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A Brief Argument for Why You Are God

The time has come for humans beings to acknowledge consciousness and their role in its drama.

The premise of this argument is that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are, where we are, and when we are.

Picture yourself walking outside. You hear a bird sing.

Bear with me through this first paragraph, I am going to describe the process that must occur for you to hear the bird’s song. The bird has to emit a sound. A simple manipulation of the air pressure in and around the bird’s body. This change in pressure creates an acoustic pulse or wave. That wave travels out from its origin in all directions. One of those directions happens to be in line with your body, and the acoustic wave travels through the air until it meets your ear. Your ear then acts as a funnel to send that wave into your ear canal. Eventually that waves hits a membrane which separates your inner ear from your outer ear. The wave pushes on the membrane, causing the tiny bones (the tiniest in your body) on the opposite side of the membrane to create waves in a fluid filled structure deeper inside your ear. These waves are then converted into a specific electrical signal in your nervous system depending on their frequency (the frequency of the waves depend on the frequency of the original sound emitted by the bird). This electrical signal travels through specific nerves en route to particular locations in the brain where the signal is processed and we finally perceive that beautiful sound of the bird.

So where are you in this process? The answer is of course a paradox (as everything is in the realm of God). You are everywhere, or nowhere. In order for you to have the experience of perceiving the sound at the level of the brain, you also had exist in its pathway through your nerves. You exist in the complex architecture of the tiniest bones in your body that contact the tympanic membrane, you exist in the particular shape of your ear that directs the sound inward, you exist in the surrounding air which allows for the passage of the acoustic wave from the bird to your ear, and of course you have to exist as the bird itself, the origin of this infinitely complex string of events (which is admittedly simplified). If you remove any part of this sequence, the fundamental experience or perception of the sound changes. And isn’t your perception part of you? As you can see, your experience depends on much more than your body. Where you are is not limited by your body, you extend much further, infinitely further in fact.

Now that your perception of space has been called into question, we should also abolish your conception of time. When we hear the bird sing, we think of it as a singular moment in time, exactly when that perception of sound pops into our awarenesses. But as we just described, the acoustic waveform has to literally travel from the bird to our ear. Meaning the entity that creates the sound we hear exists through multiple slices of time, even before it has been perceived by our senses. A complex sequence of events had to happen before this point in time in order for you to have the experience of now.

You are everything. This is what I mean by you are God. You are a unique instance of source. Continually experiencing new versions of yourself.

You exist outside your body. And you exist outside the present moment. All time is stacked upon itself. The entire history of the Earth and Universe had to play out just as it has for you to be here now, reading this.

Best explorations

-Ryan; 1/12/21

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Our Improbable Existence II

This is a continuation of a previous post, A Perspective on Our Improbable Existence. 10 minutes to read both might just change your life.

“The sense of well being of a tree for its roots, the happiness to know oneself in a manner not entirely arbitrary and accidental, but as someone who has grown out of a past as an heir, flower, and fruit.”
Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

You are multitudes. In the first part of this post we wandered down the improbable road of our human ancestors being able to successfully reproduce 100,000 times in a row, roughly (really roughly) the number of generations needed to take us from 2.5 million years ago, to today. We emphasized just how incredibly unlikely it is for anything to be done 100,000 times in a row, much less, survive on Earth long enough to raise viable offspring! Quite the miracle, if you don’t mind the term.

That post was solely focussed on us, the human species. Now I want to take a step back, and examine an even wider picture. Imagine yourself in a park, forest, or really any unblemished part of nature. Now take your attention further, to the trees, grass, squirrels, insects, soil, even the microbes that surround you. Each one of these incarnations of nature is the product of an improbable journey, just as you are. Each one of the entities had “parents”, and “parents” before that, often extending much farther back than the paltry 2.5 million years of human existence. Many have much shorter lifespans, meaning they have been through vastly more generations, winning the game of life an impossible amount of times. They too are constellations of that original cosmic dust of 13.8 billion (at least) years ago.

This perspective is important, for you are not simply limited to your body. At some level, you are your experience, or your reality is built upon that which you perceive. In a way you are something like the integral of your perceptions across your life. In fact you even extend back before your birth. Do you not have instincts? And certainly we cannot lay claim to the development of instinct in this lifetime. Now, turning back to those perceptions that construct our reality. If we go back to the landscape we were picturing, with trees, birds, plants, etc., those entities exist as part of our perception. If they are part of our perceptions, then we are one in the same, as we are some type of summation of our perceptions. Or if you prefer to think in experiences, you experience the tree and the grass and the birds. Now take a snapshot in time, that experience becomes part of you. Somewhere, somehow, some piece of that experience is stored in you.

