THE MIND OF GOD

Hello all. It is definitely interesting how this amazing construct called time works. I just realized it has been almost ten months since my last post, while in my head I can swear I just completed one a couple of days ago. At any event, I got an e-mail from a dear friend of mine from Brazil letting me know he came across my “blog” and decided to shoot me a note to let me know he has read it. I put the word blog in quotes above since, after my epiphany of realizing ten months has elapsed since the time of my last post, I cannot really with a straight face call this space a Blog. It is more like a quick fix for my writing addiction.

Funny thing is that I couldn’t really tell whether people were getting to this space or not, as I never invested the needed amount of time making sure the blog is properly published, or to monitor the number of people who access this link for that matter. Now, my good friend’s e-mail worked as a much needed shot of adrenaline for me to get out of my inertia and get going on this again, as it is good proof that though it might not be TheNewYorkPost.com in number of readers, there will always be people coming through this space.

What I would like to talk about today comes from another epiphany of mine, this one a tad more serious than the one described above; thus the title of this text. Several prophets throughout our history have mentioned that nothing that happens in our Universe escapes the knowledge of God. We can take the Koran as an example, where it reads: “Not a leaf does fall but with His knowledge..." Al-Qur'an 6:59. Now that I quoted the Koran, let me make a quick disclaimer for the ones of you who are not used to my line of thinking. I am not affiliated to any religion. In fact, my previous post to this space talks exactly about that. I am a student of all religious thoughts and philosophical currents; therefore I will here and there cite religious passages and quotes in order to exemplify some points. So, fear not, you who get really turned off by religious bias you. You can keep on reading.

The passage above was always stuck in my mind. One that, to me, was always practically impossible to rationalize and understand. Intuitively, I did accept this as something very much possible. Moreover, the very concept of omnipresence and omnipotence of God is something that I do believe in. I could go on about the rationale that makes me believe on those two concepts, but that in itself would probably be enough to fill the space of this entire text, so it is best if I save it to another post. Let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion, that we do accept the notion of omnipresence of God. What that means is that the very definition of the term implies that He/She/It does have knowledge of anything that happens in this Universe.

The question than is: How? How can we start to understand this question? Is it one of those questions that we should dismiss by saying that there are things our minds can’t comprehend? I flat out don’t accept that. I really don’t believe that God would be so secretive to the point of concealing something as fundamental the relationship Creator/Creation from His creation. Something that came out of the Perfect One cannot be imperfect. Definitely finite, which is a totally different story altogether, but not imperfect. Again, we are starting to venture onto another philosophical point about our own perfection that I will also save to another time. Going back to the heart of the matter at hand, I just couldn’t accept this as something my mind couldn’t comprehend, along with a list of things that I have in my mental list of things that need to be understood about the Creator/Creation relationship.

This went on until very recently, when I got my hands on some material credited to Hermes. Hermes is named by many as being the precursor of the philosophy that was used by the great prophets of our history; the ones that became figureheads of the multiple religious movements of our time. When I started reading a little about the history behind this figure, I started to get a little excited as, if this indeed carried some merit, his texts could contain all the answers I was looking for. I was preparing myself for years of reading. In my mind, if he was indeed the source of all religious movements, I was to expect volumes and volumes composed of thousands upon thousands of pages. What wasn’t my surprise when I discovered he left nothing but seven principles? The whole content of the so called Hermetic philosophy is composed of a whopping sever principles!

At first, my excitement became disappointment. My avid reader self was already drooling over the prospect of getting my hands on some sort of Hermetic Encyclopedia, or something of the likes. My mind was set to tackle the potentially daunting task of reading the “entire Hermetic material”. Well; that was much less time consuming than I thought. The entire material filled a grand total of one page. Once I got over my initial disappointment, I decided to actually ready what the seven principles were. The very first one came about so called the Principle of Mentalism that reads: "THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental."

