Cracking the code

So Morgan Freeman, the man who has played God a few times, has told the Huffington Post that he believes “we invented God”.  This isn’t a new concept.  Voltaire said exactly the same thing in the 18th century (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”).  And thus, with a fancy sound bite, we ushered in the Age of Enlightenment – a time when superstitious beliefs were banished by science.

Now that we are entering a new Age of Enlightenment (and this paradigm shift can’t come soon enough!) it might be appropriate to figure out what went wrong with the old one.

Well, for a start we over reacted and threw the baby out with the bathwater.  We treated the mystery of life as just one more thing we would eventually figure out with our fabulous minds.

Once scholars understood the laws of science, the educated world became fanatical physics fans – leaving the masses to their superstitious beliefs.  Knowledge became the thing to have.  The earth was neither flat, nor created in six days, and far from originating in the Garden of Eden, humans evolved from monkeys.

The world split.

On one side we had the ignorant, with their childish beliefs in a personified God. On the other side were the intellectuals who glorified all aspects of the mind – reason, logic and code.

In a tiny enclave were the mystics who lived on a hill and had no truck with this world of duality.

Things moved on a pace.  Science became technology.  Then…

The atom split.

This heralded in a whole new ball game.

Suddenly we weren’t so smart.  The atom contained sub-atomic particles that defied the laws of physics.  Being simultaneously both energy and form, they refused to be codified.  As a final coup de grace, most of the atom was just empty space, yet from this emptiness came more energy than the world could comprehend.

The scientists scratched their head.  The religious predicted the apocalypse.  The mystics smiled, and reached for the Syd Barrett album.

During the 300 year love affair with our intellect, we have become myopic.  We don’t want to consider that vast as our intelligence is, it is minute compared to the intelligence that created it.  We look at the world with our narrow, limited perception and think if we can only figure out the code, we will understand the mystery of existence.

But we’re looking in the wrong place!  It’s not in the code.

There is something inside and outside of us that creates – something science has no access to.

Just think on this… We eat a sandwich and our body, with no assistance from our mind, knows how to convert it into blood, bone and tissue.  First it was a sandwich.  Now it’s a human being!

The body is an incredible feat of engineering – yet we only acknowledge the conscious mind, which is just a small part of it.  This would be like looking at a Ferrari and being enthralled by the 50 cent computer chip in the key fob.

Our mind split off.

We’ve revered the mind so much, it thinks it’s God.  And now it’s become our biggest barrier to experiencing who and what God is.  The mind functions like a computer.  Our five senses have been collecting and feeding in massive amounts of data from birth.  It then runs programs based on this data.  Much of it is inaccurate.

On the other hand we experience things in our body.

Of course the mind won’t allow this!  It doesn’t want its God like status to be revoked, so it pulls off a brilliant trick.  When the body starts to sense something, the mind kicks in, pulls up some information and superimposes it onto what’s happening.

Perhaps the mind thinks this is helpful “People who bought this experience of mild discomfort also experienced dread, fear and an inexplicable desire to run away.”

The mind takes in “what is” and fashions a new version of “what is” according to its operating software.

In the same way that Amazon makes book choices, we have abdicated our powers of discernment.  And now our senses have become dulled.  We don’t trust what we feel any more.  Sometimes we don’t even know what we feel.

All our cleverness has been directed to engineering the outside world – vehicles for transportation, communication and calculation.  But we forgot to engineer the people – to upgrade our own operating software.

So yes, Morgan was right, we did invent God – the mind’s version of God.

Behind this of course is the real God.  And along with Syd Barrett, this God is laughing and wondering when on earth we’re going to get it.  (Sadly for most of us when we’re no longer on the earth!)

We can’t access God through our mind.  The computer won’t allow it.  (Damn that spinning wheel of hell).

We can’t herald in the Age of Enlightenment 2.0 with a snappy sound bite – Twitter and Facebook are positively DROWNING in new age aphorisms.

The portal to the source of intelligence is through the heart not the mind.

It’s where the mystics have been hanging out.  Waiting for us.

Shine on you crazy diamonds.