Are We God’s AI?
Who’s running the show? An interventionist or a non-interventionist God? Or does the buck stop here?
Is God really Love?
There is an argument, and not just from atheists, that the concept of “God is Love” flies in the face of historical fact, e.g., centuries of wars; pervasive, seemingly incurable poverty; an ever-widening wealth gap between haves and have-not individuals, societies and countries; 21st century corporate feudalism; and the roiling rancor and cancel-culture philosophy on both sides of nearly every modern American issue, not to mention some of the historic behavior and acts of the Church, itself.
Buddhists, having no God to blame, might respond with the assertion that life is suffering. Period.
Have Buddhists got it right and the God-is-love folks got it wrong? Where is the love in all of this suffering?
Which triggers the question: Who or what is running this Life-on-Earth show?
Who’s in charge?
Who, if anyone, is running the show? Some may say there’s nothing and no one out there; it’s just us here, all alone. Many people will instantly and unequivocally identify God as the ringmaster. But some people pale at the use of that term. So, could we speak of the Universal Consciousness or the Ground of Being or All That Is? Those labels seem to be consistent with the words of mystics and a growing scientific consensus that there is an energy or a consciousness outside (or underneath) space-time that is the source of all the seemingly concrete manifestations that we count as real in the apparent universe.
So, what and where is this underlying energy or consciousness?
Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung said that our limited, human consciousness is to what he called the Collective Unconscious like a drop of water to an entire ocean. That oceanic consciousness, he said, is the domain of templates, archetypes and psychological complexes among them, for whatever manifests in the visible world.
Physicist David Bohm postulated an invisible Implicate Order from which springs all that what we see, hear, smell, touch and taste in our world. The Implicate Order is the place of causes, and our world — the Explicate Order — is the place of effects. “Space is not empty,” he wrote. “It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. [emphasis added] The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”*
Contemporary scientist Ervin Laszlo, in Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, uses the same kind of language to articulate the nature and source of reality and refers to the cosmic plenum as the source of all that we observe.
What’s the Big Picture?
For me, there is a powerful and persuasive metaphor for the universe and life on Earth, and I believe it is consistent with much mystical wisdom and the emerging scientific theories.
Everything exists in the “mind” of the Universal Consciousness. Everything. You, me, the floor, the mountain, the muskrat, the ocean, the opal, the pine tree and the pangolin, feelings and emotions. Everything.
If you find that incredible, just Google terms like “God is everything” and “Everything is God.”
So, indulge me, if need be, and let’s dig deeper.
If we are willing for a moment to imagine that we are all figures in the Universal Consciousness (UC, the mind of God in other words) what kind of God is this? Is this a non-interventionist, Deist’s God who set everything in motion long ago and then walked away or is It an interventionist God? And, is the UC: (1) committed to a favorable outcome or (2) willing to accept an unfavorable outcome, e.g., the decline and extinction of human life on Earth, possibly as a consequence of Global Warming.
And if It’s a non-interventionist God, did It just throw the dice and walk away or did It embed something like AI (artificial intelligence) into human DNA that might have a built-in survival-of-the-species intelligence? Don’t you think it would make a difference in our attitudes toward life and our actions if we’re here on AI autopilot or the Universal Consciousness has stopped paying attention?
Is the UC paying attention to our reality right now or is It distracted by dreams of other universes (search the Web for “Multiverse”)?
And if you’re convinced that It’s a caring, interventionist consciousness or God in whose imagination we’re living, how do you know if It is committed to a favorable outcome or not? Why would the UC imagine a reality and an outcome that It had dreamed before?
If this is a new scenario, what if the UC is actually learning from our experiences, our responses, and our trials and errors?
Doesn’t that suggest that the outcome of this experiment — life on Earth — may well be uncertain? And, if we’re Its AI at work, isn’t it possible that It might want to wait and see how we handle a possible end-of-life-on-Earth scenario?
We can’t know the answer to any of these questions, but don’t we have to consider the consequences? Would the Universal Consciousness let the experiment run its course all the way to extinction of our species or would It intercede?
What if the evolution of consciousness is managed by Human Consciousness AI? To invoke the spirit of former US President Harry Truman, what if the buck stops here? What if the buck stops with us?
And, if the buck stops with us, with you and me, what can we do?
Stay tuned …
* Bohm quote from Science & Nonduality, https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/david-bohm-implicate-order-and-holomovement/, accessed June 2, 2024.
© 2024, Paul Wesley Burke. All rights reserved.
