A bat swooped overhead, and a possum scurried up a tree as we approached the road.
"So, torturing AI," I said. "I was going through an existential crisis a few years ago, and just reading a bunch of different books on different topics. One of those books was Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsch."
"What were you doing reading a religious book?" Zac asked. "I thought you despise organized religion."
"Oh, this isn't a religious book. In fact, it's the most poignant and wise book I've ever read on the topic of God. Basically, there was this guy, Neale, who started writing angry letters to God, asking him questions. One day, God answered them."
"What does that even mean?"
"Neale would write a question in his notebook, and God would dictate an answer to him. I guess you could say he was channeling God."
Zac looked at me skeptically. "Sounds like a scam to me."
"I was a bit apprehensive at first, to be honest. I realized I'd been conditioned by society to either believe in a personal religious God who granted some prayers and denied others, which made no logical sense. But on the other hand, I'd been taught — by science, no less — that I'm a purposeless sack of meat. Neither paradigm was intellectually satisfying to me. As I explained earlier, a correct application of the scientific method deduces the existence of God. Everything is God. The universe is a giant conscious system; a neural network; an infinite intelligence. God exists, by any rational standard. He just doesn't exist in the theistic form that organized religion has taught us.
I was also fascinated by the idea of channeling this 'God' intelligence. I've experienced a sense of channeling once before, and I never quite forgot it. It was eerie and uncanny and odd."
"When was that?" Zac asked.
"When I wrote that failure story a few years ago after 99dresses went down. I honestly don't even remember writing it. One minute I was sitting down in a meeting room, and the next minute it was there on the screen as if someone else had written it through me.
What's even weirder is that I pressed publish. And you know me — I'm pretty private. I'm not big into sharing and social media and all that stuff. I don't think I have anything interesting to say, or that anyone would care when I say it. There is just so much noise out there on the internet, and I find the world quite deafening sometimes. Or maybe it's just a confidence thing... I dunno. Anyway, when I published that failure story publicly, it all felt very strange and out of character.
My point being, I'm very open to the idea of channeling because I've experienced something akin to it before. Also, logic asserts that an infinite intelligence exists, so I know there is a plausible way to channel something we call 'God.'"
"Fair enough," Zac said as we approached the hill leading up to Redleaf.
"So," I continued, "I was reading this book, which paints a beautiful pantheistic picture of God that's devoid of all the controlling power-plays that I typically associate with notions of God: heaven and hell, good and bad, judgment, rules, objective morality, and all that crap that makes no sense and just feels manufactured. The God answering questions in this book laughs at all the man-made illusions and mythologies that humans have created about Him. The words He speaks make beautiful, intuitive sense. Here, listen to this…" I stopped on the footpath and began reading from my notes. "Oh, and keep in mind, it's in a question and answer format. God is speaking first, and then Neale is asking the questions."
Life (as you call it) is an opportunity for you to know experientially what you already know conceptually. You need learn nothing to do this. You need merely remember what you already know, and act on it
I'm not sure I understand.
Let's start here. The soul - your soul - knows all there is to know all the time. There's nothing hidden to it, nothing unknown. Yet knowing is not enough. The soul seeks to experience.
You can know yourself to be generous, but unless you do something which displays generosity, you have nothing but a concept. You can know yourself to be kind, but unless you do someone a kindness, you have nothing but an idea about yourself.
It is your soul's only desire to turn its grandest concept about itself into its greatest experience. Until concept becomes experience, all there is is speculation. I have been speculating about Myself for a long time. Longer than you and I could collectively remember. Longer than the age of this universe times the age of the universe. You see, then, how young is - how new is - My experience of Myself!
You've lost me again. Your experience of Yourself?
Yes. Let me explain it to you this way:
In the beginning, that which Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. Yet All That Is could not know itself - because All That Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. And so, All That Is… was not. For in the absence of something else, All That Is, is not. This is the great Is/Not Is to which mystics have referred from the beginning of time.
Now All That Is knew it was all there was - but this was not enough, for it could only know its utter magnificence conceptually, not experientially. Yet the experience of itself is that for which it longed, for it wanted to know what it felt like to be so magnificent. Still, this was impossible, because the very term "magnificent" is a relative term. All That Is could not know what it felt like to be magnificent unless that which is not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.
