I continued reading.
Now in creating that which is “here” and that which is “there,” God made it possible for God to know Itself. In the moment of this great explosion from within, God created relativity — the greatest gift God ever gave to Itself. Thus, relationship is the greatest gift God ever gave to you, a point to be discussed in detail later.
From the No-Thing thus sprang the Everything — a spiritual event entirely consistent, incidentally, with what your scientists call The Big Bang theory. As the elements of all raced forth, time was created, for a thing was first here, then it was there — and the period it took to get from here to there was measurable.
...
In rendering the universe as a divided version of Itself, God produced, from pure energy, all that now exists — both seen and unseen. In other words, not only was the physical universe thus created, but the metaphysical universe as well. The part of God which forms the second half of the Am/Not Am equation also exploded into an infinite number of units smaller than the whole.
...
My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient parts of Me so that I could know Myself experientially. There is only one way for the Creator to know Itself experientially as the Creator, and that is to create. And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole.
This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the “image and likeness of God.” This doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that our physical bodies look alike (although God can adopt whatever physical form God chooses for a particular purpose). It does mean that our essence is the same. We are composed of the same stuff. We ARE the “same stuff”! With all the same properties and abilities — including the ability to create physical reality out of thin air.
Neale Donald Walsch
"Wow!" Zac said as his mind ticked over. "We are the same stuff! Christians always drone on about us being made in 'the image and likeness of God.' I can see how 'image and likeness of God' is metaphorically like saying, 'you're a holographic fragment of the whole.'"
"Yes, exactly!" I said. "It's all a metaphor. Of course, this book doesn't prove anything empirically, so it's not actual evidence. But it sets up an awfully elegant philosophical motive behind the universe's design, and the philosophical motive overlaps with the science we've looked at. Anyway, let's continue."
My purpose in creating you, My spiritual offspring, was for Me to know Myself as God. I have no way to do that save through you. Thus it can be said (and has been, many times) that My purpose for you is that you should know yourself as Me.
This seems so amazingly simple, yet it becomes very complex - because there is only one way for you to know yourself as Me, and that is for you first to know yourself as not Me.
…
Now, to keep things simple, I'm going to use your children of God mythological model as a basis for discussion, because it is a model with which you are familiar - and in many ways it is not that far off. So let's go back to how this process of self-knowing must work.
There is one way I could have caused all of My spiritual children to know themselves as parts of Me - and that was simply to tell them. This I did. But you see, it was not enough for Spirit to simply know Itself as God, or part of God, or children of God, or inheritors of the kingdom (or whatever mythology you want to use).
As I've already explained, knowing something, and experiencing it, are two different things. Spirit longed to know Itself experientially (just as I did!). Conceptual awareness was not enough for you. So I devised a plan. It is the most extraordinary idea in all the universe - and the most spectacular collaboration. I say collaboration because all of you are in it with Me.
Under the plan, you as pure spirit would enter the physical universe just created. This is because physicality is the only way to know experientially what you know conceptually. It is, in fact, the reason I created the physical cosmos to begin with - and the system of relativity which governs it, and all creation.
Once in the physical universe, you, My spirit children, could experience what you know of yourself - but first, you had to come to know the opposite. To explain this simplistically, you cannot know yourself as tall unless and until you become aware of short. You cannot experience the part of yourself that you call fat unless you also come to know thin.
Taken to ultimate logic, you cannot experience yourself as what you are until you've encountered what you are not. This is the purpose of the theory of relativity, and all physical life. It is by that which you are not that you yourself are defined.
Neale Donald Walsch
"Remember," I said, "space and time are extra dimensions that create the illusion of this and that, here and there, before and after. I can't be Nikki if there is not something that I am not. And I can't experience growth or learning or any change unless I have the concept of time."
Zac nodded, and I continued.
Now in the case of the ultimate knowing - in the case of knowing yourself as the Creator - you cannot experience your Self as creator unless and until you create. And you cannot create yourself until you uncreate yourself. In a sense, you have to first "not be" in order to be. Do you follow?
I think…
Stay with it.
Of course, there is no way for you to not be who and what you are - you simply are that (pure, creative spirit), have been always, and always will be.
So, you did the next best thing. You caused yourself to forget Who You Really Are.
Upon entering the physical universe, you relinquished your remembrance of yourself. This allows you to choose to be Who You Are, rather than simply wake up in the castle, so to speak.
It is in the act of choosing to be, rather than simply being told that you are, a part of God that you experience yourself as being at total choice, which is what, by definition, God is. Yet how can you have a choice about something over which there is no choice? You cannot not be My offspring no matter how hard you try - but you can forget.
You are, have always been, and will always be, a divine part of the divine whole, a member of the body. That is why the act of rejoining the whole, of returning to God, is called remembrance. You actually choose to remember Who You Really Are, or to join together with the various parts of you to experience the all of you - which is to say, the All of Me.
Your job on Earth, therefore, is not to learn (because you already know), but to re-member Who You Are. And to re-member who everyone else is. That is why a big part of your job is to remind others (that is, to re-mind them), so that they can re-member also.
All the wonderful spiritual teachers have been doing just that. It is your sole purpose. That is to say, your soul purpose.
Neale Donald Walsch
I finished reading and looked at Zac.
"So…" Zac said, shifting his backpack onto the other shoulder. "I mean, wow." He paused for a second. "That just makes sense. If I am everything, then I cannot know myself as something in particular until I create the illusion of separation, or relativity. And then I get to experience myself as this, relative to everything else."
"Yes," I said. "At the core of the whole design is just simple binary: a one and a zero. Something, and that which it is not. Pure polarity.
This is kind of like solving a crime, actually. According to the scientific method, our default position is that the entire universe is a conscious system; a neural network. Even inanimate matter shares this intelligent structure. On the other hand, scientists love to overcomplicate everything by assuming the existence of inanimate, unconscious matter. They do this with absolutely zero evidence and think they are being rational. When scientists assume a separation between 'conscious' and 'unconscious' matter, their extra unnecessary assumption adds new problems that need solving. Like, how did the laws of nature come about? How was the universe fine-tuned? What set gravity to this and the mass of a proton to that?
The problem of all that fine-tuning and complexity doesn't exist when you keep things simple and assume the whole universe is an intelligent neural network. If the universe is a neural network, then the creator is the created, with no new postulates required. A neural network would be perfectly capable of fine-tuning itself, as I will explain when we get to this mysterious holographic algorithm I've been talking about."
