Recycling the Cosmos

ÜberStory

Part II: The Divine Dyad

1. Recycling the Cosmos

Part I: Cosmogenesis tells us all that happened before time began.  Unique in the annals of cosmology, it explains how the primordial Nothingness (OM) gave birth to the divine Oneness (Supernal Spirit), which then evolved into God, a self-aware infinite being with the power to create the universe.  Next comes the question of how he did it, and again the answer will surprise everyone from mainstream theologians to astrophysicists.  Only the ancient Hindus had a clue:

In the beginning there was Self alone, in the shape of a person.

He looking round saw nothing but himself.

He feared. Therefore anyone who is alone feels fear.

He thought: “Since there is nothing but myself, why then should I fear?”

Thence his fear passed away. But he felt no delight.

He wished for a second.  He was so large as man and woman together.

He then made this his Self to fall in two, and thence arose man and woman.

He embraced her, and the world was born.

~ Upanishads

In some translations the last line is given more explicitly as “He copulated with her.”  This is the part of the myth that was most popular: that the world and all that’s in it is the love-child born of a primordial act of sacred Eros.  It adds a new dimension to the obvious entendre of the “Big Bang” by showing that of course it came not from a Singularity, but from a Divine Dyad.

Scientists admit that their discipline cannot fathom the Source of their Big Bang, whether it be a Singularity or some other mysterious unknown. Earlier systems of metascience (mislabeled “theology” by the West) did a much better job of plumbing the mystery, but even the best of them (those astute Hindus) never came up with an answer as to how that singular Self (Purusha) managed to split off his dyadic other half (Prakriti). The Shaivite school of Hinduism would disagree, and say that their casting of the cosmic characters as Shiva and Shakti explains everything and nothing, which to them is not a bit ironic but makes perfect sense. Fortunately the Hindus, along with their Buddhist and Taoist cousins, have the enlightened ability to agree to disagree. So, unlike dogmatic Christians, Muslims, and Jews, they won’t mind if I step into the cosmological gap (specifically the Abyss) and spin out my own metascientific mythos.

In accord with all the enlightened traditions of metascience, I’ve presented the nature of existence as an eternal cycle of repetition, a series of rounds in which being manifests and then withdraws back into non-being, and ultimately into OM, which transcends all duality. In each round it dips a little deeper into the pudding until finally it ends up as the übergalactic mind-bender that the astrophysicists show us in this cosmic egg pic, a gazillion light ears up and down and across, containing everything that is, was, and will be.

But the kicker is that the whole humungous thing is only one round of creation, the one we happen to be living in. Metascience cracks open the cosmic egg and says that all the rounds have a simultaneous existence, which means that we have to bend our minds over backwards and try to imagine an infinite number of über-eggs somehow superimposed on each other and interacting in mysterious ways. How is this possible? Obviously there must be extra dimensions of reality beyond the familiar four. Modern scientists would wind up with egg on their faces except that quantum physics posits just such a thing, and even speculates that the multidimensional cosmos houses parallel worlds, sometimes called alternate realties. So hurray, they finally caught up to what the Hindus knew a couple of thousand years ago!

Cosmogenesis described the events in the first three rounds, of which I’ll now give an instant recap. Round one was the first fissuring of OM into being and non-being: a vast Godlike consciousness floating blissfully in Nirvana, a divine babe in the womb of the universe. This is the ecstatic Oneness discovered by humans in spiritual experience. The baby God was born in round two, and matured from the dreamy amorphous perfection of round one into a being endowed with knowledge and self-awareness, and radiating divine love. This happened because the identity of God coalesced as Purusha-Shiva, or Yang as the Taoists say, which qualified him for the male pronoun even at this early stage. Meanwhile, the Prakriti-Shakti-Yin half of reality became the Abyss, a vast black chasm of unknown not-self. God felt a desire to fill it with fresh creation, but also yearned to return to the perfection of OM. He simply couldn’t decide, and literally pondered the choice forever ~ i.e. until the round ineluctably ended, along with time itself.

God got another chance in the third round, and leaped into the Abyss. He found himself in a hellish place, the one described in the Upanishad quote above; it was named the dark night of the soul by St. John of the Cross, and the Ultrasphere by your humble scribe. God was again caught between intractable opposites, this time the stark choice of life or death, to be or not to be. In an act of pure faith he surrendered himself to death, and rose again into the glory of OM. The real miracle was that he retained his individuated consciousness therein; this endowed him with the ability to direct the absolute power of OM into any purpose he chose, and to invoke whatever beacons of omniscience were needed to inform the task. He was thus transformed into OM-God, the Infinite Creator, though his work was still before him.

From his catbird seat at the hub of creation OM-God could see all three rounds in their entirety, simultaneous from beginning to end. Thus time was as visible to him as space, in the “long body” of each cosmos: the four-dimensional form of its total duration; and as any physicist or science-fiction writer can tell you, in order to see four dimensions you need to exist in five. He could see himself as he was in the three parallel worlds, as if his past-but-present selves were three separate God-beings ~ but OM-God grasped the five-dimensional thread of continuity that wound through all the rounds and raveled up in him. And now as OM itself he consciously breathed out the fourth round, and watched it unwind like a movie. At first it was a rerun ~ everything exactly repeated each previous round to the node where it had ended. So the point of interest was what would happen when round four caught up to the climax of round three, the death of God.

OM-God watched expectantly as his scion endured in the Abyss, hoist on the petard of life and death as if nailed to a cross. The lonely Self (Purusha) made no move to either pole, and his night went on and on. In wonderment OM-God realized that it was long past the mark at which he had chosen death. His breath was now almost fully expelled ~ perhaps when the limit was reached the present God would end his life and attain his resurrection in OM. But no, the turning-point came and passed, the great reconvergence of the cosmos began, and still God stood adamantly in the Abyss. It seemed fated now, and sure enough the fourth universe was absorbed back into OM along with its undead God, who did not rise again but simply dissolved into the nothingness from whence he came.

2. The Deuce