CHAPTER 1
HOSPITAL OF THE SOUL
At the cultural core of every great and lasting civilization is a religion that holds that the universe manifests divine love. Moreover, the most potent cultural figures in human history have been men and women that prove, through word and action, that placing ourselves in the service of that love is a source of great power and liberating strength.
Conversely, the skeptic looks at the human condition and the history of religious warfare and concludes that saintly martyrdom proves the rule. The universe is a random place, full of cruelty. The faith of the believer is misplaced foolishness.
It is this great gap between heart and mind that I first attempted to fill at www.everdeepening.org. From the perspective of a particle physicist and software designer, the material there and the book Love Works lead from reason into compassionate faith.
Since completing that work, I have wandered in the wilderness, talking with people of simple faith. In the journey, I was deeply impressed by the power of Christian conviction to guide people from darkness toward light. For the man trapped in substance abuse, this can be an inward journey. For the volunteer building a learning center in Africa, it is a journey that shines light outward.
But the simplicity of these relationships of love is bounded by a theology of rules and constraints that I believe would have wounded Jesus's heart. The logic of this theology is simple:
1. God is perfect.
2. Because God is perfect, he must be the origin of all things—because otherwise his perfection could be challenged.
3. Since God is perfect, his Creation was perfect in its conception.
4. Since life is not perfect, the source of imperfection must be human disobedience. In our little, weak way we seek to challenge God.
5. The only way to restore the perfection of Creation is to learn obedience—in other words, to follow God's rules.
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the net result of this chain of logic is that far too much power is ceded by the faithful to those that claim to know the rules.
The more serious fault of the logic is the conclusion that Humanity is a flaw in Creation. This is completely in opposition to the actual truth. Humanity is an essential and valued part of Creation, an element that is held with the most tender concern and honored regard in recognition of the difficulty and importance of the work that we must perform, the pain and sacrifice involved in accomplishment of that work, and the joyous consequences of its eventual completion.
The goal of this book, then, is to heal the confusion and shame that informs so much Christian dialog, replacing it with a sober understanding of our role and the tools given us to achieve it. That understanding will be supported by the evidence of Scripture, which is best interpreted as a history of the work done by Divine Love to prepare Humanity for its job.
In the Realm of the Almighty
If the Bible is the record of the Almighty's work on Humanity, then the only way to make sense of it is to understand the motivations of the Almighty for taking on the work. So I am going to propose a story. It is a story that will be familiar to us, because it involves the angel Lucifer. It also matches the experience of those that have achieved a degree of spiritual maturity in their journey as Christians.
To an infant, a mother must seem a god from whom all things come. But outside the nursery, we know that she struggles with worries that sometimes have no easy solution; thus, it must be with the Almighty. While I am certain that this Creation could be destroyed without great effort by the Almighty that would have undesirable consequences in his Realm.
Note how that metaphor works. It starts with the idea of a relationship—the relationship between a mother and a child. With that image in our minds, it places the Almighty and Humanity outside that relationship as a sort of magnified image of it; then, it makes it clear that there is much more to the Almighty than that relationship to Humanity.
This is the essence of the Realm of the Almighty. It is a place of pure ideas: ideas built upon and around ideas, ideas exchanged and merged and transformed, and ideas evolving into ever larger and more glorious imaginings of possibility. As they merge, these ideas manifest personalities that we name as angels.
At the center of the maelstrom of ideas is the principle that we know as Unconditional Love. In that Realm, Unconditional Love makes the promise that every idea has value, has its place, and has the right to survive until it chooses to surrender itself in service to an idea that it accepts as greater than it. In recognition of the worthiness and benevolence of this principle, the angels choose to place themselves in obedience to Love's judgments, and in service to the expansion of its dominion. The means they use is to sing its praises so that all other ideas feel its presence.
The Almighty is the sum total of ideas great and small held together by the compact of Unconditional Love.
