A Synopsis Of My Personal Cosmology – Part 1
LAST UPDATED ON: DECEMBER 14, 2023 AT 9:47 AM
DECEMBER 14, 2023 BY FATHER SEÁN ÓLAOIRE, PHD
An Essay in Four Parts
1. Introduction
A friend challenged me: “Telescope your cosmology, your entire thinking, into one homily”. If I tried to telescope 77 years of life, 59 years of meditating and 51 years as a priest into one homily, the following essay is what I might come up with. Now, I know that it is a ridiculous kind of exercise. And I know that a map is not the terrain. And a cosmology is not the reality. But we need maps to guide ourselves.
Buddhism has a saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him”. In other words, if you create a theology that you really believe in, “kill it before it kills you”. But we need theologies to maneuver as we try to understand what God is. There is a great statement by the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, “I pray daily to God to rid me of God”. As soon as we attempt to create reality, we try to express in words what essentially is ineffable.
So, I must navigate between giving you enough detail to let you know what my thinking is, and at the same time, to not swamp you with so much stuff that I do not confuse you in the process. Now, because I’m Irish, I can’t be succinct. So, I’m not going to be able to tell you in one phrase what my cosmology is. I’m a bit more like Moses. So, I’m going to be rather wordy.
2. Some Important Definitions
a. Reality
If we live in the West, we suffer under the misapprehension that something is only real if it can be grokked by our sensorium — either directly, or by extension through our instrumentation. So, we don’t believe, in the West, that anything is real unless we can see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, or smell it. However, that is not my understanding of reality.
Reality exists in many different levels — some of them more pristine than others. I believe that anything you can sense, feel, think, remember, dream, choose, or imagine is real. But there are different levels of reality. And to make our maps of reality, we must be cartographers of all those levels. So, reality for me is much bigger than what we normally think.
b. Truth
Truth is not the same thing as fact. Fact is simply a data point in the physical Cosmos — not particularly important. So here is how I define truth: something is true if it transforms me and aligns me with Source. And something is ultimate truth if it transforms me radically and aligns me permanently with Source.
I’m not particularly interested in factoids. I’m interested in that which can transform me and align me with God. The factoids are only important to manipulate the physical world in which I find myself.
c. Memory
For me, memory goes all the way from “Eidetic Memory” which is the tiny memory that remains in your senses after you’ve experienced something. When you see something, there’s a small memory that lives in your eyes for a few nanoseconds. Or you hear a sound. There’s a memory of the sound that stays in your ear for a little bit of time. So that’s what I mean by “Eidetic Memory”, memory held by the sensorium itself. Then at some stage, it goes into short–term memory. And then, it goes into long–term memory.
I believe that the memories of an entire lifetime are available to you. I believe that the memories of all the lifetimes you’ve ever lived are available to you. And I believe ultimately in the Akashic Records — that everything that has happened in any dimension of God’s manifest realms has been recorded — that God is a doting grandparent who has videotaped everything that every one of Her children have ever done. So, memory to me means access to all of God’s data.
d. Imagination
Imagination is not the ability to make up stuff that is not real. Imagination is the ability that allows us to shift our state of consciousness, alter our mental frequencies, visit other dimensions, have encounters with entities and energies that exist in those dimensions, bring them back here, cross–fertilize them with our culture and, therefore, expand our models of what’s real. That’s what imagination is. It’s the most important gift an artist or a scientist has. Real science is based on imagination — leaps of creativity — not just technical data.
3. Only God Exists
I believe that, ultimately, only God exists and that everything that we experience is some kind of emanation, or articulation, of God.
God seems to have two aspects — a transcendent aspect, the “Isness” of God, which is totally ineffable and about which we can say nothing. And then there’s the “Immanence” of God — as She breathes and moves through Her manifestation. The “Immanence” of God is that which we can encounter and experience.
In a different way, you could say that there are three aspects to God. There’s the “Isness” of God, represented by the Father, in the Christian Trinity. There’s “God’s Total Self–Knowledge” represented by the “Word–of–God” or “Jesus” in the Christian Scriptures. And then there’s “God’s Total Love for Herself”, the total self–acceptance of this mystery. And that’s represented by the Holy Spirit.
4. Five Things I believe God Is Not
a. I do not believe that God is a person. I don’t think that God is some kind of superhuman being with human attributes. We have projected these onto God, from our own virtues and vices.
b. Nor do I believe that God is a “Creator”. I don’t think that God sits in His workshop and thinks, “Today I’m going to make elephants”. And then He makes elephants out of nothing. And then He says, “I think I’m going to make planets”, and then He makes planets. Or He says, you know, “I think I’m going to make spiders”, and then He makes spiders. For me, all manifestation is, literally, emanation from God.
