God as software engineer

“When we make these virtual worlds in the future —worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options— it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.”

— From a piece titled “Geek Theologian” Kevin Kelly talks with Christianity Today’s Katelyn Beaty.

Difficult to noodle on such things and not recall the scene with The Architect in the later Matrix films.

Einstein on Buddhism

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.” 

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

One measure of a book (for me) is how many passages get highlighted [after the jump]. What ideas will I want to find again? A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle had some on nearly every page. For example:


“Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head — the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it — that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. You take the thinker to be who you are. … Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on.”

Everything in the book made perfect sense to me. I’m trying to incorporate man of his ideas into my life.


“…when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form –or a species– will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.” – pg 20

“A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die.” – pg 21

“We are coming to the end not only of mythologies but also of ideologies and believe system. … At the heart of the new consciousness lies the transcendence of thought.” – pg 21

“What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought–or the emotion or sense perception–happens.” – pg 22

“Thoughts consist of the same energy vibrating at a higher frequency than matter, which is why they cannot be seen or touched.” – pg 146

“You look at the present through the eyes of the emotional past within you. In other words, what you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you.” – pg 173

“Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do.” – pg 176

“…heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness.” – pg 23

“Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, bercome hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is.” – pg 25

“Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp.” – pg 27

“Most of the time it is not you who speaks when you say or think “I” but some aspect o fthat mental construct, the egoic self.” – pg 30

“…the shift in identity from being the content of their mind to being the awareness in the background.” – pg 30

“The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past.” – pg 34

“The unconscious compulsion to enhance one’s identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.” – pg 35

“Most people don’t inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one.” – pg 37

“Being must be felt. It can’t be thought.” – pg 40

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” – pg 41

“The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious.” – pg 42

“The ego doesn’t mind what it identifies with as long as it has an identity.” – pg 44

“…making yourself right and other wrong is one of the principal egoic mind patterns.” – pg 44

“The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison.” – pg 45

“How do you let go of attachment to things? Don’t even try. It’s impossible. Just be aware of your attachment to things.” – pg 45

“Wanting keeps the ego alive more than having” – pg 46

“The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks. … When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. … If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking.” – pg 55

“The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.” – pg 57

“Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield.” – pg 57

“Most people are so completely identified with the voice in the head — the incessant stream of involuntary and compulsive thinking and the emotions that accompany it — that we may describe them as being possessed by their mind. You take the thinker to be who you are. … Your thinking, the content of your mind, is of course conditioned by the past: your upbringing, culture, family background, and so on.” – pg 59

“In most cases, when you say “I,” it is the ego speaking, not you. It consists of thought and emotion, of a bundle of memories you identify with as “me and my story,” of habitual roles you play without knowing it, of collective identifications such as nationality, religion, race social class, or political allegiance. It also contains personal indentifications, not only with possessions, but also with opinions, external appearance, long-standing resentments, or concepts of yourself as better than or not as good as others, as a success or failure.” – pg 60

“Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.” – pg 61

“Instead of overlooking unconsciousness in others, you make it into their identity.” – pg 62

“The ego’s greatest enemy of all is the present moment, which is to say, life itself.” – pg 63″The ego’s greatest enemy of all is the present moment, which is to say, life itself.” – pg 63

“Whenever you notice that voice, you will also realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it. … The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. … Every time it is recognized, it is weakened.” – pg 64

“When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong. There nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. For you to be right, you need someone else to be wrong. You need to make other wrong in order to get a stronger sense of who you are.” – pg 67

“Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness –not through thinking– can you differentiate between fact and opinion.” – pg 68

“The (church’s) Truth was considered more important than human life. And what was the Truth? A story you had to believe in; which means, a bundle of thoughts. … Thought can at best point to the truth, but it never IS the truth.” – pg 70

“The particular egoic patterns that you react to most strongly in others and misperceive as their identity tend to be the same patterns that are also in you. … Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.” – pg 74

“Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists. … There is a deep interrelatedness between your state of consciousness and external reality.” – pgs 75-76

“All that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it.” – pg 78

“Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am.” – pg 78

“The only thing that ultimately matters: Can I sense my essential Beingness, the I Am, in the background of my life at all times?” – pg 79

