This morning, as often, I was praying God would forgive me, and it hit me that this request is absurd. Being somewhat cyclically amnesic, I’ve likely said this before, but ponder the stupidity of asking forgiveness from an infinite being. In my view, God is the animating force behind everything that exists; God both creates the form and the motion. Richard Feynman said that a square meter of empty space has enough latent energy to boil every ocean on Earth. Multiply that by an infinity of space, and that is still likely too small.
We can’t begin to grasp what we don’t know.
But I did want to make two points: I think the image of God as a punitive parent creates fear, and fear creates violence and hiding. I have no doubt that the reason I was tortured as I was, was to prevent me becoming a “brat”, and going to hell. Love was not a word used or understood, but brat was. Come hell or high water my mother especially was not going to raise a brat.
When you ask forgiveness of God, why? Because you fear punishment. In my case, I am doing something which makes me feel good, but have an ambient anxiety that I have done something wrong, and that the way to dispel it is to ask forgiveness. I do this out of fear. It is a way of reducing fear, because this would be reasonable if you were interacting with a human and offended them in some way.
But I truly think there will come a day when we view most religions as fairy tales, as ridiculous, as profoundly psychologically unbalanced in many ways. I think Love is and should be the universal creed, but even in Christianity it is diluted and unbalanced by the terror of Hell. Much hatred and violence flows from this primordial fear.
And I will wonder out loud how accurately human history could be viewed as as history of undiagnosed and unprocessed PTSD, which is more or less a disorder of the nervous system, and which leads to depersonalization, dissociation, pervasive fear and paranoia, and an inability to relax. Did the Assyrians beat their kids? I’ll bet they did. What is the cure for fear? More fear. War as homeopathic remedy.
I will say as well that I think a new and better psychology will figure out how to access and process infant trauma. I’ll bet it is much more common than we suppose.
Finally, the point of this post was this vision that popped in my head of developing an actual science of God. We know about Zero Point Energy. We know non-locality is a feature of our universe. We know consciousness can affect matter. Somebody needs to jump in with both feet and start finding and better understanding how our universe is shaped by an ordering principle, by a dynamic energy which is endless.
Some people are doing this of course, as people like Dean Radin have well chronicled, but my vision is a post-religious world, based fully on science, but a humanistic science, one which grasps the importance of faith and ritual and play, one which understands the value and centrality of symbols and human connections.
The specific vision that popped into my head was the creation of an endlessly reactive surface, and finding people who could affect it, and figuring out how. Robert Jahn demonstrated telekinesis as an observable reality beyond any reasonable doubt. But he did it statistically. My vision is doing it directly.
All these things are vastly important. We are literally talking about the nature of life and the structure of the universe. No more important topics could be imagined.
And yet fools waste time on spent theories, that should have died 100 years ago. There is no matter, only energy. It is my personal view that all of us are created a million times a second.