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.
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