GUEST ESSAY: Does God have an Agenda?

By Ben Iscatus

(This is a guest essay submitted to the Metaphysical Speculations Discussion Forum, reviewed, commented on and approved for publication by forum members. The opinions expressed in the essay are those of its author.)

"God blessing the seventh day," by William Blake.

Don't say this isn't an ambitious subject!

Idealism takes many forms, but in what follows, I am assuming that monistic Idealism is true. This means that God (or Consciousness) is all there is. What we call 'matter' is just how ideas or thoughts in God's mind appear and register to the senses of avatars (humans and animals) in God's dream of Planet Earth. I will use the terms "God" and "Consciousness" interchangeably here. (Conventionally, I refer to God as "He", but the "She" and "It" pronouns are implied). The essay is an informal and sometimes avant-garde exploration of some of the issues, and I hope you find it entertaining.

OK, that's the premise. So what is God dreaming and why?

First, there doesn't actually have to be a "why." God could be dreaming the World (the Universe) just because that's what He naturally does. No reason is intrinsically necessary. This is the view that Ancient Chinese philosophy takes. However, if human beings are delimited aspects or sub-personalities of God, then we might be expected to share some of God's mental attributes. Curiosity about our origin may therefore be something that derives from God Himself.

Now, it may be that only humans have this need to search for a "why" because (to borrow Bernardo's analogy), being little whirlpools cut off from the sight of the great river makes us self-reflective (I can't see the river or feel its flow, so how on Earth did I get here and why do I exist?). In this analogy, animals would be swirls and eddies rather than full whirlpools, not cut off from the natural flow of the world, and God, being the whole river itself, would instinctively know who and what He was. Nevertheless, He might like to see how He appears from multiple different, limited perspectives, which is why he creates or permits the human whirlpools...

In spite of this possibility, if you can accept the idea that a Creator God may not be utterly ineffable and may indeed have reasons that humans might understand for His thinking and dreaming, then we can speculate what these reasons might be.

The most obvious religious idea about what God is to us in the West, is the Christian one of 'Love', though many polytheistic gods have not been loving, so we might wonder where that monotheistic idea comes from. God as Love may simply derive from the way that parents behave towards children. Right across Nature, parents of many animals show care and nurture of their offspring, particularly mammals. Even alligators carry their newly hatched young gently in their mouths down to the river. Without Love, the young more easily die and the whole species is put at risk.

Yes, Religion extends this Love beyond death, due to a faith in having an immortal soul or a belief in our connection to God, but the whole concept may originally derive from a powerful strategy for survival which is found throughout the natural world.

Love is also our name for sexual attraction, of course, another powerful evolutionary strategy. Freud showed how sex can be sublimated, and it is easy to imagine with the Christian Church's distrust of sex, how enforced celibacy has affected monks, priests and the faithful. In nuns, the added complication of a frustrated maternal drive might well be expected to lead, on occasion, to ecstatic visions of God.

Going against this pragmatic explanation are (ahem, celibate!) mystics who say that Heaven is indeed a realm of blissful Love. Those who have Near Death Experiences often concur (though not always). But who is to say that any mystical experience of loving ecstasy is a final truth, any more than what religious seers and prophets have said about the future is the truth? Here's a poem I wrote in sonnet form that expresses this idea in terms of near death experiences:

Loosh

What is this 'Light' the near-dead rave about
Which sucks them up into its shining sphere—
The atheists as well as the devout—
Kiss-blisses them, then spits them back down here?
In a hypnotic haze of love and awe,
The ravished claim this White Light is divine,
But how can all the rest of us be sure
Its ministrations are, in fact, benign?
We know it exercises mind control
And avidly observes each life review.
Perhaps it licks the loosh from human souls
As ants milk aphids of their honeydew.
'Above is as below', the mystics say:
Are we too proud to think that we're its prey?


"Loosh" is a term first coined by Out-of-Body researcher Bob Monroe. You get the idea; we're being duped, love-drugged and cunningly harvested, our life-energies are being fed upon by higher-dimensional beings.

This recalls the old Gnostic notion of a false god in charge of Creation, a Demiurge. It's not a silly idea. Look at life as we know it on Earth: there is a food chain, Life is obliged to eat other life or its products. There's a lot of killing as well as loving going on in this Dream/Nightmare we're in. (As I write, a great tit is foraging gracefully in the ivy outside my window. Do I say, "Shoo! Leave those poor insects alone!", or do I say, "Charming!"? The latter, of course. Where is my compassion?) Ironically, the most benign sort of life to eat is a fruit, like an apple, which is 'purposefully' produced by the tree so that its seeds can be spread far and wide. Yet the apple is, according to the Biblical parable, what got us into trouble in the first place!

