To Touch the Face of God

In the beginning was the word, and the word was “god”. In the beginning was the word, and the word was sunyata. In the beginning was the word and the word was without end.

Call it Braham, if you will. Or the Ayin. The Ein Sof. Speak of Fana if you wish, or The Tao, the formless and ineffable source and pattern of the cosmos.

Those who truly feel non duality, those who understand the non existence of ego would fain attempt to foist their experience on others. Those who have experienced reality know that you cannot teach it.

True prophets don’t wage holy wars. Those who have seen the face of god don’t seek to conquer and subdue. Above all they claim no exclusive access to ultimate truth. It’s just that they have seen it and others have not and maybe never will.

You do not shout and scream and wage jihad if you have seen the illusion, if you have looked upon the nakedness of the emperor. Instead you find yourself in a forest glade in Lothlorien. You set up home on the green hill in the Western Wild of Narnia.

I talk in allegory and metaphor but reality is best described that way. It is all that is. An infinite swirling pattern, a whole of which we are an integral and essential part.

Western religion has largely missed the point except for a few mystics who have seen through the veil. St Saul the deceived and Mohammed the bloodthirsty have foolishly wrought death and destruction through a combined two thousand years.

They only ever saw through the glass darkly, and to this day they remain clouded in thick and impenetrable mist.

Eastern and ancient greek philosophy, all those thousands of years ago, perceived a truth which is only now beginning to be seen. Democritus had a vision of the Atomos and so was some of the way there. But you have to go farther east to those who saw the real truth – emptiness.

There is no energy, there is no matter. At rock bottom we are beginning to realise there is only information, patterns, structure, mathematics. Call that god, if you will.

Check out the Higgs Bosun – a perfect physical representation of the Logos—an invisible, mathematical “ordering principle” that permeates every inch of space, giving substance to what would otherwise be nothingness. Look at Rainforest Realism where “agency” is seen as a high-level functional property of certain physical systems, rather than a violation of physical laws. It gives back meaning from the brutal aridity of the materialist worldview. It gives back agency and a form of free will.

In the Narnia metaphor, if the universe is the “Green Hill,” the Higgs boson is the scent of the silver apple—the evidence that a higher order exists, even if we cannot see the Tree itself.

Science re-clothes the concept of Sunyata: “emptiness” is not “nothingness” but rather the very ground of existence.

We are transitioning from seeing reality through a glass darkly, to actually touching the face of god.

From Ancient Greece to Narnia and Middle Earth, from Buddhist voids to Quantum fields we are circling a single truth: that the visible world is a thin veil over a much deeper, invisible logic.

We exist in a rainbow forest: like the rainbow we are both real and not real. We exist in some senses and in others we do not.

Even if most scientists lack poetry or a conception of the divine, the best of their theories do not.

Mine is the god of Einstein and Spinoza. How profoundly beautiful.