We examined in question #6 that God is love, and love is an internal, subjective experience. Only the one in love can prove that love exists. Only the one in love can prove the value or worth of that love. And only the one in love can verify that experience exists “inside” themselves by voluntarily identifying with it and saying, “I am in love.”
In this question we’ll examine what “in” the “network” of love really means.
We can see how easy it would be for someone who is actually in love to deny the very existence of that love. Since it’s an inner, subjective experience they hold all the cards in proving that love exists. Only they can determine the value of that love and voluntarily identify with it by saying, “I am in love.’
Love is a network phenomena
Love is, to use a computer term, a “network phenomena”—like the internet. It takes at least two to be “in” love. So, what if God were the self-evident, inner experience of love? A self-evident truth? Jesus says, “The kingdom is within you.” Countless mystics talk about the truth of God being within you.
Let’s assume for now that’s how God and ultimate reality is; a wholly connected network phenomena. The Love Internet, so to speak.
The Buddha would have dug the Internet
The Buddhists would say, that ultimate reality is the unalterable interconnectedness of the part and the whole. This is part of the principle of dependent origination detailed by the Dalai Lama in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom:
…there is mutual dependence between parts and the whole; without a whole it makes no sense to speak of parts…anything that exists and has an identity does so only within the total network of everything that has a possible or potential relation to it. No phenomena exists with an independent or intrinsic identity.
Similarly, in the Internet it makes no sense to talk of the whole (the Internet) without the parts (Web sites). The whole Internet does not exist if there are no Web sites; conversely Web sites don’t exist if there is no larger whole (the Internet) connecting them.
A Course in Miracles says it makes no sense to talk of a Father without a son; nor a son without a father. By definition, a father can’t be a father unless he has a child. Nor can a child be a child unless he has a parent.
Un-inventing the Internet with un-Al Gore: The Spam Filter From Hell
So, we can see from our definitions here that the Internet literally cannot exist—at all—without its “whole” aspect (its total interconnectivity) and its part aspect—its individual Web sites.
How does the Spam Filter from Hell “uninvent” or blot-out the existence of the Internet? All it has to do is vacillate between blocking either aspect of the Internet.
First it can block me from experiencing the whole aspect by denying me the ability to experience the totality of the Web that’s out there. I would lose the “infinite” aspect of the Web’s existence. Every time I tried to connect to the Internet, it would simply have to block, limit, frustrate or confuse that total experience. It could deny me access. When I went to another site that really existed, my Spam Filter from Hell could pop up false 404 Error messages. It could kick me off the Internet every time I made an actual connection to another site by crashing my browser. It could re-route me to the same Web site despite me entering all kinds of different Web addresses. The list of tricks could go on and on.
Similarly it could block the part aspect as well. Every time a connection was made and returned to my computer, it would make my screen go black. It could Spam-filter the content completely so nothing got through. It could garble the language or the graphics that were returned from all those Web sites so that they were indecipherable. It could leave my global, whole connection going all day long and simply skew, distort, erase, or mess up the information that infinite connection returned to me.
Or like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, it could morph or alter the real characters (like she did to her loved ones at home inside her dream) of these Web sites by dressing them up in evil, frightening or sinister perceptions. So all day long their harmless, benevolent content would be returned to me as dark, sinister attempts to harm me. It could keep a known list of things that frightened me as a “cookie” on my hard drive, then simply alter all incoming content with those known psychological triggers to produce fear in my mind despite their true innocence. Then I would simply ignore them or shunt them aside mentally.
We’ll call that the Fear Cookie and investigate it more later.
This is exactly how the ego keeps you separate from God and your brothers and sisters. Their communication of love is coming at you continuously, all day, every day. The triggers that twist and morph that love are kept in your subconscious mind, hidden from your view. What you perceive as hate and attack on you is simply their morphed love dressed up in your unconscious guilt and hate. As we saw in question #6, any loving act can be interpreted as an obvious attempt at manipulation or evil. That’s what a relative universe allows.
There, see, the Internet doesn’t exist
If I had someone over to my house, I could show them that this Internet thing doesn’t exist at all. “If it exists, then hop on my computer and prove it,” I could say. And when they did, my Spam Filter from Hell would do its thing, mercilessly, relentlessly distorting, skewing, and blocking the Internet.
That’s a variation on the Skinny Tree, as we’ve discussed:
To block the existence of any totality from your awareness, you create an artifically limiting set of parameters from whatever relative vantage point you wish (science, for example), then, using only those parameters as acceptable evidence of actual existence, block out any totality you wish by simply insisting that everyone else views that totality through your rediculously narrow paradigm.
Do humans do this? From our earliest days. From inside a fort we built as young boys, I can remember hanging a sign on the door that said “No girls allowed.” If we wanted to, we could have insisted girls didn’t exist from inside the relative framework of our fort.
How this applies to why God hasn’t shown Himself
From the teachings of the Buddhists we can see ultimate reality is an experience of the part and the whole together as one. That’s the idea of dependent origination. It takes both part and whole for a network phenomena to exist and for us to experience it as real. Period. Block one or the other from your awareness and you “eliminate” the existence of both.