Putting the idea of an evil Demiurge to one side for a moment, why do animals exist at all? Why didn't Consciousness simply choose to express itself on Earth in sentient plants happily absorbing the sunlight and soil nutrients in a Botanic Paradise? Why did animals have to evolve and enter the dream? Why teeth, why claws, why stings?

The answer, presumably, is that Love is not enough. In wildlife behaviour, Consciousness expresses itself in many other ways. For instance, in Fear. Without fear of danger, a species might become easy prey, and like the flightless bird the dodo, get clubbed to extinction by sailors landing on their islands. Religions have picked up on the importance of Fear: for example, the Old Testament Jehovah is to be feared, as are the Zoroastrian god Ahriman and the Aztec goddess Coatlicue.

Evolutionary activity can be construed as Consciousness moving into species and phenotypes in order to explore its own qualities and characteristics. Clear evolutionary strategies apart from Love, Sex and Fear include Dominance (I'm the monarch of the glen, so I get the females), Cunning (the trapdoor spider), Concealment (the stick insect) and Co-operation (the wolf-pack). At any rate, through all the changing predators, prey and ecosystems (99% of all species that ever existed are extinct), creative dreaming by Consciousness through Nature remains a constant.

We humans have evolved a greater self-awareness and cultural intelligence because we are not simply immersed in the natural flow of life—we moved out of our natural habitat, out of Africa; we need clothing and complex artefacts for cooking and storing food, unlike animals. Because we are partly outside the natural flow, Consciousness has discovered many new and interesting ways to explore itself in us—artistic, scientific, technological, sporting, as well as in complex emotional bonds. And now, God's self-exploration has gone exponential in our global human civilization.

For sure, the quest for experience and self-exploration both in nature and human nature is a highly believable 'folk interpretation' of what a Manifesting God is doing.

All our complex human behaviours must be hard on God the Dreamer. It seems reasonable to suppose that such intense dreaming cannot be sustained for very long. The current dream-image of a world under strain does suggest that this is so.

But, going back to the idea of an evil Demiurge, and looking at the history of the Universe as a whole rather than just our planet Earth (which we can now do, thanks to science and technology), one can speculate about a very different, alternative agenda. This Big Picture 'shadow agenda' might be that the Original God, from whom the Demiurge sprang, actually finds manifest life complete anathema. The true Unmanifest God may not have wished to dream at all; He may only have wanted to find a way to be Unconscious.

In this scenario, The Big Bang would be seen not as an act of Creation, but as an act of Destruction—an exploding suicide bomb—God's attempt to self-destruct, emerging from Infinity and Eternity into the finite structures of space and time. It's been suggested that the Universe as a whole looks rather like a brain. So the Universe expanding out into the Big Rip can be seen as an image of its synapses stretching and its neurons flying apart, dissipating until there is no longer a Mind left to speak of. Perhaps the True God cannot bear His own lonely, ever-wakeful Consciousness, so is seeking to die to Himself.

Self-extinction or achievement of "Notself" has a perfectly respectable Buddhist tradition in the context of dissolving the human ego—a will to nihilism, Nirvana, which in one translation means "blown out": let's interpret that expression as blowing outwards like the Big Bang, as well as like a candle flame being snuffed out.

So why may God not be intending to achieve this sort of Nirvana? Presumably, because He is seen first and foremost as a Creator and Sustainer. But that's not appropriate if Creation was not a conscious intention. Looking at the cosmos as a whole, you have to wonder—where is all the life? There's not much, is there? The vast volume of the universe is at least 99.99% lifeless desert. Despite many years of searching, SETI has found no technological civilizations. In fact, so far as we know, in the dimensions available to our senses and instruments, we are it!

We and the Sun that supports us, might symbolise some of God's remaining, living Neuron-clusters. Gravity, across the universe, signifies their means of trying to get back together. This view might explain why for so long the only life on Earth that could be dreamed was simple bacteria. Traumatised by the separation, the Neuron-cluster 'Our Solar System' had to try to relearn what it was before the Big Bang 'brain damage.' Slowly, it has been healing and growing. Life on Earth forms an evolving, networked cortex.

It may even be that humanity, and the Demiurge which sustains us even as it uses us,  really represent the pro-Life Resistance! In which case, Nietzsche would be wrong—God is not dead, at least not yet. The laws of thermodynamics are against us, but let's hope we're not predestined to snuff ourselves out or blow ourselves up...