It is the nature of God to emanate into manifestation. I’ve used the example, many times, of a flowerpot someone gave me. There was a bulb set in it. But I couldn’t see the bulb. And the person who gave it to me said, “It’s very simple. Stick your finger in the clay. If it’s dry, put water in it. If it’s wet, leave it alone”. And I put it by the window in my bedroom and a few weeks later; this green stalk began to emerge. And then, a few months later, four big trumpet flowers emerged. It’s not that the bulb created a stalk and that the stalk created four trumpet flowers. It was the nature of the bulb to emanate and manifest as stalk and then subsequently as flower and then again return to being a bulb.
I do not believe that God waves a magic wand and then elephants come into existence — from nothing. Rather, it is the nature of God’s “Immanence” to manifest everything that we see around us — whether they’re galaxies, elephants, spiders — or humans.
c. Nor do I believe that God is a “Covenant–Maker”. I don’t think that God makes agreements with particular groups of people. I do not believe that God has that kind of relationship with any group.
d. Nor do I believe that God is a micro–manager — that He inserts himself into human affairs and gets really upset when you don’t follow His laws.
e. And I do not believe that God is partisan. Rather, I believe that everything that exists is a Word–of–God–Made–Flesh. In the Christian dispensation, we make a huge mistake, I believe, by claiming that the Word–of–God became flesh just once. In the prologue to his gospel John says: “In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. And the word became flesh and dwelt among us”. And we think this word is “Jesus Christ”. We make a grave mistake if we think that this happened only once.
When I meditate on that passage, here’s the version I use. I say, “In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. And the word became flesh. And You are such a word”. So, everything that exists in the phenomenological realms is a Word–of–God–Made–Flesh.
5. The Metaverse
I do not believe that we live in a Universe. I believe that we live in a Metaverse that has given birth to a pluriformity of Multiverses. And that this little Universe that we inhabit is one little baby connected to other little babies in the womb by black holes and white holes and that literally we live in a bubble bath of Universes, each of which is precious to God. And this Universe, we now know has more than 800 exoplanets — planets similar to Earth, that exist in other solar systems. The probability is that there are billions of such exoplanets. To think that life only exists on this one is ridiculous. It’s like thinking that the Earth is flat. There are other life forms out there much more advanced than us.
===
A Synopsis Of My Personal Cosmology – Part 2 – Evolution
LAST UPDATED ON: DECEMBER 14, 2023 AT 2:53 PM
DECEMBER 21, 2023 BY FATHER SEÁN ÓLAOIRE, PHD
An Essay in Four Parts
6. Planting and Tending Life
My next point is to look at life itself as it’s planted and tended. So, where does life come from in this little Universe? We believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years of age. But we know that our planet is only 4.6 billion years old. And so, there are parts of this Universe which are literally three times older than Planet Earth. Do we want to believe that for two–thirds of the existence of this Universe nothing happened — and that life then began to breed only on Planet Earth?
For me, that’s ridiculous. I’m convinced that life started elsewhere long before it started on Planet Earth. And it became very complex long before Planet Earth was seeded. Later, life was planted on Planet Earth. By whom? And how? When Sir Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, was asked about this he said, “I believe it is through directed panspermia, that spores came from outer space and settled on Planet Earth and began to grow”. And when somebody asked him, “How could spores exist in inter–galactic space?” he said,” because they were sent here in specially designed capsules”. Now, I think, it’s a bit more hands–on than that.
I don’t think that some extraordinary extra-terrestrial civilization bombarded Planet Earth with capsules filled with spores of life, but rather that the ET’s themselves visited here. I believe that many different extra–terrestrial societies, much more advanced than we are, visited the Planet and treated it as a garden. And they planted the garden. And they’ve come back regularly. And they’ve weeded the garden. And they’ve fertilized the garden. And sometimes they’ve grafted new stuff onto it, and they genetically modified it. And then, finally, as we’ve read in the Scriptures, they created us in their own image and likeness. So, what does that mean? That they finally bred a life form that somehow resembled those who planted the garden.
Now, are these gardeners the ineffable Source? No, we are simply talking about some very advanced civilizations that literally planted, tended, fertilized, and genetically modified this garden and continued to look after it. We read in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the book of Genesis, that some kinds of “Sky Gods” made us in their own image and likeness.
And moreover, they got infatuated with the human beings and began to breed with them. There’s a very strange statement in the Book of Genesis, in Chapter 6, where it says, “The Sons of God found the daughters of men to be really attractive and they took them to wife as many as they wanted, and they created a great race called the Nephilim”. They give this race two names in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sometimes it’s called the “Nephilim”. Sometimes it’s called the “Anakim”. And according to the Scriptures, which we believe are the word of God, the sons of God— whoever they are— found the daughters of men — whoever they are — to be very attractive. And they took them to wife. And they bred with them and created a race called the “Nephilim” or “Anakim”.
