The Eternal Conundrum of the Word “God”

Ivan Figueroa-Otero MD FACS www.ivanfigueroaoteromd.com

Is it the basis for the belief in Atheism?

Is there a common ground between the sectarian-belief systems and those of secular-minded thinkers? I will try to find it in my search to understand the nuances of the word “God.” I uphold that our understanding of the good, the bad and the ugly of this word originates from the conflicting views that sprout from religious sectarianism and proselytism, its resultant economic and social strife, and the incongruities within the new scientific views of our universe. My academic background drives me to suggest that modern scientific evidence dividing our universe into a matter-antimatter duality is not only a weak argument to deny the possibility of the existence of “God,” but paradoxically, it can also be used to create a real perspective that suggests its existence. We can also gain new perspectives if we attempt to understand the transcendental awareness employed by oriental and some occidental philosophic systems to describe other experiences of consciousness.

The Origin of Time

Time within timelessness emerged as images developed into an archived continuum of the previous experiences of consciousness, where the memory of the initial images become the happenings of the past and the present ones become the future of the previous ones.

The events experienced in the present time are the subjective origins of the past and future occurrences. Therefore, the implosion (Yin centripetal phase) resides within the explosion (Yang centrifugal phase) simultaneously, for the universe is always creating and destroying (recycling) itself as depicted in the Tai Chi sign.

Each centripetal and centrifugal manifestation becomes a continuous flow of time created by the memory of the events. It is similar to the events of a movie, where within a single film all past, present, and future events occur in a sequence relative to the observer that lives in the present.

The Origins of God (Monotheism) and Gods (Polytheism)

This word, and the immense emotional mirage that humanity attached to the very diverse interpretation of religious and pagan beliefs, develops from the misconception that the biological experience needs a beginning and an end to exist! This obtrusive emotional view establishes an abnormal codependent relationship between the creator and its creation. The result is an apparent disconnection of the created from its creator, generating a sense of loneliness and emptiness that is like the experience of an abandoned child or a parental loss to disease.

Awareness of the developing human brain appeared as the prehistoric man became the historical one, and the survival of the fittest was facilitated in the races that became more knowledgeable. Man’s need to understand the meaning of life and his relationship with the unsettling forces of nature gave origin to a hierarchical societal structure where some led, and some followed. Among the most influential were the appearance of leaders or chieftains that ruled the day to day administration and the shamans or priests that would heal and intercede between members and the forces of nature. The priestly interpretations of the way the tribes understood the forces of nature gave them a divine stature as the interceding force that could appease the gods to favor the specific needs of the tribes. This process used animal and sometimes human sacrifice to obtain the favor of the gods.

This hierarchical organization originated most of the known pagan religions. Their gods were many times depicted as powerful real or mythical animals, while others had human forms as in the Greek and Roman civilizations. Others, as in the Egyptian tradition, were depicted as part human and part animal.

Most monotheist religions originated in countries and races that had previous polytheist beliefs like the Adamic Jewish tradition, the Egyptian Sun God Akhenaten, and Zoroastrianism. Since then all their followers claim theirs to be the original monotheistic faith. As promoted by the political power supposedly entrusted upon the leader by the spiritual deity, these gave origin to the power that most monarchic ruling lineages of present times still claim to have.

Initially, the Romans were a tolerant multi-religious society influenced by the Hellenistic anthropomorphic polytheist religion and by other foreign beliefs that the military forces learned in their conquests, such as the practice of Mithraism that some maintain influenced the fundamental Christian theology. The irony of most monotheistic religions is that their god, although initially the one creator, have prophets that took the original message in completely divergent paths that are the historic cause of the most significant human blood shedding in history.

These diverging interpretations of monotheism and its theological variants developed into a new Hellenistic view of human-like qualities in their gods, ending with as many opinions of god as there are humans to interpret them. The emotionally tainted faces of god, plus the inaccessibility of its power and qualities without the priestly class to intercede for the common man, developed a significantly influential power over the sociopolitical systems that followed. These hierarchical structures developed into massive economic systems that controlled the access to “salvation” like toll gates of offerings. Instead of animal blood sacrifice, the new sacrifice was money. The theological foundations of all these religions were strongly influenced by the need to compete and survive within their economic, racial, social and geographical context.