Copyright © 2017 by Ben Iscatus. Published with permission.
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22 comments:

  1. This is well worth reading but I do feel the use of He, which connotes male, has a negative impact, at least on females, and a better generic term for God is either It or S/HE.

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    1. Thanks, Roslyn. Pronouns are difficult for God! I did say at the beginning that "She" and "It" are also implied.

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  2. Yes, you did say they were implied but S/HE works better and nothing is implied. The terms He and She are so much a part of our mental functioning that I don't think implied works.

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  3. I don't think we're too proud to think that we're it's prey, so much as there's little reason to assume such by default. There exists an entity that showers you with love when you pass over. Why assume that it's out to get you without evidence? What can you even do about it, if it was out to get you?

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  4. I expect you're right, Andy. But, as discussed in the essay, feeding often depends on killing, and if God the Creator is a Being of Love, then we are entitled, like the Gnostics, to ask why this is so. The idea of loosh (feeding on energy) was discovered by consciousness researcher Bob Monroe.

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  5. If killing is seen as a process of transformation instead of something absolute like death, we can have a different perspective. If all that happens is part of a story we experience for a time, then death is not final and is just a part of the experience.

    I believe the true meaning of love is connectedness. The greater the connection, the deeper the 'love.' In the wild, as one can sometimes observe, when an animal kills, or for that matter any creature, there is a point where the victim virtually sacrifices itself to that moment - surrenders to the inevitable, offers the gift of its life.

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  6. Alternatively, the victim may be quivering in terror, exhausted and too weak to go on due to loss of blood.

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  7. All of a sudden, after I red this essay, I lost hope I have found it in Kastrup books. Good bye meaning. And that is not because this essay is bad, on the contrary, is a very good one.

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  8. The essay is speculative and you shouldn't believe it - it's just food for thought. Bernardo Kastrup is open-minded enough to allow expression of such avant-garde ideas, but if you stick with his mainstream Idealist philosophy, you'll find it offers a lot of hope.

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  9. I love it. The Big Bang is God self destructing. Why not? For look at what it produced. A Universe of disorder. Maybe there is no God, but only opposites like a Dark Universe versus a Light Universe. Maybe the Light Universe is a world of very advanced sciences that influenced disorder to create Life, and humans are merely an arrangement of disorder, but granted a soul to understand the Light Universe.

    And maybe humans have learned the sciences in the Light Universe and we control everything that happens on Earth, including the flow of Time. I think many of you will like this essay on how time may work.
    http://thecompassionateworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/An-Essay-The-Nature-of-Time-The-Human-Soul-by-Karl-Gary-.pdf

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  10. Ben,

    See also "God's Debris: A Thought Experiment" by Scott Adams.

    Spoiler alert: The idea of the Big Bang as God's suicide attempt is also expressed there.

    --MG

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  11. "We humans have evolved a greater self-awareness and cultural intelligence because we are not simply immersed in the natural flow of life—we moved out of our natural habitat, out of Africa; we need clothing and complex artefacts for cooking and storing food, unlike animals. Because we are partly outside the natural flow, Consciousness has discovered many new and interesting ways to explore itself in us—artistic, scientific, technological, sporting, as well as in complex emotional bonds. And now, God's self-exploration has gone exponential in our global human civilization."

    I couldn't disagree more with this. How do we know we have greater self awareness? We are creatures who may think differently than animals, but what does it really matter? What do we really know? As far as art/science/tech etc. is concerned. What makes you think we are so special compared to the creativity and accomplishments of other creatures?

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  12. Another speculative possibility is that God--understood with traditional attributes and "character traits" such as personality, love, will, purpose, order, meaning, etc.--had to create, in order to bring to birth something capable of standing in some sense "apart," that which God was not, in many respects his polar opposite. Thus we have a world filled with impersonality, aggression, competition, randomness, impermanence, etc. And to go farther out on a speculative limb, perhaps God created such a world because God was somehow, even in the divine fullness of Being, lonely and desirous of relationship--the river yearning for interaction with whirlpools, swirls, and eddies. I've always been struck by the words found sewed into Pascal's coat, the result of an intense religious experience: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars."

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  13. If God equals Consciousness then IT will be fine as the pronoun. Since the ego-self is an emanation of the eternal Self what does it have to fear? Read my Vita Somnium Breve)

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  14. When it comes to NDE's it's all in my essay "Brahman's Dream'.

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  15. With staying with the question, "Does God have a agenda?" This is a topic long sought after by every thinking being. The Agenda is self discovery. It is the driving force in thinking begins. In self discovery, the "mind" reasons and argues who, what, and why of it's existence.

