The attempt of physicists to create a unified field theory combining the four elementary forces of gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong force and the weak force is an attempt to put everything back together.  It is a try at unity, a play at returning to the Garden of Eden, when God and humankind were reconciled in one Being.  The Big Bang could be read as a tale about our separation from God and from each other.  The Big Bang could be the new Genesis, a modified version of the tale of the Expulsion from Paradise.

The splintering of consciousness into separate minds occurred at the moment of the Big Bang.  It happens for each of us the moment we’re conceived in bodies.  It is at this moment that each of us has chosen to inhabit a body we’ll call our own.  It’s at that moment we perceive a unified awareness as separated into individual beings, and life as divided into organisms.  The Big Bang is a theory of separation.  It’s really a mythological tale of disunity.  In the beginning, All was One.  Then there occurred an explosion in which eternity was abolished by time, and unity was besieged by fragmentation.

According to the Big Bang theory of creation, there was a moment before time when all matter and energy now contained in the visible universe were concentrated into one superdense particle smaller than an atom.  The universe is thought to have been hatched from a singularity, a point of near infinite density, in which time and space don’t exist, and the laws of physics break down.  The Big Bang, the most sublime theory in cosmogeny, tells us that there was a time before time when all was one.  All of reality was unified, of like “substance” throughout.  Then there was an explosion, a Big Bang.  The moment of the Big Bang was our first moment.  In the seconds after the Big Bang, time and space were created as matter and energy raced away from each other in the expanding substrate of spacetime, eventually cooling, precipitating, and expanding to the parameters of the present-day universe.  All was now separate.

The four forces – or interactions – physicists call the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity, separated.  New particles were created as matter ran away from itself in a profusion of quantity and type.  These particles grew increasingly complex and different from one another.  As the universe expanded, it cooled.  The matter within it congealed from intensely hot gasses into uncountable particles.

As the universe continued to cool and fly away from itself, the field of awareness – what we call life – dropped off into a long sleep.  And while it slept, it dreamed.  Life couldn’t help but dream, for a dreamless sleep is too near death, and life is anathema to death.

Before the moment of the Big Bang, life (or consciousness) was uniform, undifferentiated throughout itself.  But as the field of awareness continued to build and enhance its dream, it became more conscious of itself.  As it continued to grow in awareness of its own self within its dream, its forms became increasingly complex, according to its own idea of its dreamself.  Eventually, life saw itself as so complex that it split off from itself.  As its one form became many forms within the dream, they grew in sophistication, just as the dream grew in complexity.  As they grew in complexity, they grew in diversity.  This meant that the parts seemed more and more different from one another. This was deemed to be an essential aspect of evolution, the idea that change can occur.

Eventually within its dream, life came to regard parts of itself as so radically different that it came to regard some of its dreamself as nonliving.  It could now safely turn against these inanimate parts of its dreamself and consume them.  This consumption was thought to be necessary so that the rest of life could continue to subsist within the dream.  Life needed to consume to survive, to keep the dream alive, to keep itself from lapsing into what it thought was death.  This implied that separate parts of life existed in a universe of fixed quantities.  The laws of the Conversation of Matter and Energy would later be invented to translate and express the perception that reality was closed and separated into parts.  For once there was any number other than the number one, there had to be an infinite number of numbers, and thus an infinite number of things which ended in space and in time.  According to these laws, neither matter nor energy could be created or destroyed within the simulation.

A world of limited resources was seen as real because life had conceived of itself in separate parts.  When a part saw itself as broken off from the whole, that part was necessarily finite.  It had a definite beginning and a definite end.  The beginning and end were not only seen as physical in that the separate parts of life had bodies, but the beginning and end were also temporal.  They existed in time.  In other words, the separate bodies would be born and they would die.  If there were now space and time, both would have to be finite.  Thus, the universe itself was seen to have a beginning and an end.  Time itself, being an invention, would sooner or later run out.  It was of a fixed quantity.  This quantification of time would eventually be described in the Law of the Conservation of Time.  So many laws.  So little time.

Now, each separate part of life was in a dilemma that appeared to have been imposed from an outside force, which it called God or natural law, depending on the belief system around which the separate entity was organized. Each part of life was finite.  Each had a beginning and an end.  That hadn’t been a problem as long as each was connected to the whole, for implicit in the concept of wholeness is the idea that nothing more is needed.  But as soon as each “part” saw itself as a part, each part saw everything else in reality as limited too.  This was because each saw all of awareness as fragmented into parts, much like itself.  Parts always have limits. Parts always have boundaries. Yet a whole is infinite because it’s not boundered.

