Jung believed that the God image evolves within us. Some of the most interesting speculations regarding the nature of reality describe the cosmos as we know it as a simulation. Living within that simulation, we are simulated beings.
In some ways, this metaphysical speculation is very old in human terms. The dream argument posits that we exist within a dream. I dreamt I was a butterfly, says Chuang Tzu. How do I know I am not a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
Each age has its metaphor for what the universe is, and how it operates. There were the medieval spheres. The Enlightenment had its vast clockwork universe. Today, in the Information Age, with our ability to simulate lifelike realities, the metaphor for the universe is a vast simulation, programmed by beings so advanced, we might regard them as gods.
The futurist and science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, proposed that given a sufficiently advanced technology far beyond our own, we humans would be unable to distinguish it from magic. There are historical and anthropological parallels. Some Pacific Islanders regarded the explorer, Captain James Cook, with his great ships and guns, as a god. Some Mesoamericans perceived of Spanish Conquistadores as godlike. A relatively small number of these European invaders subdued Indigenous peoples in part because Aztec priests believed that the Spaniards were prophesied to arrive in their armadas. And yet of course, in both instances, the technologically more advanced Europeans were no more intelligent or ultimately more advanced than the people or the cultures they encountered. Coming from the Old World and its older civilizations, the Spanish just had a head start.
If we were to encounter an advanced extraterrestrial civilization which had the ability to simulate entire dimensions, what would be the difference between these extrabiological entities and our ideas of God? If these EBE’s created our universe and maybe even ourselves, they would, in a sense, be God to the extent that God is identified with the creative force. In some assumptions about the supersim, the simulation contains bots that are artificially programmed, and real individuals which arose organically and which are authentic in a sense that the bots in the sim are not.
For those who believe in a God that is not synonymous with EBE’s, the very idea that we live within a simulation might be a horrifying proposition. It’s almost like coming to the realization that you were adopted, and not procreated by your parents. I mean, what if we’re not real? What if we’re just part of someone’s experiment, or a walk-in on their TV show? These ideas, again, aren’t knew. The Matrix, the Truman Show, The Outer Limits, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and a raft of other sci-fi stories, movies and shows explore these themes.
But what if it’s true? Then, we must ask a couple questions. First, are these beings really godlike or even God Itself? If the analogy discussed above continues to hold true, then keep in mind that New World civilization eventually caught up to the Spanish, and Pacific Island civilizations are equivalent in their development today to modern England and France. The civilizations which launched these Old World explorers had been under development for a longer period than Indigenous Amerindian cultures or Pacific Island cultures.
By some estimates, the universe is 13 billion years old, maybe even twice that age. As colonized cultures like India eventually attained the technological sophistication of Old World colonizers, we may eventually reach the technological equivalence of ‘godlike’ civilizations which simulate us. In fact, our ability to create lifelike simulations of our own world and our very selves already exists, and this may be why we adopted the metaphor of the supersimulation.
But there is a second, more fundamental question: Who created these metaphorical EBE’s we may regard as gods or even as God? How did they come to be?
If these gods simulated us, how is it that they themselves came to be? They still exist in some sort of spacetime, as far as we can tell. Even if we subsist within nested hierarches where one universe contains another, which may in fact house concentrically within its simulation yet another introjected dimension, what exists outside the final simulation? What gave rise to the highly advanced civilization which created the ultimate simulation? Perhaps even this hypothesized most advanced of cultures cannot answer this ultimate query.
If there is an answer, it may lie in dreaming, that most ancient of metaphors employed to explain our simulated predicament. For when dreaming, the dream never leaves its source. The projection is instead not projected outward, but injected, or introjected, inward. In a physical sense, some, like the physicist Fred Alan Wolf in The Dreaming Universe and Michael Talbot in The Holographic Principle, have hypothesized that dreams take the ‘shape’ of a hologram, that the brain is holographic in structure, and that the universe itself is holographic in nature. This self-same, isomorphic aspect of the cosmos, if true, is also corroborated, for lack of a better term, by the chaological principles which govern fractals. Chaology holds that vast complexity in universal structures can be explained simply by the repetition of simple, iterative forms. Computational scientist, Stephen Wolfram, adopts this argument in his book, A New Kind of Science.
If we do live in a simulation, the fact that we developed awareness of this fact should provide us hope that we may one day realize escape from its confounding labyrinth. This is perhaps the next advance in the evolution of the God image within; the realization that we are still dreaming. To escape, as Buddhist philosophy puts it, from the endless cycle of births and deaths, we need to wake from the final dream which seems to contain us. To free ourselves from the wheel of time is to escape from the cycle of spacetime, an unreal structure of whose reality we remain entirely convinced, except in moments of ‘unreal’ clarity, a lucidity which is often pathologized by the standards of 21st century psychology as a derealization disorder.
To evolve is to transcend. In both Eastern and Western traditions, there is the idea that God is immanent and transcendent. The immanent God becomes us, lives within us, suffers along with us. The transcendent aspect retains memory of our wholeness, of our innocence, in a lucid paradise we’ve never left. For if heaven were heaven, and God were God, it would be impossible that we should ever be able to leave this omnipresent, infinite state, which is synonymous with paradise. However, something retained memory of this truth, we would indeed be forever lost in the maze of dreams.
Yet unless some aspect of this transcendent Self also accompanied us into our dream to remind us continually of who and what we really are, it would never be possible for us to wake. This explains why both of these facets – transcendent and yet immanent – seem as opposing aspects, as polar dualities which express the ultimate nature of God; the both/and, the neither/nor, as in neither this nor that. And the evolution of the God idea also contains within it the intuitive sense that since the divine is everywhere and in all things, we also share in its divine properties.
If we were meant never to transcend the wheel of time, the seemingly endless cycle of birth and death, would we even be capable of having the notion that we live within simulations within simulations, like dreams within dreams? And since something had to get the ball rolling, is not the first cause still operative? In other words, something had to create it all. This something we call God, or gods, as your beliefs may be.
So, take heart. Have hope in knowing that we have never left the bosom of paradise. We only need to wake to the fact. Wake we may into yet another dream, and another, and still another. But something real must exist outside the final level of the simulation, or simulations themselves could not be. The dreamer got dream going, yet the dreamer ultimately wakes to a lucid reality beyond all dreams. The fact that we can intuit this may be a signification of our divine (or enlightened) nature, or, depending on your belief, of the evolving psychological processes by which we may achieve enlightenment, and so wake at last from cycles and wheels, from births and deaths, and from time itself.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just