To Eternity and Back

To Eternity and Back is life-transforming. It shows us the ultimate fabric of reality by connecting the dots linking cosmic and human history to the infinite and the eternal. It reveals the purpose of life and makes sense of our everyday experience.

We live in a multi-trillion star universe hostile to humankind. The history of life on planet Earth is a narrative of inter- and intra-species warfare. And what about us? Here today, gone tomorrow and forever!  No trace, no point!  But is this the whole story? When all seems lost, a still small voice whispers that, au contraire, “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Beyond the abyss of annihilation, “death’s dateless night,” there is a firmament and a fullness. 

To see why this is indeed the case, we begin at the end. Death. In the light of the inescapable fate awaiting us all, our priorities and attitudes have to be adjusted and aligned with our true destiny. To discover that destiny, we explore the Multiverse by which we mean all dimensions of reality – the kinds of realities, the physical, the psycho-physical, and the non-physical; and the kinds of destinies, the plenitude of perfection and the void without end.

Our voyage takes us first to Mission Control–Eternity, the God Algorithm and the Ultimate Theory of Everything.

Eternity is not endless time. It is the possession of the fullness of life in one act without beginning or end.

Time–history–is an interacting web of causes and effects, agents and acts, events and processes. This “web” is known and willed from all eternity.

But who possesses “the fullness of life in one act?” The greatest thinkers and mystics of the golden age of human thought had a unanimous answer to this question: things exist only because there exists One that cannot not-exist, that exists without beginning or end or any conceivable limitation. The primordial religions––Judaism in Israel, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Hinduism in India––captured this truth with a description of the One that may be called the God Algorithm: “I AM.”

The “proof” for this Self-Existent Source is indisputable once all the relevant data points are recognized. The molecules in our neurons change thousands of times during our lifetimes but our identity (the “I”) remains the same although we progress or regress in terms of knowledge and character. So, what is it that stays the same? It is clearly not something physical because the physical––for instance, the neurons––is in a constant state of molecular flux. Where did this non-physical dimension come from?  Not from the physical because the laws of physics have no room for the creation of the non-physical from the physical. Its source has to be non-physical and, in fact, the source has to have always existed because it could not pop out of nowhere and nothing. But if it always existed, then it exists without any limitation. It is limitation-free which is what we mean by the word “infinite.” It is, thus, both eternal and infinite. This “it” is what we call God.

But what do we know about the Self-Existent? Our starting points are right before us: the very nature of the divine as infinite perfection and therefore infinite love; our experience of ourselves; our discovery of the nature of the world in which we live; and, ultimately, the witness of the world religions.

Take the nature of the divine. Love is necessarily personal and in fact necessarily inter-personal: it is a relationship between at least Two. Furthermore, love, as we know it, involves not just two but a third who is the fruit of the love between two. Love is fulfilled, manifested in its fruit. For the love of an I and a You to be complete, it must culminate in a third who likewise loves and is loved by both. Lover, beloved, co-beloved. I, Thou, Ours. And, since God is infinite love, there must be love within God. Since God is infinite, this loving, its object and its fruit must likewise be infinite: Three inseparable “centers” that ARE the One. 

Or take the world religions. The tripersonal being of God is manifested in the religious traditions of India, China, Israel that represent the three main human approaches to God: cyclic-mystical (India); unity-in-multiplicity/harmony (China); historical-linear (Israel).

In the Hindu holy books of India, God is seen as Saccidananda: Being, Knowledge, Bliss.

In China there is the ancient Taoist belief in God as the “Three Pure Ones:” “The Universally Honored One of Origin”; “The Celestial Worthy of the Numinous Treasure”; and “The Celestial Worthy of the Way and its Power.”  In the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, God is described as Father, Word/Wisdom and Spirit/Shekinah.

Taken together, the starting points lead us to the ultimate Theory of Everything: the startling truth that within the one Godhead there are Three Infinite Persons subsisting in the unity of One Infinite Mind and Will and One Love. Hence, across diverse cultures and untold ages, humanity has recognized God as tri-personal: Being, Knowing, Loving.