What about Atheism? We can divide its complex roots in historical, religious, scientific, and political influences that came up in response to their hierarchical, economic, and political growth.

The history of atheism can be dated to as early as the 5th century B.C. Diagoras of Melos was a Fifth century B.C. Greek atheist, poet, and sophist, who traditionally has the credit of being the first Atheist, although the term was incorporated into literature around 1546 as described by the Merriam Webster dictionary.

Most of the original oriental religions, Jainism, Buddhism, various sects of Hinduism in India, and Taoism in China, didn’t hold monotheist views of a god with personal creative principles such as later held in pantheistic and panentheistic philosophies.

The growing schism that Descartes brought on with his Scientific Rationalism put a lot of pressure on church theologians to attempt concordance with the expanding scientific evidence. This metaphysical disjunction and the inability to prove the existence of a god by the scientific method is the mainstay of modern atheism. Its modern origins can be traced to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that eventually gave birth to most of the socialist philosophies that molded many new political systems.

The primary foundation of all modern atheism beliefs is the incapacity of contemporary science and its scientific method to prove the existence of a god transcendent to our physical universe. This schism created a “reasonable doubt” in the minds of most rational minds that together with the lack of a reasonable, coherent explanation of the nature of suffering associated with social-economic-health differences drove more believers into the files of Atheism.

Previous influences set the mood in the minds of intelligent people to question the totalitarian and abusive hierarchical power imposed by the priesthood making them like guards at toll gates that bridged the connection between “god” and its flock. Followers were asked to insure their safe passage by requiring obedience to superstitious rules and monetary offerings that would guarantee “salvation.”

The church then created a knockoff version of the transcendent reality of god, full of human and male chauvinist characteristics, thus establishing a codependent relationship between the believer and the deity. This codependent relation generated disgust in the educated and intelligent followers who couldn’t accept the substitute version. As I understand it the founders of Atheism rebelled against a non-intelligent spruced-up deity, in the misunderstanding that it was an actual god. In reality, that deity was a total fantasy.

In my opinion, this philosophical belief based on the discrepancy of scientific knowledge and religious doctrines has become obsolete, as science progresses to become more inclusive with new ways to understand the evolutionary role of man. Most of us agree that the “god” that religions portray to believers is unbelievable and non-existent and that this spiritual codependency is a variant of modern type slavery, trapping the progress of humanity within the religious, economic, and political needs of these hierarchical systems. You must admire the courage of those that dared renounce their enforced dependency upon these established unreasonable religious paradigms.

Quantum Physics Bridges the Schism Between Science and Spirituality

Quantum physics describes the laws of the microscopic (invisible) particles, in opposition to classical physics that attempts to determine the laws of the macroscopic (visible) particles. We now understand that our visible realities behave differently, although simultaneously, in both worlds under different sets of rules and time frames. As we observe the apparent independent interactions of the macroscopic world and dig deeper into the microscopic universe, we see a wholly different and interdependent interaction between the particles of the invisible world, as if they were in a holographic relationship.

This relationship was later described as the entanglement principle that exists in certain quantum states, where the reactions of individual particles exhibit a group response as if they were physically and energetically connected. These particles seem to interact with each other in a timeless manner as if no physical separation existed among them.

From quantum theory, we discovered that the observer can change the action of the observed particles, just like an artist can change the painting of a specific landscape by the subjectivity of his or her previous experience. We live in a world of mind-over-matter reality that is always evolving as the observers change.

Most of the reality we experience daily, like particles of light, sound waves, and gases in the air we breathe are invisible to our senses, yet they exist. So, the existence of something cannot be denied because of its invisibility. Therefore, the metaphysical separation of the physical and spiritual universe that the Cartesian theory postulated was wrong! We must adjust our paradigms of awareness and consciousness of our living experience accordingly.