Understand this trick, and how the physical universe is wired to do just that, and you’re on your way to seeing how the universe attempts to block the existence of God from our awareness.
We need to pull a perceptual 180 to see the truth
So, in order to understand why God doesn’t show Himself to us, we need to do a 180° in our understanding and consider that perhaps God is showing Himself to us, maybe even continuously, and we are the ones doing the filtering. God isn’t hiding; we’re blocking. Einstein said, “God is subtle, but he is not malicious.”
What some contemporary atheist authors fail to investigate rigorously enough is that we all could very well be existing behind a perceptual filter blotting out our awareness of the exsistence of God: The Spam Filter from Hell.
If God is love, and love is a network phenomena between two or more beings, then all the Spam Filter from Hell has to do is blot out, twist or distort either the intimate (personal) aspect of our relationship to God or our awareness of the infinite (totality) of our interconnection to all things.
Is there evidence of this happening in nature? YES!
Divorcing the part from the whole is exactly what nature tries to do. Look no further than the divorce between quantum mechanics and relativity, which clearly shows that the part aspect of nature, it’s point-like, standalone, “quanta” aspect, is divorced perceptually from its continuous, connected “relativistic” aspect. We’ll get more into these ideas later.
Jung shows us the programming of the Spam Filter from Hell
Is there evidence some sort of unconscious, pre-cognitive filtration parameters could literally pre-screen everything we perceive in this universe, and could somehow be stored in a collectively accessible location—almost like a firewall on a collective computer server? Yes, indeed. They’re called archetypes and they are stored in our collective unconscious, as Carl Jung explored in his lifetime of work.
I encourage you to read Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds by David Lindorff. He shows how Jung’s idea of archetypes paralleled constructions of spacetime and were explored jointly by Jung and the great physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In Introducing Jung, authors Maggie Hyde and Michael McGuiness indicate Pauli had discovered the presence of Jung’s archetypes in the theories of mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).
Lindorff clarifies: “…whereas Kepler attributed the archetypes to the Mind Divine, Pauli understood them to originate in the collective unconscious.”
And regarding science, “..Pauli…concluded that the rational perspective of science in the twentieth century had gone too far, to the point where it had lost a holistic view of reality…In probing the atom, science had encountered the need to ‘relinquish its proud claim to be able to understand, in principle, the whole world.’
So we have, in his day, the theoretical heir-apparent to Einstein (Pauli), arguing that pre-conditioned patterning (perceptual filters) exist in Jung’s model of the collective unconscious, and that these pre-cognition filters have a parallel in the construction of spacetime, the latter idea dating back as far as the work of Kepler in the sixteenth century.
According to Hyde and McGuiness, Jung taught archetypes were “inborn forms of intuition” that “determine our mode of apprehension” and are “collective because they are concerned with universal, inherited contents beyond the personal and the individual and they correlate with each other.” So, we all have these filters, we’re all born with them and they literally determine our mode of apprehension.
Strong evidence of universal perceptual filtration in quantum mechanics
Look no further than quantum mechanics to see that the actual reality of the universe is radical connection—a networked phenomena—but our mental perception of it—aided by the filtration mechanism of our human senses—shows a universe that’s disconnected and includes all kinds of standalone objects—stars, planets, rocks, bodies, etc.
Frijof Capra in The Tao of Physics:
As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘basic building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole.
[and]
In modern physics the universe is thus experienced as a dynamic, inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way. In this experience, the traditional concepts of space and time, of isolated objects, and of cause and effect, lose their meaning. Such an experience, however, is very similar to that of the Eastern mystics. The similarity becomes apparent in quantum and relativity theory, and becomes even stronger in the ‘quantum-relativistic’ models of subatomic physics where both these theories combine to produce the most striking parallels to Eastern mysticism.
Everything around us has a connection to the whole and a standalone essence
Like our discussion of the Internet requiring both a “whole” (connectivity) and a “part” (Web sites) to literally exist, physicists have discovered that everything around us has both a connection to a larger whole and a standalone, individual existence. They don’t call this “the Internet” and “Web sites” they call the connected part of individual matter its “wave function” and its standalone reality its “particle function.”
What quantum mechanics discovered is that no matter how separate, or alone or isolated matter in the universe looks to us—indivudal rocks or trees or even people—everything has both a wave function connecting it to the larger whole of the universe, and a particle function making it distinct from that whole.
We are lost drops from the Ocean of God’s love
Ken Wilber says the mystical explanation of how we got into this universe of suffering is that we were once “parts” of the totality of God’s love—like drops of water in the ocean—but identified too strongly with our “drop” aspect and lost our “ocean” aspect. In short, we became so attached to our “Web site” aspect, that we became horrified of our “Internet” aspect, even though it was completely natural and built-in.
Fritjof Capra again:
…the Eastern image of the Divine is not that of a ruler who directs the world of above, but of a principle that controls everything from within.”
