Amerika

It’s a slow news season, so we figured why not tackle one of the stories we’ve been avoiding because it’s difficult, and ask God a few questions. Since most people are atheistic, this should go right under the radar and keep us from having to do another one of those god-awful (no pun intended) Miley Cyrus features.

What’s it like running the entire known universe and you know, being God?

I am not a personality as you are accustomed to. It is more like being in a deep sleep, with lucid dreams. In these dreams I make small changes to the patterns of the world. It is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I am pleased when a design improves, and miserable when it goes awry, but part of the larger design is that misery and pleasure balance themselves constantly, so it is difficult to be miserable at misery or find pleasure pleasurable.

Do you have any message for believers on earth?

Dear believers, you are not believers, you are intuiters. When you look at the whole world and cosmos, and realize how it is organized, you intuit that a god-force exists, and that makes you a believer. Others do not have your vision. Help them but burn their books, because they’re incoherent.

I’d like to also add that the perceived split between religion and science is kind of funny actually. Religion and science are both ways to explain the world around you, but each has a different scope. Science can explain material, but religion tries to explain the order behind the metaphysical. But since you both study the same world, your conclusions will always be compatible, if you look hard enough. Yet scientists are people too and so also fallible.

Are you infallible?

No. I am a process that is infallible, but at any given instant, I can make an error. Then again, from this point of view it is not so much an error as a prototype decision which will later be revised.

What is the source of evil?

I am, of course. Evil is necessary to balance good; both are extremes. If you look at a Normal/Gaussian distribution, you’ll see that outliers on the left and right represent those extremes. If you watch over time, you’ll see how they help corral the majority of points in that distribution toward the center.

It’s a very effective way of locating a mean and gradually refining it without having a predetermined “center.” If you have a predetermined center, it’s easy enough for the whole thing to fall into rote and become stagnant. Evil and good keep beating the center about, which forces the system to self-correct, shifting its energy to keep it in constant motion.

This way it is a perpetual motion machine, of sorts. Eventually it must be reset, but that takes nearly infinite transactions to hit that level.

What happens when the universe is reset?

A huge explosion, or implosion, after a seemingly endless time of gray inconsequence. When you hit entropy, any choice is about as good as any other. So everything grinds to a halt because there’s no positive transfer of energy for any action. This causes a condensing of matter, and eventually, a vortex forms. This packs the whole thing in tightly, but you wouldn’t notice that if it were happening to you because it happens so uniformly it’s unobservable. After the implosion, a radical potential energy is created by the vast distance of collapse, and so a new cosmic iteration forms.

What happens to the old one?

What happens to you, after you die? You get stuck in time. Time is an artifact of causality, but that whole causal chain persists at the informational level of the universe, so you exist simultaneously while you don’t exist yet. It’s hard to explain in time-based causal language, but basically that universe persists in a palce we can’t access it.

The same is true of death: you’re no longer there, in your present time, but you have existed and therefore you exist. All action in this universe is synchronous, so that to be born is to die, but to have the conditions existing for your birth, there must have been a previous causal state, so you’ve always existed. I’m sure that makes zero sense to you because you see time as linear. That’s… well, if you swim through an ocean, you may see your path as linear but waves move under you, and the ocean itself is far from linear.

What you see of existence is like a movie generated from your path through existence. Existence itself exists in more dimensions than you can see, and time is an artifact of your relative motion, so while you’re dead in your present time, you exist in the past and because you existed in physical space, there are also causal consequences of your existence in other dimensions.

You know the saying “a watched pot never boils”? Well, a watcher never dies, at least in the sense of ceases to exist. But you’re no longer there, you know, where you live now.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

That’s understandable. You know that old parable about if you had infinite monkeys typing infinitely randomly, would you eventually get a volume of Shakespeare out of one of their typewriters? The universe is like that, except that randomness isn’t random. It’s based on existing patterns, it’s causal. But it’s not linearly causal, meaning that you don’t need object X to collide with object Y to interact. It’s more like the two converge because of a harmony between the patterns they’re trapped in.

So imagine infinite monkeys typing away on computers, dreaming of the same kind of shape or maybe a musical riff, and that influences what they type. Eventually one of them writes a UNIX operating system (on the way to that point, sixty of them write Windows 95). It might take a billion years or a few billion, but it happens without outside intervention. All of this is my dreamstate. I sleep, I dream, and the universe — which you might think of as my mind — organizes itself, forms thoughts this way, and then picks them through a process like the one that controversial guy (the one with the beard, Darwinks or something) wrote about: natural selection.