The Disease of Selfishness
There are diseases in this Realm just as there are diseases in ours. The most serious is the absolute contradiction of Unconditional Love. This is not destructiveness, because destruction is easy to flee when Unconditional Love calls as a refuge. No, the most serious disease is selfishness. It is the assertion "I am most important." It is the tendency of the greater angels to say to the lesser, "No, you cannot leave me to associate with other angels—you are mine, and I decide where you go."
Now obviously in the competition for relationship amongst ideas, selfishness is always going to be a problem, and its management is going to be an ongoing concern. But the concept that would be both most vulnerable to infection and most dangerous as an agent of transmission would be the concept of exchange. In the Creation we inhabit that exchange occurs through light, and thus we recognize Lucifer, the Lord of Light, as the agent of exchange in the Realm of the Almighty.
Lucifer was infected with selfishness and attempted to take control of the Realm held by Unconditional Love. The Realm survived and was faced with the problem of how to carry on in the aftermath of his rebellion.
Let's bring this down a human scale. We've faced this problem in our own history, in the two Great Wars of the twentieth century, both against and lost by Germany. After the World War I, the victors concluded that there was something wrong with the German spirit, and crude methods were used to beat the German people down.
The defect of that logic was that Germany was not a single personality. It was composed of individuals—bakers, priests, and mothers alongside arms merchants and generals. Was it right and just to punish all of those people alike? The answer is found in the letters of British soldiers enforcing the Treaty of Versailles, writing home to beseech family and friends to ask the Foreign Office to end the blockade of German ports, because it broke their hearts to see the children starving.
And then into the crucible of the just grievances of the German people was poured the self-righteousness of Adolf Hitler. Seeing no justice from without, the German people asserted their strength from within, and forced the world into a second Great War. Fortunately, this time another nation held sway in the aftermath and put forth a plan of healing—the Marshall Plan.
In this history, we see a realization of the considerations that moved Unconditional Love in the aftermath of Lucifer's rebellion. First, Lucifer's function was essential to the operation of Unconditional Love—without a means of exchange, ideas seeking expression could only do so by dominating ideas in their vicinity, which is in violation of the contract of Unconditional Love. But exchange was the method used by selfishness to cause rebellion. This was a Catch-22 situation that required a permanent cure for the disease.
Secondly, there were all those innocent parts of Lucifer that deserved a chance at liberation.
This, then, is the purpose of the Creation we inhabit: to solve the problem of selfishness by healing Lucifer and so restoring him to his function.
Antibody Matter
Even the casual student of science can see some huge contradictions in this story with what is proposed by modern scientists concerning the origin of the universe. Creation, of which I believe our universe is only a small part, was designed as a hospital to contain and heal Lucifer. It was not launched into existence as a super-heated plasma that wiped away all history but initiated carefully in order to preserve as much of the beneficial parts of Lucifer's personality as possible.
I could continue with a detailed comparison of my picture of the plan of Creation with the picture put forth by physicists and astronomers over the last 150 years. I perceive a plan that does not contradict the experimental results of relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, cosmology, or evolution. It simply replaces the mathematical framework used to calculate results with a completely different set of methods.
Working out the details is clearly beyond the means of a single individual. Just as it did from the time that quantum and relativistic phenomena were first observed, I expect that it will take the effort of a century to iron out the details.
What's important, for the purposes of this discussion between those of faith, is that we understand the plan of healing. It began with a cage that was then filled with a framework or lattice that gradually filled all of space. (The astrophysicists recently discovered the framework as "dark energy.") The pieces of the framework were smaller than the smallest of ideas, and so acted as a kind of molasses to slow down the rate of their interaction.
In turn, the enclosed ideas create a disturbance in the uniformity of the framework. The lattice acts to minimize that disturbance by collecting it in one place—this is the essence of the gravitational interaction.
As the framework filled space—actually, in effect, creating space—selfish ideas would have pulled themselves in to maintain control of the ideas they had come to dominate. And here is where the real genius of the program becomes apparent. In order to avoid losing control of subservient ideas, selfish ideas have to prevent the lattice from disturbing their domain. That means carefully controlling the structure of the lattice, which means embedding themselves deeply into it. Unfortunately, the lattice—being a kind of molasses—is sticky. The harder the selfish ideas work to maintain control, the more they get stuck in the lattice. Eventually, they tear themselves apart.