“Whatever behavior the ego manifests, the hidden motivating force is always the same: the need to stand out, be special, be in control; the need for power, for attention, for more. … The ego always wants something from other people or situations.” – pg 80

“The ego thrives on others’ attention, which is after all a form of psychic energy.” – pg 85

“Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? … When you play roles, you are unconscious.” – pg 90

“Don’t say, “I’m unhappy.” Unhappiness has nothing to do with who you are.” – pg 95

“Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.” – pg 96

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.” – pg 99

“Doing is never enough if you neglect Being.” – pg 103

“You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don’t try to be yourself. That’s another role.” – pg 108

“Assumptions (are) unexamined thoughts that are confused with reality.” – pg 114

“You don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.” – pg 115

“Before you were the thoughts, emotions, and reactions; now you are the awareness, the conscious Presence that witnesses those states. … To become free of the ego, be aware of your thoughts and emotions — as they happen.” – pg 117

“Your entire personal history, which is ultimately no more than a story, a bundle of thoughts and emotions, (is) of secondary importance.” – pg 117

“Each person is so identified with the thoughts that make up their opinion, that those thoughts harden into mental positions which are invested with a sense of self. Identity and thought merge.” – pg 121

“When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.” – pg 122

“When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.” – pg 122

“Strictly speaking, you don’t think: Thinking happens to you. Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.” – pg 129

“Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality.” – pg 134

“The ego is the voice in (your) head which pretends to be you.” – pg 134

“Thoughts consist of the same energy vibrating at a higher frequency than matter, which is why they cannot be seen or touched.” – pg 146

“You look at the present through the eyes of the emotional past within you. In other words, what you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you.” – pg 173

“Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do.” – pg 176

“Who you are requires no belief. In fact, every belief is an obstacle.” – pg 189

“Most people define themselves through the content of their lives. Whatever you perceive, experience, do, think or feel is content. When you think or say, “my life,” you are not referring to the life that you ARE but the life that you HAVE, or seem to have. You are referring to content –your age, health, relationships, finances, work and living situation, as well as your mental-emotional state.” – pg 193

“Only if you resist what happens are you at the mercy of what happens, and the world will determine your happiness and unhappiness.” – pg 200

“It is at this moment that you can decide what kind of relationship you want to have with the present moment.” – pg 201

“The decision to make the present moment into your friend is the end of ego.” – pg 201

“Instead of adding time to yourself, remove time. The elimination of time from your consciousness is the elimination of ego. It is the only true spiritual practice.” – pg 207

“For the ego to survive, it must make time –past and future– more important than the present moment.” – pg 207

“You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is joy and aliveness in what you do.” – pg 211

“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness.” – pg 213

“Become conscious of being conscious. Say or think “I Am” and add nothing to it.” – pg 236

“Breathing isn’t really something that you do but something that you witness as it happens. … Whenever you are conscious of the breth, you are absolutely present. Conscious breathing stops your mind.” – pg 245-246

“Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.” – pg 255

“To be still is to be conscious without thought. … When you are still, you are who you were before you temporarily assumed this physical and mental form called a person.” – pg 256

“Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. … Instead of being lost in our thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it.” – pg 259

“Presence: consciousness without thought” – pg 259

“The separation of thinking and awareness happens through the negation of time. When you negate time, you negate the ego.” – pg 265

“You cannot become successful. You can only be successful. Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.” – pg 270

“Your entire life journey ultimately consists of the step you are taking at this moment. This doesn’t mean you don’t know where you are going; it just means this step is primary, the destination secondary. And what you encounter at your destination once you get there depends on the quality of this one step. What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.” – pg 271

“Thinking cuts reality up into lifeless fragments.” – pg 276

“You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.” – pg 293

God for a Day

For most of us (well, actually, for all of us) God is a mystery. Whatever God is, I’m confident she has a fine sense of humor and might be doing something like this.

Once she knocked out the Heaven and Earth stuff and had a few people running around it occurred to her to put them in charge of the Universe. But she knew a committee was the wrong way to go. They’d come up with those soon enough.

