Exit Interview

Thank you for granting me this chance to explain our point of view. You are obviously more intelligent and have access to more information and your civilization is far advanced, and I realize we must seem trivially simple to you, and you may or may not see value in our continued existence. But let me give you some thoughts.

While each of us humans is limited to our individual sensory inputs, we do have shared stories, memories, conclusions and theories developed over many generations and hundreds and thousands of years. Because the universe is so elaborate, we believe that it has some purpose, even though we don’t know what that purpose is. We believe, given that the purpose is grander than we can imagine, it may include intelligence and reasons that are completely opaque to us. It might therefore be that this purpose could include logical reasons for what may seem to us to be absurdities of our existence and our reality.

It does seem to us absurd that complex thinking, conscious animals are each individually doomed to die. And of what value is their suffering? When you look at us, why should you be concerned if we, as a whole species and civilization, cease to exist? From your greatly higher position, knowledge and point of view, you may ask why you should be any more concerned with our troubles and our existence or nonexistence as the universe as a whole apparently is. Maybe you should even step on us like we might step on an ant, or exterminate us as we might an ant colony.

We think your knowledge, opinions and theories are of immense import and interest, but we also do not know that you are the ultimate reality or in touch with the ultimate purpose. There may be a higher-level power that could still make and execute judgements beyond your knowledge and control. Who is it say whether information is conserved and never destroyed? Who is to say that the past does not exist? Who is to say that moral judgments beyond our ken will not be exercised? For these reasons we abide with a deep faith that all will be well in the end, and hope for outcomes unseen. We endure all hardships, seek equitable justice and trust in providence. This is our point of view, and we honor it. It is better to have lived and died as an insignificant little creature than never to have lived at all.

But let me say just a little bit more. Our Reality is a large crystal. The crystal has an Absolute Apex that flows forth into the whole crystal in a volumetric explosion of colors, flowers and shapes beyond our imagination, and also contains many streaks of localized intensity and development. Each streak is a thread-like skein of even more internal connectedness, complexity, and inter-relatedness and each streak is also intimately connected with all the other streaks, in complex ways that co-determine intimate development. Our own streak is actually a time-stream, we inhabit and experience our own now as a speck in this stream. We view our past as events closely connected to our speck to the left, and anticipate our future as close-by specks to our right. We do not see at all the myriad intimate connections between our stream and all the other streaks. These connections are completely invisible to us but they control, constrain and enhance the development of our stream. Everything in the crystal is eternal in that the crystal is permanent and exists outside of what we call time. So our speck, our current now, will always exist and has always existed as part of the crystal. Likewise our past and our future have always existed and will always exist, although we cannot perceive that from our current speck of time. So we take care with how we live each moment because we will have to live with these moments forever.

When God the Father created the crystal, He created it in such a way that it would evolve in fabulous and elaborate ways that are beyond our understanding, and so as to bring ultimately favorable results including for us puny creatures, but in order to do this it involves some suffering and pain. We cannot possibly perceive why or how because it involves the elaborate interconnections between the many streaks and throughout the crystal. When God’s Son created our stream He did so in accordance with all of the Father’s plans and He created it to evolve in a time stream to ultimately beget creatures such as us. He incarnated at the appropriate place and time and He will return again at the end of our time-stream. This time-stream has the capability to encapsulate time in such a way so as to ultimately create a capsule that will have a subjectively infinite and eternal amount of time. That is, our entire stream including the ending time capsule exists inside the crystal, but to creatures such as us, the amount of information processed per unit of our time will increase exponentially and to us as creatures it will seem to be an eternity. This is our paradise.

Consider the paradisiacal subjectively eternal time capsule at the end of our time stream. It will seem infinitely long to those living in it because each time period will incorporate infinitely more conscious experience and information content than the preceding time period. This will be engineered by the massive information computing power of the society of conscious beings led by Jesus the Son of God after His return. Everything good from preceding times will be resurrected there, nothing good will be wasted and nothing bad or evil will be allowed in to the paradise time capsule. Every person who ever lived will see all the good within them resurrected. But if a person is resurrected, which person will it be, the child, the young person or the old person? There are an infinite number of persons in the many moments of our lives. Perhaps a composite will be resurrected. In addition, every good possibility springing from a good person or thing will be manifested in all its glory.