Antimatter Maters for the Final Understanding of our Holographic Universe

The discovery that 95% of our universe is composed of antimatter and only 5% is the matter we experience as our universe made us aware of how little of our living experience we are aware of. As rational beings, we can’t accept our present reality and the scientific data we obtain from this limited pool of available knowledge as being the absolute, unchanging truth.

Since all we know about the antimatter universe is that it is timeless, immeasurable and that it is the origin of all matter, we must agree with the Platonic and Jungian archetypal theory that all possible knowledge resides in a nonphysical storage house, accessible to be discovered by the intelligent mind. That is why Plato, as well as the Buddha, expressed that the process of learning was one of remembering what we had forgotten.

In my books, I postulate that this source of knowledge could be the antimatter universe and that the consciousness of the biologic material universe resides in the three-dimensional reality of birth, aging (time), sickness, and physical death, as the Buddha said in his teachings. It is a fact that for an intelligent consciousness to exist, there must be a duality of awareness between an inner reality (subject) and an outer reality (object) and a memory of the relationship that exists between both. Without this memory, the process of learning could not occur. The evolutionary process of natural selection as described by Darwin would not exist without the learning process of automatic selection of the best options recorded in our mental continuum.

The fact that our biologic experience is recorded in our biologic (matter) DNA pool, where it is processed intelligently by the evolutionary process of natural selection, would seem to imply that this intelligent progression is also occurring in the antimatter (transcendent) universe.

I believe that the Quantum Entanglement principle processes the biologic knowledge of the hologram, interweaving the multidimensional relationship of all its parts by the natural selection of the evolutionary progress of the whole. The three musketeers say it well, “One for all and all for one.” This process is managed and archived in the holographic genome of our transcendent DNA, which traditionally has been referred to as our Akashic Records.

The law that rules this multidimensional hologram is based on Newton’s third law of thermodynamics (action-reaction principle), which holds that when a body exerts a force upon another, the latter exerts an equal and opposite force upon the former. In spiritual terms, it is known as the law of cause and effect. The purpose of this law is to prioritize the evolutionary progress and wellness of the hologram over that of one of its parts. The law will respond to each loss of equilibrium with a corresponding calibrating reaction that will only take into consideration the consequences for the whole hologram, and not its parts.

In a nutshell, since the universal hologram has continuum and memory of both the antimatter (multidimensional) and matter (tridimensional) components, there must be corresponding levels of consciousness in each part, and the archived experience of both parts is independently stored in the DNA of both universes.

The evolutionary progression of the universe depends on the natural selection of the best causes to obtain the best results. After all the causes (ideas) are tested in the tridimensional world, and the results are archived in the holographic memory of the antimatter universe, the universe will go back to its pre-big-bang state of empty reflection (meditation) like a dream state until the next explosive intelligent manifestation of consciousness occurs.

The beings that explore the tridimensional universe are all individual holograms guided by the inclusive law of cause and effect, and they all have the absolute option of free will in making their decisions, but they will always be responsible for the impact of their actions upon the results of the whole holographic universe.

In a nutshell, since the universal hologram has continuum and memory of both the antimatter (multidimensional) and matter (tridimensional) components, there must be corresponding levels of consciousness in each part, and the archived experience of both parts is independently stored in the DNA of both universes.

The evolutionary progression of the universe depends on the natural selection of the best causes to obtain the best results. After all the causes (ideas) are tested in the tridimensional world, and the results are archived in the holographic memory of the antimatter universe, the universe will go back to its pre-big-bang state of empty reflection (meditation) like a dream state until the next explosive intelligent manifestation of consciousness occurs.

The beings that explore the tridimensional universe are all individual holograms guided by the inclusive law of cause and effect, and they all have the absolute option of free will in making their decisions, but they will always be responsible for the impact of their actions upon the results of the whole holographic universe.

In conclusion, what is the real meaning of the word “God”? It’s bigger than any preconceived religious notions, and encompasses this holographic universe and the responsibility of each being to understand it and accept the journey that will reunite it with its origin and Creator, with all its twists and turns.