Now it’s time to explode your mind. If we are some type of summation of these snapshot experiences, we are entirely dependent upon the perceptions that made up the experiences. Meaning, if that tree was not there, in its exact place, we would have a fundamentally different perception, a fundamentally different experience, and therefore we would be something fundamentally different. The snapshot has changed. A piece of the puzzle that is us, has changed.

This means that our improbable existence just got infinitely more complex. Our existence requires not only 2.5 million years of successful Homo sapien reproduction (improbable in itself), but it mandates 23 million years of successful reproduction by the ancestors of that specific Oak tree. And 7 million years of reproduction by the predecessors of the squirrel. And don’t forget the grass, plants, soil, microbes, or that other human across the park. They are all part of your perception, all part of your experience, all part of you. As you are their’s.

It is hard to not appreciate our momentary existence with this perspective. Or does this perspective actually prove our existence is much deeper and more profound than initially assumed. You are everything, and everything is exactly as it has to be.

Best explorations

-Ryan; 5/8/2020

Thoughts for the Weekend

A few things I’ve been thinking about…

1) The mark of a great thinker is not the stature of his ideas, but the flexibility of his mind to change them

2) The reCAPTCHA click so we know you aren’t robot thing. Does anyone else find it ironic that through our proving we are not a robot we are training the robots? With the most recent version where we are forced to click images of cars, crosswalks, stop lights, etc., we are oh so diligently training the visual systems of automated vehicles. Not really taking a side on this one… it is just kind of funny.

3) Gods are real. All of them. Odin, Jesus, Shiva, Vishnu, Zeus, etc. They were, at the very least, at some point a projection of the psyche. If you tell me that’s not real, then you are telling me motivation, anxiety, rage, and other all the other elements of our psyche aren’t real. Just because something fails to exist in material form does not make it not real.

4) Something like the Selfish Gene Theory for the psyche. Is archetypal appearance in myth a mark of longevity or prevalence of structures of the psyche (collective unconscious)?

What are you thinking about?

PS: For anyone interested in archetypes or the collective unconscious. I have made a page listing explanations for people to become familiar with the ideas. Those pages will be updated as I come across more information. I’m still very much a beginner here, so feel free to learn with me.

Best explorations

-Ryan; 4/24/2020

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Sleeping With Jesus and Darwin

I grew up in a religious home. Do not take that to mean I was religious. I went to church because my mom made me. I was not exactly waking up cheerful and proper on Sunday morning, singing harmonies of Amazing Grace. We didn’t go every single week, but I was exposed to many of the common teachings of today’s non denominational Christian church. And I at least knew enough to be completely turned off when I was exposed to science in high school. How was I supposed to believe some dude died and CAME BACK TO LIFE three days later, all to somehow save mankind? How was I supposed to believe God created literally everything when I had learned about Darwin’s theory of evolution and selection? And the fact that none of these contradictions were even broached in church really turned me off. The church goes on acting as if many of the things they preach are not in direct opposition to hard science. These contradictions were not spoken of – more or less tucked away in the DO NOT DISCUSS category. Surely, if you ignore something long enough it will just go away right?

One of the things that bothered me most as a kid was the extreme geographical bias of the great savior Jesus. Was I simply lucky to be born in the blessed holy land of the southern United States where Christian churches were on every other street corner? What about the billions of people born around the world who will never be exposed to the Bible, Jesus Christ, nor ever see a church? Did the great forgiving savior simply forget about those billions of people? Were they sentenced to Hell simply by virtue of birth location? That didn’t strike me as a great strategy by the almighty one. It was also not difficult to see that many of the religions shared a great majority of their teachings. Sure they were dressed up in different words and practices, but they seemed to almost be coming from the same source. If my God was teaching the same principles as your God, should we not go to the same Heaven? Unfortunately the dogma and traditions of religious institutions seek to emphasize distinctions rather than embrace the many of qualities connecting the world’s religions.

My largest stumbling block was the manner in which the Bible or Christian stories were taught to me. They were taught as objective truths. God did create the entire world in 7 days (or whatever), and Jesus did in fact come back to life after being crucified and killed. The basic theory of evolution I was taught in high school clearly contradicted the truth of creation I was taught in church. But factual contradiction was not the the only problem here. I was forced to entertain the idea hypocrisy. How can one assemble a tome espousing the virtue of truth and honesty, when the first book on the creation of the world is a blatant lie when interpreted literally? At this point I was not aware of the metaphorical and metaphysical truths actually being described by the creation story. I did not have that belief structure because the idea of the Bible as metaphorical truth was never discussed during my time in church. From the viewpoint of the dogmatists and traditionalists of institutionalized religion, claiming a metaphorical truth would be the largest surrender and step backwards possible, so I understand their predicament. I could go on with the problems I was finding in the teachings of the Christian church, but these illustrate the point clearly enough. These sentiments generally sum up my spiritual position from high school up until about 1 year ago (I’m 26 now).

