There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds
— Ziggy Stardust
Perhaps to start, a disclaimer: This is not an attempt to convince you that God exists. One reason is the same as with truth in general — it cannot be told, each person has to discover it for themselves. Hopefully, they will get help on that journey from those who have already completed it. Still, even though a guide can show you the door, only you can walk yourself through it.1 This, again, is true for all knowledge. When it comes to knowing God, however, there is a whole other dimention of complexity.
Unlike simpler and, therefore, more predictable parts of the Reality, God is a living, intelligent entity. She decides for herself how much, when, and whether she would reveal — and to whom. And it is not hard to understand why God does not want to advertise herself to everyone, despite what many religions would want you to believe.
I mean let’s be real — she is God. She has no need to seek validation, nor does she care for our obedience. She sees us as her children and, like any good parent, she works to put herself out of business. The last thing she would want is to keep telling us what to do, to keep us relying on her wisdom (or on anyone else’s wisdom for that matter). Instead, God wants each person to learn to think for themselves — to piece together, that is, and rely on their own understanding.
This, I believe, was the underlying message of the oldest, by far, book of the Bible — the Book of Job. The Book tells the story of, well, Job — a supposedly righteous man who fell on misfortune and who wanted to understand why. To that end, Job hoped that, perhaps, God could explain what sins he, Job, was being punished for. Because God is the creator and, therefore, responsible for everything that happens, including Job’s misfortunes… right?
Eventually, God did come down to have a word. Still, she refused to give Job the explanation he was looking for — offering instead, many examples of how incomplete was Job’s own understanding of this world. As I read God’s reply, she challenged Job to do his homework. The ultimate truth, you see, was never God’s to tell — it was Job’s to discover.2
The same idea applies to our knowledge of God. It’s not like she tries to hide from us. On the contrary, she wants to be known — she just doesn’t want to tell, to give it to us on a silver plate, as if to satisfy our idle curiosity. Rather, God wants each of us to do the work, to make the effort, to discover her and the rest of the truth for themselves — and, in the process, to become a better human being. To become in God’s image, if you want.
God does not proclaim Himself. He is everybody's secret, but the intellect of the sage has found Him. — Katha-Upanishad
And this is why I am not trying to convince you of anything either — because, again, no one can be told anyway. All I can do — all anyone could possibly do when it comes to knowledge — is to share a few puzzle pieces.
So, how the God thing — if real — could work? Where does she live — like, where is heaven? The common idea of it — of heaven, of the spiritual world — is of something that lies beyond the physical realm and, as such, beyond the reach of science.
But what if it isn’t? Maybe let’s ask ourselves this question: is there a place within the physical Universe that is so inaccessible, both to our own senses and to our most advanced instruments, that it feels like it’s not even part of it?
Yes, black holes would fit the bill, as would everything that lies outside the visible Universe. But what about the part of the Reality that lies much closer — our own brains that is? Or, rather, the minds that are powered by our brains?3 Our subconscious minds, if even more specifically — the underwater part of the icebergs? And, of course, the whole heaven would not fit in a single person’s mind. But what if our minds are connected on a subconscious level, creating a much larger and much more powerful computational network?
Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father.
— John 16:25
This subconscious connection to others is, again, something that many people feel. Perhaps most acutely we all feel it when such a connection breaks studently — a connection to someone close to us, to someone who grew to become a significant part of our life. We might feel like a part of ourselves died with it — because this is exactly what happens, actually, when the neural networks of the two subconscious minds become so interconnected, they form a singular entity.
And again, because we don’t have a theory of how such a deep subconscious connection might work, we would say that it is somehow non-physical and beyond science. Or we would come up with science-like explanations (like suggesting that we somehow pick up the other person’s electromagnetic emissions — except our bodies don’t have a radio wave receiver capable of such a feat). Well, here is how I see it could actually work: all this magic comes courtesy of the neural network supercomputer in your subconsciousness. Specifically, of its enormous information processing power.
Operating under the radar of our conscious awareness, we hardly know it is even there, much less how it works and what it does. We only catch the glimpses of its power when the results of its processing are communicated to our conscious selves — through emotions, through feeling of the other person’s energy, or, indeed, every time we instantly and effortlessly recognize the object we are looking at.
One particular thing this supercomputer can do is detect and track all the minute details in our environment and in the people around us — way more details than we can hope to register consciously. The slight changes in the tone of the other person’s voice, their body language, their microexpressions — their non-verbal communication, in short. Similarly and, for the most part, just as unaware of it consciously, we too are “talking” non-verbally to others. These subconscious channels form a network that links all of us together — something Carl Jung referred to as “collective unconscious”.
And by no means it is limited to humans! The same neural networks that run in human brains also run in all animals, from our pets, on whom we often rely for emotional support, to birds in the sky, to that eight-eyed spider in the corner… And not just animals either — even trees can talk to each other, all bacteria in the soil, all life can be connected into a planet-wide computing network.4
This is heaven — this is where the spirits live. Whatever memory and intelligence this planet-wide network possesses, we traditionally perceived as a being — as God. Or gods — ‘cause we can’t really know what is going on in there. We should assume, however, that, being a living entity, it learns from experience and evolves over time.