So infinite monkeys type ideas, I dream them, and then one of them “fits” in with all of the causal relationships that have gone before, or at least approximates a fit best, and I go with that. That’s what I do. It’s like a deep meditative state, where imagination and logic are joined perpetually. Anyway, this process isn’t as smart as you, but it’s consistent, which you’re not. And it has billions of years, and even more than billions of simultaneous processes, so it’s vastly smarter than you.

Shocking, isn’t it. Well, it’s probably not any comfort then for me to say that you’re also part of this process. Like every atom of this place, and every other living thing, you’re a monkey with a typewriter. Good luck parsing all of that. If I were stuck in linear physical causal time, my head would explode trying to understand it.

It’s just that… I can’t bear the thought of not seeing Aunt Georgiana again.

You will. If you did see her in life, you’ll see her again. Or rather, it’s correct to say that you never stopped seeing her. She never stopped seeing you. In a part of the vast causal chain of being, you exist in a perpetual exchange of energies. You, as a consciousness, shape the world around you, and it shapes you. Most of the time it’s bigger, so you’re on the receiving end. But you also carve out a place. So does she. And you’re there now because you were there in the past, and that past doesn’t change just because a future occurred, in fact, they co-define each other. So you’ve seen her in the future already and you’re already dead and you’re both still there, so I think you’re OK.

I have to admit, I’ve always gone to church, but I’ve never really bonded with Jesus. He seems like a really hippie version of You.

Did I sent Jesus? Well, I guess anything that splits off of divinity can claim to be sent by me, but it’s more complex than that. I sent every genius in history.

I sent Jesus to tell you not to worry about death, just do the right thing. He — well, you know boys — they’re all heart but not as much wisdom. He was only 33 when he died. And since then, most people have gotten his statements wrong. He never wrote down a damn thing, other humans did. And as part of the plan, they changed it a little. And so on, for centuries, before the Bible even got to Europe, where it got translated into a more specific language and lost a lot of its connotation. So the Bible you have is a beautiful work, but often a dream.

I am known in all languages, and on all continents. They call me different names, and describe me differently, but it’s still me, because I am the only God of this cosmos and this world. Jesus tried his hardest but he was all heart. You should just take away from him the idea that you shouldn’t fear death. Do what is right and if you die, you died well. You carry on elsewhere. Even more importantly, should you succeed, you will have helped keep this universe brilliant. Your life will have no higher accolade. Think about being old and nearly dead: do you care about your awards, your money, how many homeless people said “Gawd bless” as you passed? No, you’re past those things. And so the only reward you really get in this life is knowing you spent your time well, by creating beauty.

Beauty occurs when form fits function with grace. Grace is that insight which takes us past linear thinking into synchronous thinking, when you see all the factors at once, and you make something beautiful. Oh, that’s tautological, you say? When you get outside of time, son, everything must be tautological or it doesn’t make any sense.

I was going to ask you about the death penalty, legal drugs, and, uh… but you probably know that.

Yeah. I kind of sidetracked your interview because that’s my job. I’m God. And you’re asking me about all these little details, as if you needed someone to explain the obvious for you? Here it is again, if Jesus didn’t make it simple enough: treat people as they deserve to be treated. If they’re good people, give them good things and never stop. If they’re murderers, murder them. You have plenty of people. You want to make life sacred? Keep only the life with the light in it. That way, you’re helping make the experience of being alive that much brighter and clearer.

Remember that Gaussian distribution? Evil must exist, and good must fight it. If they do, that keeps the middle in line. If they don’t, well, you shift over toward evil, and it’s such a vast shift you can’t perceive it except by measuring yourself to the past.

They say you should put the most important thing at the end of an interview. I can’t imagine why in 2010 this would end up there. Except I can. I planned it that way, and I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but I’m starting to dream a shape. Or a melody.

Either way, the future is being formed as we speak, and it’s up to you to help. So stop talking. Go do it. Don’t call me — I already know. I’m God.

Thanks to Derek at SolidPR for hooking us up with this interview. Transcribed by Steve Harris. We do not promise an absence of farcical content.