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)