We may not know the details and the exactness because we are limited creatures of low understanding, and so our ideas are more metaphor and simile than fact, but the underlying meaning is there and is of value and we cherish what we collectively are imagining. You should see the value and honor it like we honor the value of crows and parrots, whales and dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, and elephants and octopuses. Value is value, and everything in the crystal is preserved. The Father is beyond our imaginings and it scares us as a Fire that must completely dissolve and consume many things in order to create many things. The Son who created our time stream is more approachable and understands us better. We each wander about our stream as if it matters and it does matter to us. Some sense their fate and adhere to it and stay beautifully on-path, with each decision following the logic of their fate. Others go off-skein and make confused decisions bouncing them from stem to stern amongst the many paths within the multiverse. Each and every one of us helps to unfold the infinitely branching multiverse of our time-stream.

So please consider taking us seriously. We have thoughts, ideas and aspirations. We are very interested in your knowledge, theories, and opinions, which are based no doubt on superior data, knowledge and cogitation, but please don’t be surprised if we don’t automatically just abandon our ideas when they conflict with yours. There may be more things than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

For example, what if our crystal is part of a larger crystal, which might be a part of a still larger crystal, perhaps in an infinite chain, crystals all the way up. Maybe way up at the top is an Ur-Apex. This Ur-Apex must contain both good and evil, since both certainly exist in our world. In our world, a war exists between good and evil, and we cannot be sure which will win. If evil wins, then the God of our crystal and our timestream must be a megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic monster, or else a weakling. But we can imagine and hope that a good God designed and planned it so that good will win and good things will all be resurrected in a paradise at the end of our timestream, including a paradisiacal afterlife for all good people. After all, is it really any harder to create an afterlife in a paradise than to have created the world we see all around us that we live in along with creatures such as ourselves? I don’t think so. Admittedly, our universe has a probability of one hundred percent since we observe that it does exist, whereas a paradise and an afterlife rest on hope and speculation. But, I submit that creating a paradise and afterlife is no more difficult than creating the massively unlikely stuff we see all around us, including us. So, if our god is a monster, there is nothing we can do about it. But we can and do hope for a God who creates an outcome worth the price, drying every tear and full of all that is good. Also we hope for a God who resurrects every good part of every person who ever lived or will live. Maybe a resurrected person will be made up of all the good parts of that person from every stage of that person’s life, which gives each of us the incentive to strive for the good, and abhor the evil, for the resurrected person of a Hitler may not be worth very much.

At the end of the day, it seems that the Ur-Apex, the core apex, had to have intentions when it started the whole ball rolling. And, given the good and evil we see around us, the core Apex must have contained both good and evil, even if the evil really only consisted of the inability to create the intended good without the necessary and associated creation of a lot of pain, suffering and evil as part of the process. Maybe, for God, the ends really do justify the means.

Also consider that God, who knows everything, cannot therefore be a participant in a process that requires a conscious, thinking and feeling entity to make choices that facilitate evolution. God, desiring to create through evolution, created us as conscious, thinking and feeling creatures who are ignorant of what it’s all about, how it came to be, and where it’s going, including the consequences of our choices. I wonder whether your very advanced civilization might be too knowledgeable to properly participate or facilitate certain evolutionary processes?

Consider our messiah, Jesus Christ. He is hard to pin down. He was the Prince of Peace, yet he brought not peace but a sword. A defender of the faith, but a critic of the religious establishment. He spoke in parables, not mathematical formulas. Like Him, we look at a world in which innocent children suffer and die due to earthquakes, tsunamis, and disease, yet we believe in divine purpose and that all will be well in the end. We are a peculiar people, pondering a paradox.