So she decided to rotate the job. Every day, someone new becomes God, with full powers. They can create sunsets or erupting volcanoes or whatever pops into their temporarily divine heads.

And to keep things interesting, there would be no rhyme or reason to selection. Totally random.

Even if the world’s great religions figured this out, they kept it to themselves. You can’t build a functioning religion when there’s a new deity every day. Just keeping up with the artwork would be a nightmare.

Each new god could tell his friends the exciting news if they chose but, being omniscient they could see that could turn out badly. Some couldn’t resist, however.

You’d think after all this time (and all those god’s) the world would be in pretty good shape. But each new god could –and often did– fuck up the good work of previous gods.

So. If today is your day, what will you do?

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).

GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).

I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.

To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.

Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:

“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”

TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:

“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)

Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.

If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:

  • If you wanted to start a religion that would last thousands of years, how would you go about it?
  • How would Jesus feel about the religion that is based on his life and death?
  • Could Christianity have taken hold if Jesus had lived at any other time or place?
  • If the story of Jesus’ life/death –as we have known it for 2,000 years– was shown to be inaccurate, would it be better to know the truth, or to allow Christianity to continue to be based on events that never happened?

Continue reading

The One True Faith. Mine.

I’ve always wondered how deeply religious people could be so certain their “faith” was the real deal and everyone else’s was bogus. Brian Hines wonders, too:

“People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books… except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories… except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God… except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.

Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?

It’s like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

There are good reasons for belonging to a religious, spiritual, or mystical group. But having a lock on cosmic truth isn’t one of them. Nobody knows what lies at the heart of reality, or even if there is such a thing: a heart, a core, a central truth.

So the only honest attitude is “I don’t know.” Along with, “You don’t know either.” This leaves us all on the same unknowing level.”

Religion and ego

Brian Hines finds it strange “that religiosity is so often associated with humility, selflessness, and lack of ego. Actually, the religious impulse is highly egotistical.”

How would religious belief be affected if it was known that our sensations of being connected with, of under the care of, a higher power were entirely contained within our own personal mind/brain?

The mystical and spiritual experiences would feel the same. But no longer would we believe that we were contacting a transcendent divinity. We couldn’t claim a special relationship with some supernatural being, because that “higher power” would be us.

An expanded us, to be sure. An us that encompassed normally untapped areas of the mind/brain. An us that wasn’t as split, searching, anxious, uncertain, and self-doubting as we are now.

This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary religious egotism. No one would be a member of a chosen people, or a special beloved of God. We’d all just be human beings, having human experiences, making the best use possible of our human psyches.

I’m grateful we live in a country where it’s still okay wonder and write about such things. And yet, any candidate fo higher office who dared make such a connection between religion and ego would be toast.

The God Theory

My interest in quantum theory, time and the relationship between consciousness and reality lead me to a book by Bernard Haisch titled The God Theory. (I’ve included a chunk of Dr. Haisch’s bio below). I include this post for my own reference.

“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of  view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”

“Bernard Haisch, Ph.D., is an astrophysicist and author of over 130 scientific publications. He served as a scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for ten years, and was Principal Investigator on several NASA research projects. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Haisch did postdoctoral research at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. His professional positions include Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory; Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley; and Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik in Garching, Germany. He was also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.”

Books: 2009

Yes, the list is a little skimpy but this blog will not write itself. I plan to read more fiction in twenty-ten.

  • Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
  • The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield
  • The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keeys to Joy and Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra
  • The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  • Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson
  • Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Douglas Rushkoff
  • Road Dogs, Elmore Leonard
  • The Increment, David Ignatius
  • Wicked Prey, John Sanford
  • What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis
  • Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, Bart D. Ehrman
  • Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, DonTapscott
  • God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, Scott Adams

Scott Adams: The building blocks of God

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime, it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.

A billion years from now, if a visitor from another dimension observed humanity, he might perceive it to be one large entity with a consciousness and purpose, and not a collection of relatively uninteresting individuals.”

“Are you saying we’re evolving into God?”

“I’m saying we’re the building blocks of  God, in the early stages of reassembling.”

— From God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, by Scott Adams