enough stars which might carry planets that harbor their own versions of living things. But apparently the Godhead does it easily, although if we understand what is going on we can spot God’s little fudges here and there. I’ll give you a few examples below.

For now, we only know that the evidence is strong that these five statements are some version of true. And wonderfully, they help us explain so much! Here are three quick examples to ponder:

The Godhead Can be Both Powerful and Personal

I have always been a skeptic. I don’t want just comforting answers that make no sense! When I was a child, I would hear people talk glowingly about a “personal God,” and I knew even then that One God on a Throne in Heaven could not possibly be a personal God for each of us individually. If it were not for my experiences of light, I likely would have ended up an atheist. But the genuine Godhead turns out to be a gigantic Collective of thousands of Perfected Beings whose minds are in such perfect harmony that together they make one infinitely powerful Mind. There also are billions of beings who have grown past their need to incarnate and are furthering their ongoing spiritual growth by serving humanity. Each of us has at least one spirit guide, and for all we know each guide works with a preferred aspect of the Godhead. Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead with whom many of our guides are in contact. That seems to be roughly how it actually works. And that makes sense. Even to me!

Reality is Infinitely Scalable

There are many very important questions that materialist scientists never will answer. But the Godhead, in staying always just ahead of us, is able to keep scientists happily busy trying! Here are three such scientifically insoluble and highly scalable puzzles out of very many:

• How did the universe begin? Our ancestors ten thousand years ago (or even just a hundred years ago) had little interest in figuring out the history of the universe. Then in 1920 someone was inspired to propose what became known as the Big Bang. Of course, going back to something the size of a single atom that explodes to become the universe still doesn’t tell us where that first speck came from or what caused that amazing explosion, but no doubt the Godhead will eventually build in answers to those questions that will “always” have been there.
• How did life begin? The simplest explanation is that life is a property of consciousness, but scientists aren’t yet ready to accept the idea that consciousness is primary. To indulge them, the Godhead may well soon come up with a life-creating process to be found by scientists that “always” has existed but was just “overlooked.”
• What is beyond the universe? Neanderthals needed only this solar system. We, however, need a gigantic and ever-expanding universe so we never will find a disturbing edge and have to fret about what might be beyond that. So we have precisely the limitless universe that we need! And there is some evidence that the process of creating ever more galaxies to stay ahead of us still goes on.  

A Lot of Odd Glitches Are Now More Understandable

A reality that is remade freshly in each instant can remain stable while it is being tailored on an ongoing basis to the Godhead’s needs and to our own. For example, here are just three of what are many impossible-seeming facts that represent what amount to God’s short-cuts in creating our past and present earth-reality. When it becomes necessary to fill them in with more details to keep us busy, we can only assume that will happen:

• Cosmological constants. We are told that there are 26 values that must remain within tiny tolerances or the universe will either implode or blow apart. They must remain “constant,” but in fact some of them keep minutely adjusting!
• Punctuated equilibrium. There are many “missing links” in the histories of each of the 8.7 million species of plants and animals living on earth. Species will remain stable for thousands or millions of years, and then they will be replaced by new species almost at once and without anything like a sufficiently long transitional period of Darwinian natural selection.
• About ninety percent of modern species came into existence within the last two hundred thousand years. When God established modern people, God almost simultaneously set the stage for us with all the other modern animals and plants. For this to have happened on its own, so recently and so quickly, is so unlikely that just thinking about it can make your eyes cross.

God is real! And God loves us! There is nothing else that matters beside that single perfect truth. God has always been minutely involved with us, but so respectfully that spotting God’s precise role is difficult. Let’s see now what we can discover about God’s involvement from God’s perspective….

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
– St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253), From his deathbed prayer (1253)

Texas desert photo credit: G Yancy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/141788246@N08/51010193191″>Arches Canyon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>