That could be said exactly of a Web page the Internet. The “principle” that makes a Web page a Web page has to exist inside the Web page; the protocols to connect it to the Internet have to be coded right into it.
God’s laws exist inside you, literally connecting you to the Love Internet
Similarly the real you—your Self, Soul or Spirit—does not exist in absolute reality without a “networked” component—a link to the whole. There is no such thing as a standalone you. It’s a fantasy; an illusion. Einstein called our individual identity an “optical delusion of our consciousness.” Like a Web page totally connected to the Internet pretending it has a standalone existence.
You were created with a network connection to God’s Love Internet built right in; a connection that absolutely, without exception, cannot be severed at any time, in any place, in any way, no matter how good you are at building Spam Filters from Hell.
Seeing your way through the Spam Filter from Hell
Once you get this whole/part seamless integration thing, you can see how so much of spacetime is set up to block or filter that understanding.
Quantum mechanics clearly reveals that our perception screens out the “wave function” or “connected aspect” of isolated objects.
This built in combination of “standalone” and “interconnected” aspect of matter is called the wave-particle duality. Or the wave-particle complementarity (see the Wiki article on complementarity (physics).
For us to ignore or screen-out the wave (interconnected) aspect of any standalone object would be to “obliterate” the truth of that object, a physicist would tell us. Yet our perception does just that; wholly missing the truth of the object by blocking out its wave function from our perception. We look at a rock and don’t see at all that it the tiny sub-atomic “particles” that make it up have a wave-function connected to everything else in the universe—but it does.
Look no further than the allegory of Plato’s cave—quoted again and again by contemporary physicists—to see this great philosopher clearly believed our perception was “chained” to look only into the isolating physical world, missing a whole level of primary, deeper truth behind it.
The human nervous system is one big filtration mechanism. Here’s Sam Harris in The End of Faith:
The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all. You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness, the physical status of which remains a mystery…
We really are such stuff as dreams are made of. Our waking and dreaming brains are engaged in substantially the same activity; it is just that while dreaming, our brains are far less constrained by sensory information or by the fact-checkers who appear to live somewhere in our frontal lobes. This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indication of reality at large; it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not first been structured, edited or amplified by the nervous system…
For every neuron that receives its input from the outside world, there are ten to a hundred others that do not. The brain is therefore talking mostly to itself, and no information from the world (with the exception of olfaction) runs directly from a sensory receptor to the cortex, where the contents of consciousness appear to be sequestered…Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.”
Your senses are reliable inputs?
We say things like, “I’ll believe it when I see it with my own two eyes.” But our eyes show us only 1/100,000 of the total sea of electromagnetic energy spectrum (visible light, x-rays, etc) that literally surrounds us. We are literally swimming in a sea of electromagnetic energy flowing all around us—literally through the noses on our face.
Yet if that spectrum of energy were a 1,000 story office building, our eyes would show us just 1/100th of one floor! That’s your measure of absolute reliability?
If a witness in court said, “Your honor, I saw the whole thing. My own eyes detected 1/100,000 of the accident scene” that judge wouldn’t be able to keep his judicial decorum: he would wet himself laughing.
We’re on Fantasy Island behind the Spam Filter from Hell
Again, it comes back to C.W. Lewis assertion that the door to hell is locked from the inside. We are like little kids holding the door shut in a dark closet loudly screaming out, “Why doesn’t the light exist!” It’s our filters doing the blocking, not God refusing to show Himself.
Is there evidence our senses screen-out the “network” or “interconnected reality” of the universe around us. Quantum mechanics offers a resouding YES!!!
Is our mind connected to that universe in some way? Nobelist and physicist Wolfgang Pauli—and psychologist Carl Jung should out a big, fat YES!!
Do pre-screening Spam Filters from Hell exist in our collective unconscious, pre-filtering everything in the universe around us? Jung shouts out an emphatic YES!!!
So could it be, that discovering God requires approaching Him with love, not skepticism? Just as to “see” or “perceive” the internet one would have to turn off all Internet-blocking Spam filters and draw out your awareness from behind our perceptual firewall? YES!
In any networked relationship which depends on a part and whole to experience the truth, or actuality or existence of that relationship, you must volutnarily agree to experience both part and whole, and to identify with them with seamless, effortless courage and without fear.
The same courage it takes to experience a self-evident idea like love or freedom, or an absolute universe like Heaven.
To discover the networked reality that is God’s existence, you must be open to approaching him with love. Just as to discover the reality of your child, or a loved one, you would have to approach them from love.
Jesus nails it in Matthew 18:3, “And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Einstein loved the universe like a child and it revealed its secrets to him. Only when you love another do they reveal their truth to you.
No love, no truth.
God does reveal Himself to us continuously. We’re simply too busy existing away behind our Spam Filter from Hell to experience it.
I love this idea from A Course in Miracles: the Holy Spirit will only talk as loud as you are willing to listen.
Higher intelligence is discovered through diligent listening.
The whole point of Carl Sagan’s Contact.