And so, in the Scriptures there’s a lot of evidence that life on Planet Earth didn’t just happen. It was seeded. It was planted. And it was tended. And my belief system is that there were many such civilizations that visited. Now, the tendency is that when a very technologically sophisticated civilization meets a very primitive group, the primitive group always presumes that the others are Gods.
During World War II, when the Japanese and American air forces landed in the Polynesian Islands and brought supplies, the local population thought that they were Gods, and started imitating their rituals. They created runways and built model aircraft hoping that these “Gods” would come back with more cargo. That’s how they became known as “cargo cults”.
And so, I am convinced personally, that religion — as distinct from spirituality — is literally the false worship of advanced civilizations by primitive people. And we are the primitive people who continue to believe that some kinds of “Sky Gods”, who are just advanced civilizations, are in fact, Source. And we defer to this false Source.
7. The Grand Sweep of Evolution
Darwin would have us believe that evolution is predicated on three principles. First, spontaneous mutation — just any kind of mutation, most of which are useless — and that occasionally there’s a good one. And then, second, there’s a process of natural selection based on “Survival–of–the–Fittest”. It’s a dog–eat–dog world out there. And, then third, this process, very gradually and smoothly, morphs into more and more complex life forms. That’s the Darwin viewpoint. And I don’t agree with it at all.
I believe that there is an intelligence guiding this entire process. So, if you want to call it “Intelligent Design” that’s fine with me. Rather, I mean that God’s wisdom is built into evolution and that, therefore, there’s intelligence to it — that things are not just mutating randomly. There’s meaning to the direction they’re planning to take as they achieve more and more complexity. And, rather than claim that it’s “Survival–of–the–Fittest” and dog-eat-dog, I see much more evidence for cooperation and symbiosis in nature — all life forms helping each other to survive in their own particular niches.
And I do not see evidence for evolutionary gradualism. In fact, there’s no evidence whatsoever in the fossil record that evolution happens as gradual sophistication. Rather there’s evidence for what Stephen J. Gould called “Punctuated Equilibria” that every so often, there’s a Quantum Leap — and a whole new feature comes into being on Planet Earth.
So, it’s not this gradual ascent but instead there are punctuated jumps. If we were brought up in the Judeo–Christian model, we probably subscribe to the following tenets. That there’s only one Universe. That there’s only life on one planet in the Universe. And although we know that there are at least 150 billion galaxies containing about 150 billion solar systems in each galaxy, we claim that life is only on one of these planets. Then we claim that on this planet, there’s only one species that has a soul – the human species. And we claim that there’s either a chosen race or a particular religion that God particularly loves.
We think that we only get one shot at life. And then, at the end of this lifetime there’s a judgment and that we’re concerned that with the thumbs down we go to Hell. And with the thumbs up and we go to Heaven. So, that’s pretty much what most of us have been brought up to believe. That’s one model of cosmology. I see it very differently.
8. The Soul
Are we the only creatures that have souls? I don’t believe that for a moment. I think that every sentient being has a soul. And, I believe, there are different levels of soul. There are souls that inhabit human spacesuits, and they’re fairly sophisticated, but they are not anything as sophisticated as the souls that decide to inhabit and to vitalize, let’s say, a planet, or a galaxy.
So, I think, for instance, that Planet Earth itself has a soul. And that this soul volunteered more than 3.7 billion years ago, to inhabit the third rock from the Sun in our solar system and to breed life until it threw up a lifeform capable of experiencing and recognizing its own divinity and therefore the divinity of all else that is. So, everything — from spiders to elephants to daffodils — has a soul and they’re all precious to God. A banana slug is no less important to God than an Avatar, as far as I’m concerned. And there is not just one lifetime to accomplish this journey of evolution. We get as many lifetimes as we need.
9. Avatars and Buddhas and Their Relationship to Source
An Avatar is the transcendence of God reaching down into the immanence of God. It is the ineffableness of God revealing itself in the human story. And so, it’s like a downward–pointing triangle. And a Buddha means human excellence reaching toward the Divine. It is our humanness trying to align totally with our divine nature and finding its way back to the transcendence of God. It’s like an upward–pointing triangle. And, if you look at these two triangles intersecting, you get a Star of David. This is a beautiful symbol of what happens between the Avatar and the Buddha.
And so, the Avatar is where transcendence expresses itself in the human arena; and the Buddha is where an excellent human being — virtuous and aligned fully — reaches back towards innate divinity.
===
===