We all participate in it through our subconscious minds, the information flowing in both directions between the individuals and the collective unconscious. Parts of our psyches — our shadows, our ghosts — are being continuously uploaded in heaven, as the information from the spiritual world is continuously downloaded into the individual’s subconsciousness. Among other things, this would explain how God exerts her influence — by guiding our thoughts, our feelings, and, eventually, our our words and our actions.
This is also how she communicates — through the art we create, through the words we choose in our conversations... Those strangers who were seemingly talking about you — well, maybe they were, even if not consciously.
A coincidence is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.
— Albert Einstein (though not really)
It is through other people that God often talks to us — and that’s why it pays to remember that through our social interactions we also talk to God… As if we needed another reason why we should be kind to others, including everyone who we are not particularly fond of.
Note, however, that God’s influence, though quite significant at the societal scale, is less prominent on the individual’s level (because free will, among other things). In other words, for every important task she tries to create the general conditions that would make it likely that someone somewhere somehow will succeed at it — but not even God knows who, in the end, that individual would be (and how they will go about it, and when, etc).
It is very possible that in our pre-civilization past, when our lives and, more importantly, our relationship dynamics were much different from what we experience now, we were also more conscious of our spiritual side — and of God.
People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. The naive primitive doesn't believe, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn't yet let himself be befuddled by boobytrap concepts.
He adjusts his life — of necessity — to outer and inner facts, which he does not — as we do — feel to be separate. He lives in one world, whereas we live only in one half and merely believe in the other or not at all.
We have blotted it out with so-called "spiritual development”, which means that we live by self-fabricated electric light and — to heighten the comedy — believe or don't believe in the sun.
— Carl Jung
In the civilized — the nuclear-family based — societies this knowledge was largely lost. Still, many of us feel the connection to various degrees. We can imagine, for example, that extraverted individuals are more strongly connected to the collective unconscious (and, in some ways, more dependent on it) than the introverts, who tend to focus on their inner world, on their imagination.
Now, going back to God’s place in our lives — though she stays away from the limelight or from micromanaging us individually, her approach is not hands-off either, particularly on the societal scale. This, again, is something that many people feel — of someone/something pulling the strings from behind the curtain. These feelings fuel all sorts of conspiracy theories, most often blaming the money, the media, and whatnot. On any closer examination, however, those theories don’t hold water. Like, who are the people supposedly in charge — do they have names? What is their decision process? How do they implement their agenda? Where is the shadow bureaucracy, the shadow policy enforcement — the shadow government, in short?
There would be no way to hide such an organization from the public view, to keep its operations entirely invisible. Our collective unconscious, on the other hand, fits the bill perfectly. It is the underwater part of the iceberg, after all — having all the capacity, the intelligence, the access, while staying completely hidden… none of which, by the way, should give you any reason to worry.
It shouldn’t because, again, there is nothing nefarious about her power. And, in fact, this is not what God wants — to stay forever a caretaker of humanity. She had to take on this role, picking it up on the fly, learning it through us, only because we humans are yet to learn to stand on our own feet. Whatever “mind-control” she exerts, therefore, is a stop-gap measure, in effect only until we find a way to teach critical thinking skills, consistently and reliably, to everyone. To teach every individual to think for themselves.
Now, perhaps, this question: how do I know if all this is true? And the short answer is that I don’t — it’s a theory. A scientific theory, to be specific — scientific in the same sense that, for example, the theory of gravity was scientific when it was proposed by Isaac Newton. He imagined it as the missing link, one that would connect together many seemingly unrelated observations — from a falling apple, to the apparent movement of celestial objects. And it was, at the time, pure fantasy — it took a whole century after Newton to detect and measure the gravitational force directly.5
Even so, few would argue that what Newton did was not science.6 And, again, so is the theory presented in this article for the same reasons — as a missing piece to the puzzle. One that would explain, without resorting to the supernatural, the nature of God and the spiritual world — the presence of which is felt in so many ways, by so many of us.
Summing up what I think about God’s nature — she is not the creator and we are still the product of evolution. As such, God is neither responsible for human nature, nor can she change what we are. As our collective unconscious, however, she has absorbed the experience of billions of lifetimes and, in many ways, she knows each of us better than we will ever know ourselves. That’s why she would often prevent us from getting what we want — if she feels that this is not what we need. As long as you understand that part and as long you are prepared to keep your mind, your heart, and your ears open, you will see that God is your best friend, and the best teacher you’ll ever have.
Or, to be less poetic (and more specific), the guides can describe parts of the “puzzle” — of a mental simulation of the Reality — and maybe show how those parts fit together. But only you can assemble, in your own mind, your understanding of it — your personal copy of the simulation.
And, in this particular case, not just Job’s, but, apparently, of every reader of the Book — because, sure enough, there is a chapter in it where our hero unwittingly confesses to, perhaps, the deadliest sin of them all. As he keeps confessing, from the pages of the Book, for thousands of years to anyone who has ears to listen.
Using computer terminology, the mind is the software that runs on the brain’s hardware.
On top of that, there was a serious issue with the theory itself — in Newton’s own words, “so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” This one took another two centuries and the genius of Albert Einstein to resolve — to visualize the other missing link, the nature of the gravitational force.
Save for the Nobel Committee for Physics, apparently. Or American Psychiatric Association… but let’s leave it at that :)