My Interpretation of God and Consciousness
I’ve definitely “felt” the strong presence of what I call God in psychedelic and psychotic trips. And also some extremely intelligent (and Scientific) people believe in God and have developed detailed and (presumably) logically sound explanations of the “spiritual realm”. It could be a mass delusion…but just as well it could not be.
There’s so many interpretations and theories of what God is and what his nature is.
My interpretation of God that still aligns with my understanding of physics, is that God is along the lines of “society” but on a universal (or larger) scale. Meaning God perceives, by proxy, all the fields, forces, and preferences that govern all matter in the universe, just like we may feel sensations in all parts of our body. If there’s something outside the universe, maybe he perceives that too. It’s likely he perceives outside of time and space (as he would probably perceive insides of black holes and quantum interactions). And of course there might be stuff outside the universe, or alternate physical dimensions, temporal dimensions, and things we can’t actually perceive as consciousnesses bound to this universe. Of course given this enormous field of perception, it must “feel” very differently from what being a human feels like.
Psychedelics give a really good glimpse into the possibilities, of the enormous range of different perceptions possible outside of our usual realm of functioning. On higher doses, we perceive something entirely different from the physical world, which we can’t recreate or explain in regular states. It’s akin to gaining new senses, and maybe even loosing some old ones. Time and space basically lose meaning. Events sort of happen outside of a space. You can’t say x is to the left of y, or x is small while y is big, that simply doesn’t make sense in that frame of reference. Events don’t follow a sequence. There’s kind of a superposition of stuff happening. And you can’t even name what that “stuff” is. It’s not an object, it’s not a number. It’s not a concept. The closest I’ve come is “feeling”. It’s kind of like if thoughts were your only reality, and you didn’t have any senses. You don’t really have a memory, of past or future, there’s only what there is at that moment. The only parallel I’ve seen to normal perception are emotions/feelings seem to exist, even at higher doses, but they’re radically different from the way we experience them. This little clue actually hints at some possibly universal similarity between consciousnesses. I had a psychosis episode which I could only describe as alternating existence and non existence, no context, no universe. But this brought up a sense of unexplainable intense fear. These experiences give me a really good glimpse of how radically different God’s consciousness may perceive things.
Anyways, despite God’s consciousness functioning on levels far beyond ours, I do believe his physical manifestation obeys the laws of physics. Or rather everything he “does” just looks like normal, boring old physics to us. Appearing in burning bushes, splitting oceans, being reborn, is much more likely to be via mass psychosis than physical means. Doesn’t mean people lied about it, it is quite possible that it happened in their minds. And I’ve seen first hand how brittle the boundaries between the mind and physical reality can get.
All that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have a will or preferences. It’s just probably akin to manifesting itself as natural evolution or progression of the universe. The closest we can see is how societal change or markets tend to function. They seem to have some sort of trend, patterns, or direction. But they’re different from any one person’s desires and are complex enough to defy predictions.
I think God is capable of fracturing out his main consciousness into sub parts. Everything (attached to humans, matter, or even nothing at all) is capable of having a consciousness. All of these consciousnesses can exist at once, and as a superposition of each other. There may even be multiple consciousnesses attached to my physical body (I.e. believing that they are the physical space that I occupy), each experiencing my life from a completely different perspective. There may even be a me who is much happier than the “current” me, still experiencing the same exact events, saying the same exact things, performing the same actions, but having a vastly different mental experience than I am.
It’s also likely that there’s no actual thing that’s not “me”. Just pieces of me that perceive other pieces as not me. Much like a function in a computer may have a different “context” as another function. It may do completely different things from other functions. It probably will receive different inputs and have different outputs. It might even encapsulate other functions. When a program runs, you may even say it has multiple births and deaths. But from a human’s point of view it’s all part a big code block that is interpreted by a computer.
In much the same way, all these “sub consciousnesses” are possibly created and interpreted by “God”. Just while in the frame of the sub consciousness, we may forget the bigger picture.
So what are the implications of all this for us? Is there a “heaven” or “hell” or “good” or “evil” or “life after death”? Probably, but only in the consciousnesses that perceive it to be so.
If God’s mind acts anything like a quantum state, all these possibilities exist as a wave until a consciousness capable of experiencing it actually observes one of those possibilities. So, on one hand, even though the most horrible atrocities are possible, they might as well have not happened if they were never observed. On the other hand, just about any of those horrible atrocities, in theory, can be observed. And we have absolutely no way of knowing if they actually will or won’t be.
My most burning question is, as a consciousness capable of observing anything, can it always easily opt out of an experience, is there some kind of external limiter?Humans have suicide and death (not easy per se, but at least there’s a guaranteed end). How about other consciousnesses? That’s probably my biggest existential fear, being stuck in some unfavorable experience, in an endless loop. Very much like the alternating existence, non existence loop that I described above from my psychotic episode. I remember it as absolutely terrifying. But at least from my point of view it had an ending. What exactly happened from the frame of reference of that consciousness, where there was nothing besides that alternation, and no concept of time? Maybe I don’t even want to know the answer!
I think a relatively settling version of this scenario is that God’s ability to manifest or interpret consciousness is linear and time bound from his point of view. He would still be able to apparently have parallel consciousness in Universal time. But it would be something like rewinding and observing a slightly different position of a video tape each time. And perhaps there is no higher experience of consciousness, its effects are only in the abstract.
Perhaps this fracturing of consciousness is God’s way of dealing with the infinitely long length of his existence. If each consciousness has no real concept of this infinity, and no memory of the past or future, it’s not as terrible as it seems. Perhaps occasionally he interprets consciousness that can perceive infinite time or absence of time, much like I experienced in my psychosis, reminding himself of the “truth” of his situation, but quickly extinguishes and forgets those experiences.
Of course this is all my interpretation that there is a contiguous physical universe, with a past and future.
Other possibilities are that God’s physical experience of the physical universe is much more akin to an on demand simulation with very limited parameters. Whatever I am experiencing right now is basically all that there is, which isn’t all that terrible. Any memories I may have of the past are entirely fabricated, and so is the history/state of most of the universe, with some sort of reset whenever it’s too unfavorable to actually back up any of it with real experiential evidence. That would be great too :)