    What a honest being considers is not what the mind concludes, as the thought is not stable as it is ever questioning reality as it expands it conscious expression. The next logical source of searching of agenda is not what you think, not what you say, but what do you do?

    Considering that humans are created in the "image and likeness" of God, and are the DO part of the self discovery of God him/her self, what do you find?

    When we as humans experience this in self, we strive to remove, control and even destroy that which we deem "evil" within our self and the world we reside in.
    The stunning reality that we, humans, no matter how we apply our self to the task of "ascension" in spirit, still find no end to the removal or control of the "evil" that is within. We humans consider this, Sin, imperfection, that the striving of man searches out the answers or way to remove this from our "spirit" which is more of value than that of flesh.

    The best or the acceptable of the best came to Earth, to live a human experience to see if it is possible to experience human existence without evil deeds.

    God becoming Human is a expansion of the Creators self discovery.
    The task of control of this "evil" is so rare and unable to be reached in the human experience had to have another element to achieve this.

    God, Creator, had to prove this to self and to humans. The only answer in the logical, loving compassion spirit of God, was to come prove this point to self.

    Thus the action of God in Grace, provided a answer and a method to become reflective of self discovery of God's completed self discovery.

    Just as we humans ask when we find parts of our own being attractive, we strive to remove that aspect of self by questions and self discovery.

    We are responding just as our creator, we are doing all we can find to remove aspects of self that are not in harmony with the majority of the whole.

    The agenda of mankind is the same as our Creator.
    Self discovery and growth in perfection.

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  16. Why do we need to involve evil and perfection? Why could humans not simply be a creative expression of 'God' who themselves create and express in this material world as an experiment in the material?

    What if the mere act of creation is enough and there is no judgement of good and evil? Certainly, it makes for a better world if we have more love than hate, but this is a world of opposites and there can be no light without darkness, i.e. it is the polarities which make this world and which must, of themselves, be 'perfect.'

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  17. There is no apple in the biblical genesis story. The tree whose fruit was offered by the serpent to tempt eve was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There is also a similarly symbolic tree called the tree of life from which Adam& Eve and their offspring are cut off, and finally there are regular fruit trees like apple or cherry though none are named and they are described only as having seeds that bear the same fruit. Interesting essay. Flows nicely.
    Another major appetite of consciousness is contact and union with an other. Most life forms express this in the division and union of male and female. This has elements of fear, pleasure-seeking, love, escape.

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  18. When we raise the question of God’s agenda, it seems to me that we always run into two questions:
    Why would God enter into finitude, and why would god allow evil? The answer would have to be because there are possibilities that can be realized only in finitude. Here is a poem that touches on this.

    This Too

    Divine Child
    Son of Sun,
    Child of Earth,
    Eros dancing on the dangerous waves –
    This God who sheds omnipotence at the door of creation –
    Who lost the virginity of an austere omniscience drinking
    the fermented grapes
    of I and not-I in which are
    found all the intoxicating possibilities of love –
    This Love-God is one I might die for.
    If God clothed in the limitations of time and space is to be free to choose
    there must be the possibility of Caine washing the blood of Able
    from his hands with a shrug.
    If God clothed in the limitations of time and space is to create that which
    has never been there must be the possibility of that which
    never should have been --
    The true monstrosity,
    the microbe pointlessly eating the flesh of its
    more conscious and still living victim.
    There can be no creation if all the threads go one way --
    no dance without the possibility of the fall.
    Therefore of the microbe
    I say, yes, this too is God,
    And of the rat
    This too,
    And the tsunami also,
    Though it arrives with the death of so many green possibilities.
    If God comes to me as rat or microbe
    then perhaps I must kill God
    in the service of God.
    But the microbe is not evil unto itself nor is the rat.
    They too dream the creation.

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  19. I'm sure many of us who have found ourselves locked into this "seeker" mode share many of these questions without a truth answer. The key is we, the human race or let's say at our level of consciousness, we are simply the discoverer, not the deal maker. An analogy I often use is this ancient Chinese tale about a frog sitting at the bottom of a deep water well, thinking the sky is a piece light of size of the well opening. We are that frog, and we are trying to tell what's up in the sky, and where are those things in the sky from, and how are they made? To us, this could be a million answers, but for the creator he/she/it probably only chose one approach or perhaps a few. Now science and many exploration experiments by our restless mind will gradually allow us to get closer and closer to the truth. However, until we are finally home, we can never tell the truth. Or perhaps, what awaits us there is just another set of similar problems. We thought we have climbed the mountain top, truth is it's just a start.

    PS. To Ben, just curious are you or Bernado also mystics?

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