The more life dreamed, the more elaborate became the dream, as an artist adds further detail to a master work.  Like that painter, the more attention and detail that consciousness devoted to its dream, the more convinced it became that its dream was real and all-encompassing.  As life’s perception of its dreamself increased in sharpness with every dreaming moment, it made other distinctions.  At first, there was the distinction between life and “nonlife.”  But now, life created grades and classifications within its idea of life, within its idea of itself.  There was God and man; man and woman; human and animal.  And within each classification, there were inevitably more divisions.  There were tall men and good men.  Smart women and good-looking women.  The more that life scrutinized any part of its dreamself, the more divisions within that part that it saw.  A man was made up of tissues.  Those tissues, it was later discovered, were made up of cells, and the cells consisted of molecules.  The molecules were found to be made of atoms.  Life came to believe that these divisions were inherent within itself.  It called them natural, an order imposed upon life by that external agency which it called God or natural laws, as the case may be.  It could not see that the very act of scrutiny created more and more divisions, more detail within the dream. The proof of this was the correlation that complexity had with time. The longer that time went on, the more individual parts which the mind could deduce and detect.

By this process of division, the separate parts of life began to disown themselves.  In this way, life could justify life’s enslavement of itself.  Life degraded itself.  And yet, not really knowing where to draw the boundary between that which was life and that which was unlike itself (for there really was no boundary), what life did to part, it did to all.  All parts of the life began to regard themselves as meaningless, as valueless, since there were so many individual pieces within its shattered dream, that compared to the infinity and the eternity which existed beyond the matter-energy and spacetime boundary, each piece was tiny and seemed to have no impact on the whole. Yet since life was awareness, and more than that, since it was a unified awareness, life had some distant recollection that it was whole. As a unity, it had no boundary and was thus endless and timeless.

Perceiving themselves as of little value, the separate parts of life tried to terminate their memory of infinitude by rewriting their memories and their history.  They could no longer understand unity. Being convinced of the reality of their individual natures, they could no longer comprehend limitlessness. This was because they had housed their awareness in separate minds. They had become fully convinced of the reality of the boundaries they had dreamed.  Life in its fragmented state called some imagined part of itself ‘God.’  This divine part, the little parts fantasized, was worthy and powerful.  But they themselves?  They meant little, because they continued to see themselves as separate, tiny pieces.  What is tiny and divided can only be weak, they reasoned.  The error of the parts of life was their failure to conceive of themselves as what they really were:  as one whole.  The forms of language by which awareness identified itself– of you and I, of he, she, they and it, of us versus them – was a sure indication that consciousness was still deep into its dreamself, and that it had forgotten that it was only dreaming. It had become unconscious. In this state, it concluded that death was possible.

And so, consciousness had forgotten what it really was.  To forget is to lapse into an individual state. In the forgetting, it had crawled deeper into the folds of its dreamself.  Its dream became convoluted, labyrinthine.  There became sleep within sleep and dreams captive still inside other dreams.  Awareness resembled the structure of concentric circles of nested hierarchies. The architecture of its dreamself became so refined and distorted that life became lost within the illusions it had created.  It had lost the power to awaken itself.

But even within its dream, life had retained the distant memory of its wholeness, of the unified state that had flourished before the Big Bang, which was a metaphor for the beginning of its long dream.  Life was in reality only partly conscious of itself because life was only partly conscious.  And life was only partly conscious because it was only conscious of itself in parts.

In order to awaken from the dream, life used the symbols of its dreamself to reawaken to its wholeness.  In one of its dreams, life dreamed a myth called evolution.  In its dream, consciousness told itself that life is always changing.  Yet change without an end aim is purposeless.  And life was never without its purpose.  The superobjective of evolution is life’s full realization of itself.  Not realization in the sense of becoming, for life is already all that it can be, but realization in the sense of awareness.  The aim of evolution is full acknowledgement and remembrance by consciousness of what it has always been.  Evolution seeks only to rewaken life to its own wholeness.  It reminds God that God is God.  When this memory dawns on each “part” of the whole, life will be said to have awakened from its final dream. It will have pierced the veil of spacetime and breached the boundary of the final dream, the dream of the universe.

Upon awakening, it will have seemed to life that it had made a big mistake in counting itself in separate parts.  But then life will come to know that this errant wandering was part of its perfect journey.  And if life was supposed to make mistakes, then they really weren’t mistakes. In this way, humanity is sinless. It retains its innocence, which was never lost, never in doubt.

Life had never been knocked off course.  It had taken a necessary detour.  For only when the whole could perceive itself as its own opposite – individuality – could awareness ever become conscious of what it really is – the unbroken field of unified awareness.  Life could never be fully awake, fully cognizant of its great whole, unless it first fell asleep.  Since that which is all-encompassing can never really have an opposite, life’s only chance to truly appreciate its own limitless value was to conceive of itself in separate parts.  And so, awareness must seem to sleep to become fully awake.  To know, it must pretend to forget.

To be conscious of its own reality is the goal of life, an aim which it ever bore as seeds in its dreamself.  Life’s goal is awareness of its unified nature.  This was all that it had to know, all along.  And learn it not, for when life comes to know what it really is, it also knows that it has never forgotten.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just