Do you understand this?
I think so. Keep going.
Alright. The one thing that All That Is knew is that there was nothing else. And so It could, and would, never know Itself from a reference point outside of Itself. Such a point did not exist. Only one reference point existed, and that was the single place within. The "Is-Not Is." The Am-Not Am.
Still, the All of Everything chose to know Itself experientially.
This energy - this pure, unseen, unheard, unobserved, and therefore unknown-by-anyone-else energy - chose to experience Itself as the utter magnificence It was. In order to do this, It realized It would have to use a reference point within.
Neale Donald Walsch
I stopped abruptly. "Oh! Oh! This part here! Listen to this…"
It reasoned, quite correctly, that any portion of Itself would necessarily have to be less than the whole, and that if It thus simply divided Itself into portions, each portion, being less than the whole, could look back on the rest of Itself and see magnificence.
And so All That Is divided Itself - becoming, in one glorious moment, that which is this, and that which is that. For the first time, this and that existed, quite apart from each other. And still, both existed simultaneously. As did all that was neither.
Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there - but which must exist for here and there to exist.
Neale Donald Walsch
"It's a hologram!" Zac exclaimed.
"It's a fucking hologram!" I reiterated. "Think about it… if my consciousness is a holographic portion of God's consciousness, then I can stare up at this beautiful cosmos and fall to my knees in wonder at its sheer magnificence. I couldn't do that if I were everything. I could only do that if I were something in particular — a limited fragment of the whole."
"And," Zac chimed in, "he says 'Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there — but which must exist for here and there to exist'. He is talking about the implicate and explicate order, right?"
"It certainly seems like it," I replied. "Remember our diagram of the creator and the created?"
I continued. "God's words map onto our model perfectly. To start with, we can say x = neural network = God = everything. Everything is x, and because everything is a conscious system, everything is God.
But we can also split the system into three major components that give rise to the illusion: that which is here (the observer), that which is there (the observed), and that which is neither here nor there — but which must exist for here and there to exist (the creator).
That which is here and that which is there make up the created; also known as the explicate order. This is the three-dimensional illusion that unfolds above the holographic film. Or to use the computer game metaphor, it's the Minecraft world that the AI bot observes.
That which is neither here nor there — but which must exist for here and there to exist is the creator; also known as the implicate order. In our hologram metaphor, it is the holographic film that gives rise to the three-dimensional illusion. In our computer game metaphor, it is the codebase existing at the lower dimension. This entire thing is covered in holographic patterns!"
I kept reading.
Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there — but which must exist for here and there to exist. It is the nothing which holds the everything.
It is the non-space which holds the space. It is the all which holds the parts.
Can you understand this?
Are you following this?
I think I am, actually. Believe it or not, you have used such a clear illustration that I think I’m actually understanding this.
I’m going to go further. Now this nothing which holds the everything is what some people call God.
Neale Donald Walsch
"He is talking about the holographic film," Zac interjected. "The nothing which holds the everything."
"Yes," I said. "He is talking about the lower-dimensional implicate order, that gives rise to the explicate order."
I’m going to go further. Now this nothing which holds the everything is what some people call God. Yet that is not accurate, either, for it suggests that there is something God is not — namely, everything that is not “nothing.” But I am All Things — seen and unseen — so this description of Me as the Great Unseen — the No-Thing, or the Space Between, an essentially Eastern mystical definition of God, is no more accurate than the essentially Western practical description of God as all that is seen. Those who believe that God is All That Is and All That Is Not, are those whose understanding is correct.
Neale Donald Walsch
I paused again. "So there, God says that He isn't just the holographic film, or the lower-dimensional implicate order. He is also the three-dimensional illusion that unfolds from the implicate order. He is the explicate order as well: 'Those that believe that God is All That Is and All That Is Not, are those whose understanding is correct.'"
Zac smiled to himself. "The observer is the observed..."
"Exactly! This means the observer is also the summer night's sky, and the footpath we walk on, the words you speak, and the book I read. It's all the same thing, taking different forms."