From the nature of the Infinite, we turn to the finite. The cosmos is a network of networks. A procession of social media platforms and users. This is the picture painted by modern science. Science also shows it to be a Metaverse of Mind. We ascend from the MindCloud (quantum fields and the mathematically-based laws and constants of nature) to Mind-bots, Mind-pods, Mind-lings, Mind-lets, Mind-forms and Minds (Homo sapiens). The mindishness of the cosmos was recognized by the mystics of modern science, including the pioneers of relativity and quantum physics, and the great mathematicians. Said Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, “We must assume … the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” 

The appearance of the world of mass-energy (the cosmos) is followed by that of the world of autonomous, self-replicating, goal-seeking agency (microbes, plants); then by the world of consciousness (animals); and, finally, the world of the language-using self (humans). Each of these worlds interacts with the world that comes after it. The only framework that makes sense of the emergence of these worlds is an Infinite-Eternal Reality operative at every level of the world from quarks and galaxies to genomes and agents to consciousness and mind. 

Beyond the physical cosmos, there is another realm. Almost all societies across the world, as chronicled in their religious writings, took for granted the existence of a world of pure spirits both good and bad. In modern times, the manifestation of non-human evil is most dramatically witnessed in the rite of exorcism. Often, the phenomena manifested there are clearly inexplicable at a human level.

Turning to the religious history of humankind, we find a rendezvous of common themes. In the first systematically organized religions, those of the Indians, Chinese and Persians, every one of them, in their own distinctive ways, spoke of sacrifice and atonement and salvation: the sacrifice of Prajapathi and the redemption of humanity; the Border Sacrifice to Shang Di; and the sacrifice of hoama and the prophecy of the Saoshyans. The Mediterranean mystery religions were centered on sacrifice and the incarnation of deity.  The Jewish nation embodied in its own history the reality of sin and salvation, sacrifice and atonement, divine visitation and the promise of resurrection.

This raises the question: Who was Jesus of Nazareth?  His followers saw him as nothing less than the Incarnation of Infinity. “The Word became flesh.” Jesus’ life and being––the Jesus Cloud––is a manifestation in human terms of the innermost reality of the Godhead as Triune: the Three “ways of existing” (hypostases) of infinite-eternal Spirit, of Being, of Infinity. Underpinning this affirmation was the claim that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead. It may be asked, “What transformed eleven fearful peasants and fisher-folk into superheroes who preached the Good News across the world despite trials and tribulations and eventually horrendous deaths?” Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish rabbi wrote, “When these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of the last 100 years, said, “What inclines even me to believe in Christ's resurrection? … If he did not rise from the dead … We are in a sort of hell  … cut off from heaven.”  

The Incarnation of Infinity was followed by the Indwelling of the Infinite––the descent of the divine Spirit in the human heart. Thus, what is claimed is the humanizing of the Divine––the Incarnation of Infinity – and the divinizing of the human––the indwelling of the Divine Spirit.

With the Incarnation of Infinity, a new race was called into being––Homo Sapiens 2.0. With the Indwelling of the Infinite, the human had been reinvented, passing through the portal of Divine destiny.  Jesus inaugurated a new race of those living with the God Gene, the Life of God that was “the light of the human race.” For the Son of God became the Son of man so that humankind might enter “the household of God.”

This takes us to the question of final destiny. The overwhelming majority of human beings across the course of history has taken it for granted that death is not the end, that there is a life after death. The major pre-Christian religions, almost without exception, recognized the reality of two parallel destinations in the Multiverse.

The first, to which all are called, is the everlasting vision of God, our union with That which we need and desire above all. The destiny that we are warned against is the everlasting self-chosen separation from God and all that our nature needs.

Our whole life is a string of choices, free acts. We are our choices. What we become through our choices is our destiny. The state of our being at the moment of death is its state forever. Heaven or Hell is what we become.

The discovery of our destiny leads us to one final revelation: all of creation was choreographed and curated for our coming: we were “meant” to be here: the Universe is indeed “home.”

“You formed my inmost being …. in your book all are written down; my days were shaped, before one came to be.”

Everything is mystery and magic, everything is gift. We were loved into being. To be is to be loved.

We who were loved into being will not find fulfillment except in endless love. Not to worry. We have an invitation to enter into the infinite-eternal Love Story that is Ultimate Reality. Yet entry is only possible for those who love.

To love or not to love––that is the question for us.