“The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most spiritual world, which would seem to be the coldest and most devoid of presuppositions, and has obviously operated in an injurious, inhibiting, binding, and distorting manner.”
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I never had a feeling of contempt or disdain towards those who considered themselves religious, or believers. In fact, I admired those people. Not only because they were generally good people, but because it was evident that religion was this intricate connecting fabric of all peoples. I went to engineering school and was surrounded by people who were technical, science minded individuals. Many of my classmates were religious and seemed to have no problem building a career based on science while also believing that a man rose from the dead. I don’t know if these people were living their lives with some form of low grade cognitive dissonance, or if they were spiritually advanced to the level of holding paradox and understanding deep metaphor (I would have to guess the former based upon my experience with religious teachings). Anyways, I suppose I always had a deep respect for religion even if it I didn’t understand it or believe it.

Over the last year my views have changed rather dramatically. Or perhaps, they have simply come full circle. I became very interested in the ideas that lay under religion, those common threads. This led me to Jospeh Campbell (The Hero With a Thousand Faces) which led me to Carl Jung (multiple books), while previously being influenced by the metaphysical ideas of Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now), and Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements). Over the many months of these readings, I eventually realized they were all talking about the same thing. Each, through a different perspective, attempting explanations of the divine – that force or essence connecting all things, that is all things. The thing that gives rise to religion.

The fundamental problem with teaching religion is that God is all things. Therefore, when you speak about God, you are always making some sort of abstraction. Words can be classified as denoting substance, activity, quality, or relationship. For example, dog and human would belong to the category of substance, he runs or she jumps would belong to activity, dark and light would belong to quality, and lastly, having wealth or status would belong to the category of relationship. The idea of God does not fit into one of these categories, for it is all things. God is ineffable by nature, words are no more than partial descriptions. This is the fundamental reason why we must look to religion as teachings of metaphorical truths rather than concrete, objective, or historical truths. The fact that words unfailingly recoil from the idea of God demands a deeper interpretation than simple historical fact. When one views religious teachings as metaphors, the room for development and spiritual growth is magnified. Dogma feels this as reduction, when in reality, this opens the door to the infinite.

This understanding creates plenty of room for both Darwin and Jesus. The genes that are the units of selection for Darwin’s theory have been through innumerable events of birth, death, and re-birth, just as the followers of any religion have been. Science and religion are not diametrically opposed. They are two distinct lenses through which one can gaze upon reality. They are both tools capable of fantastic dynamism, growth, and innovation. Both able to generate insights into our existence, and quite possibly into our purpose. When the western scientific approach seals its walls to religion, it is limiting its possibilities and trapping creative minds. It is quite literally placing bounds on what is possible. If we limit science to only that which we currently understand, we will not be able to meet the demands of our world. We must be willing to leap into the unknown, and we must reward those bold thinkers, nay, bold adventurers. When religious institutions rely on dogma and tradition to spread their message, they are alienating future generations and severely limiting the profound spiritual wisdom of our ancestors. They are acting as a reducing valve to an unfathomable beauty and source of insight and creativity. Tomorrow’s church must embrace the deeper truths, those that underly all the religions. It must embrace the complexity of God instead of attempting to reduce the ideas to flat historical fact. We must fight the tendency to identify with only one of science or religion. Together, they can be constructive and their collaboration might just be necessary for the fantastic problems of our future. Here is to future scientist shamans.

Best explorations

-Ryan; 4/19/2020

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God Value and Opposites

To maintaining tension between the ego and the unconscious. The ego acts as the necessary anchor, but the unconscious is the portal to the idea of God. The extreme acceptance and submission to the inadequacy of your own perspective and the admission of its equality with that of the other. This is empathy, conscientiousness, and the thing that should take the god value.

For those unfamiliar with the term God Value, it is simply that which we value most. In order to act in the world we have to establish a hierarchy of values. Although much of the ordering may occur unconsciously, this hierarchy must exist in order to maneuver in such a complex world. The God Value is simply the value that rests at the top of your personal hierarchy.

What is your God Value?

Best explorations

-Ryan

8; 4/10/2020