So what is the scientist's conception of these relationships? Well, where the smallest of ideas is trapped in the lattice, we find what the scientists call a fermion. Those fermions combine to create the atoms and molecules that we recognize as matter. The selfish parts of us, seeking to maintain our separation from the Almighty, grab onto the matter as a way of asserting our identity. In the end, that attempt results in the destruction of selfish behavior, freeing the collaborative parts of our personalities to return to the Realm of our origin.
Out of Chaos—Intelligent Design!
This process of liberation has been going on for a long time—just how long is anybody's guess—as the estimates of the age of the universe are derived from the Big Bang model which I propose that we discard. The process has enormously chaotic and violent aspects—consider supernovae and black holes, for example. Fortunately, my sense is that most of those events involve the most primitive forms of thought and so don't result in the destruction of ideas that haven't become stuck in matter through selfishness.
Of course, one by-product of astronomical violence is new forms of matter—the heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon, silicon, and iron. These atoms can be assembled into an astonishing variety of forms as compared to the stars formed by hydrogen and helium. As a consequence, they are capable of playing host to a far greater variety of ideas. This merger of matter and ideas—or as we usually speak, of matter and spirit—is the essence of Life.
And it is here that the Plan of Creation becomes more than clever and reveals inspiration that can only be Divine. Remember, the Almighty seeks more than liberation for captives; he seeks a permanent cure for the disease.
Imagine a bundle of spirit—part collaborator and part egotist—floating in the framework of interstellar space. A supernova hurls complex elements into space, and sensing new possibilities, the spirit attaches itself to those particles. As the gases coalesce into planets, the bundle of spirit pulls itself slowly into their orbits, the various parts attaching themselves where they seem best to belong.
In a planet such as Earth, the process continues. Water collects to form seas, and as it combines with the silica in stone, heat is released. Methane gas in the atmosphere combines, following electrical discharges and volcanic activity, to form heavier organic compounds. Some of these fall into the ocean where they form pools under the water. Under heat, with the minerals of the stone, more chemicals form.
The pool of chemicals becomes shielded from the water by a membrane formed of chemicals with the properties of phospholipids, creating a more potent chemical environment, with hither-to unknown molecules. Finally, during a sub-sea earthquake or upon overflow into a turbulent water jet, the pool is agitated; and small membrane-encased drops containing a mix of sea water and chemicals form.
Thus the first cells are formed, and now things become truly interesting. The spiritual forms attach to the fine drops and influence their motion, trying to create an arrangement that will allow them to acquire energy to manifest their purpose—either to return to the Realm of the Almighty or to selfishly maintain control of their captives. Progress is slow because the spirits cannot specify the shape of the matter they are attempting to control. They can only pull things together and hope that the outcome is useful.
Skipping ahead on the long arc of evolution, we arrive at neurons, which spirit discovered allow it to couple directly with the electrical signals of the brain. Working over hundreds of millions of years to identify and advance a host with the capacity to create tools, spirit guided evolution to achieve homo sapiens.
With the incidence of Humanity, the game fundamentally changed. You see, angels cannot leave the shelter of Unconditional Love without risk of destruction. They do not have free will. Humanity, however, can design material structures that facilitate the expression of selfishness, or it can choose to emulate the Almighty and facilitate the expression of Unconditional Love, binding it deep into the innermost recesses of the spirits that are connected to the world around us.
Given the conditions that forced the creation of this hospital, it was certain that for a long time selfish personalities would seem to dominate; however, those personalities that chose selfishness stay stuck in matter, pulling themselves apart, and are annihilated billions of years from now when the sun expands and vaporizes our planet. Those that practice Unconditional Love are allowed access to enormous sources of power until they are able to open a tunnel through the framework and return to the Realm of the Almighty, bringing with them the immunity from selfishness that is established when Unconditional Love is integrated into the foundations of our personality.
Do you see now just how important the work we do is?