This dropped like a bomb in my mind. I have came across several lines of though, religions and philosophies along my years of constant research implying the Universe as we perceive is nothing but a mental creation. All the way from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave through Pythagoras who suggested the Universe was nothing but numbers, culminating in my own conclusions that since our five senses are nothing more than signals interpreted by the brain, the idea behind a mental Universe was starting to make sense. Now, when I read this one sentence, since it was it, one sentence, I decided to meditate on it. Literally meditate on it, on the literal sense of the word, not the metaphorical one that we overuse sometimes. I was going to purposely try to take my consciousness to a different state by meditating, while keeping this sentence in mind. I wouldn’t take the easy way out this time and read one of the hundreds and hundreds of interpretations to this line. Since this supposedly is part of the source of all religious thought, these thoughts being nothing but interpretations of this concept, it wouldn’t do me any good to try and use an interpretation to interpret the source of the interpretation. Get it?

Now is when I come back to the epiphany. What I came away with from that exercise was that our Universe and everything in it, including us, in something that is currently happening in the Mind of God. Mind you that when I include us in this mix, I am not just saying the physical body us, but also our own minds us. What I believe it is happening is that God holds all creation in His mind. Think about it from a moment. Have you ever had a dream whereby you are not necessarily part of the dream itself, but a mere observer of it? You are aware of everything that happens within the scope of the dream. You know what everybody is doing and even thinking. You know the state of mind of every character of the dream; their intentions and feelings. Everything in the dream is really a part of you as it is a creation of your subconscious mind, being therefore a part of your own mind. Also, you are part of everything in the dream, as you created the dream.

This jives perfectly with what the great sages of our history have tried to teach us. This explains several religious/philosophical passages stating we are the image of God, God is within us, God dwells in us as us, we are Gods, we are all connected through consciousness, all is nothing but One, there is nothing else other than God, the Universe is an illusion, and I can go on and on for pages and pages of passages that fits this scenarios. Obviously I am not saying necessarily that God is sleeping in a bed and is dreaming the Universe as we speak. Though, based on how our planet has been suffering lately, some may say He might be indeed sleeping. Jokes aside, what I am proposing is that all that exists is currently happening in the Mind of the All. The specific mechanism of how that is happening I believe is finally one of the things that is beyond our power to comprehend as I don’t think we can’t really expect to grasp something of this level of abstraction. Going back to the dream comparison, knowing how this is happening in the mind of God would be similar to have one of the characters of our dream figuring out they are part of a dream that you are having and that you sleeping in your supper man onesies while doing it. However, I think the main concept is something that made sense to me and we should not dismiss.

When I came to this realization, my first reaction was to think: “Well, this is really dandy. That means not only all my surroundings are nothing but an illusion as I myself am not real.”. It took me some thinking in order to dismiss this line of thinking and calm my disappointment that was quickly becoming anger. If nothing else, the one thing I am sure is that I am. I am not an illusion in myself. I am a conscious being, who think, or at least I would like to think I do, and rationalize things with my mind; therefore I am not an illusion. I am real. The second part I needed to make my peace with was the potential illusion of the Universe. I really don’t think it is the case, as much as I do think it is a matter of reference point. I’d say that if we put the reference in the Mind of the All, than the Universe is indeed an illusion, in the sense that is not really real to Him but a development inside his mind, much like your thoughts are not real to someone else who is not you. However, if we put the frame of reference in our own minds, the Universe is as real as our own minds themselves. The Universe is where our minds dwell and, under the premise that all is happening in the Mind of the All, is made of the same essence as our minds. Since we already established that our minds are real, by association, the Universe is also real; considering our minds as the reference frame.

There; no need to panic. Things are back to the way they were. Or, are they? This realization put me in a state of awe even deeper than the one I had simply by contemplating the Universe and its laws. The Universe always amazed me on its level of interdependency and perfection. By proxy, the Mind of God always amazed me for being able to create the fundamental laws that are the foundation for the Universe. Now that I believe that not only He did create the laws that govern the Universe, but that everything that we perceive as well as the things that we intuit that are happening but can’t perceive with our five physical senses are actually unfolding within the Mind of God! Now that is just flat out mind bogglingly incredible! Once we start to grasp these concepts it becomes absolutely impossible not to be totally in love with the Mind of All, and surrender in state of pure admiration to Its Infinite reach. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said: "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."