I suppose you might respect us more if we were not animals, if we were pure information processes, robots, autonomous machines. But we are animals, and as such we are influenced by emotions and deep subconscious demons. If we are thereby lesser, perhaps we are also thereby more. Consider another example, our music. We have a unique sense of rhythm, time, frequency, and tone. It is all a matter of timing. Possibly our language evolved from our primitive music. Just as we admire the singing of birds, you might benefit from our uniquely evolved music. Think of us as Idiot Savants.

I suppose you see me as so simple as to be completely determined, finalized and confined to a defined template. Maybe I am, and maybe all my dreams, feelings, heartaches, and bitter longings are simple arithmetic to you. Though I may be simple, I may still be an on-going Turing calculation that will never halt.

And what about our mathematics? It may be quite simplistic to you but it is at least a poetic picture of what we perceive around us. We know it is only one of an infinitely large collection of such pictures. Oh, there may be a few among us who think our maths are real, but they are mostly naïve professional mathematicians and physicists. The rest of us are not so easily deluded. The map is not the territory.

Even if you are going to exterminate us, or if you know we’ll die out without your help, I’d still like to ask a few questions and I’d appreciate it if you would answer them, and so would the human race, because we are a curious people and even facing imminent non-existence, we would love to know some things even briefly before we go. Is there a God, a Supreme Being, an Original Creator? If so, is God omnipotent and/or omniscient, or does God have limitations or rivals? If so, how powerful are the rivals and what are they like? Are there purposes or reasons for what exists? Can they be communicated? What is consciousness? What is time? Are there any things of great importance that we might not think to ask, that you could tell us for our fleeting pleasure? What the hell is it all about, anyway, can you tell me that?

And can you answer the “why?” question for us? Our science has allowed us to describe nature, make predictions and even explain a little bit of “how” things work, but these scientific methods of ours can’t even make a small dent in the “why” questions. Why gravity? Why electromagnetism? It’s fine to have equations describing and predicting how gravity works, but why does it work that way?

Take an extreme point of view. There is no reason or purpose. Everything is an accident. Starting with nothing but a big bang, gradually elements coalesced and through chemical and physical evolution, stars and galaxies formed and eventually biological life evolved on a remote little planet we call earth, and then eventually humans evolved with brains capable of doing quantum mechanics and with what we call consciousness. But it is all a meaningless accident. Given enough time, anything can happen.

Actually, even fourteen billion years seems far too short of a time for so many unlikely accidents to happen. But I guess the joke’s on us, it all did happen, giving us the illusion of reason and purpose where none exists.

Or take another point of view. Maybe there is another world behind the veil, a world so mysterious and beyond the world that we can see, taste, hear, touch and smell that we can never know anything about it at all. So here the joke is that there may be purpose, but we can never know anything about it.

Either way, we are adrift on a sea of doubt and despair. We look death squarely in the face and we laugh, because to cry would only make things worse. Our only motivation is to force ourselves to get up every morning, fight for survival, and convince ourselves that everything will turn out just swell, in the end. Such is our lot. But for me, I appeal to your greater sentience. You have been chosen and ordained to hear our complaints and decide aspects of our fate. Is our fate real, does it involve any conscious or unconscious minds in the physical world or the mental world or some other world? This message constitutes my appeal on our behalf.

Lastly, the language of this message is very simple, and a poor vehicle for imparting the underlying thoughts, and the message itself may seem to you to be of little import. Nonetheless, if taken as a whole, it contains a spirit and a depth, and it is more than the sum of its parts, its words, sentences, and paragraphs.

Both the language and the message, simple though they may be, are the result of a long process of inductive and intuitive evolution, involving pain and suffering, as well as glory and transcendence, by a bottom-up process of a long-suffering society, a continual and on-going collective process of giving birth. They are not, nor could they be, the result of a top-down deductive logic and mathematics. They are a participatory creation, not the result of a fiat creation, put into the mouth of a Zombie-like creature.

And yet, despite everything, despite Auschwitz and Hiroshima, despite imminent death and destruction, I rest my soul and my spirit in divine providence and in the hope of a victorious God, based on the faith inspired by the intuited evidence of things not seen. Long live the messiness of life.