A VIRTUAL PLAYGROUND: PLANET EARTH
By Sarah Odishoo
It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.
—Arthur C. Clarke
In a time of universal deceit, the truth is revolutionary.
—George Orwell
I
What if human beings are hybrid alien creatures?
That is, a Creator used matter (the earth’s four elements—earth, air, water, fire) to design a “space suit”—the human body. Then the Creator injected the body with a “spirit,” an alien life force from another plane of existence, to live and play and breed in this new earthly plane of Being?
A celebrated 1997 paper by Juan M. Maladacena…describes nature as a kind of hologram, in which the information about what happens inside a volume of three-dimensional space, for example, is encoded in quantum equations on its two-dimensional boundary, the way a 3-D image is encoded on the face of your bank card.
…physicists have more reason than ever to think that information cannot be lost.*
And the purpose?
For those beings to remember their source—the holographic designer—and return to it, not in their physical form (their space suits) but in spirit (their real form), the “eternal” information with which we are programmed cannot be lost. It may be that the ultimate goal would have been to have that information transform the body so that the spirit of the body would remember where it came from and use it consciously to teach the leaden, fleshly body to learn how to navigate its spiritual powers in a material world to transform matter into psychic possibilities…
But that may be far ahead of our script.
II
Quantum entanglement, also known as “spooky action at a distance,” in which particles separated by light years can still instantaneously appear to remain connected.*
Our spirit exists not only in our bodies but also in another dimension, and we can, if we become conscious, direct our activities—and here I mean thoughts and feelings and meaning—not only to others but to the Source within the body, not only to the physical body and world.
As Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen pointed out in 1935, quantum theory predicts that a pair of particles can be connected in such a way that measuring the property of one—in the direction of spin, say—will immediately affect the results of measuring the other one, even if it is light-years away.*
We may be in a “boarding school” where we are in the process of awakening matter with our spirit in order to become one with that which is—that “spooky action at a distance.” I suppose you could say Jesus was one of those teachers of spooky action, as were Buddha/Siddhartha, Moses, Mohatma Gandhi, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Theresa of Avila, the ones who actually lived in corresponding universes simultaneously and suffered the double language barriers—those of this material reality and the other interior one, but all chose Spirit, against all odds.
III
The physical barriers?
We are born into a material world as beings of matter—flesh, bone, blood, air. In the womb we neither see, nor hear, nor feel the outside physical world. We understand nothing of the material world. We are spirit encased in fleshly matter. We must enter the world this way to become acclimatized to a new order and learn the ways of a system completely unlike the one from which we came in order to consciously choose to return to spirit. That freedom to choose to recognize and acknowledge the Source available to us transforms the material body into life-force, like electricity. Spirit taps the source of the energy we need to transform unconscious living into conscious living—seeing the Source in all that is.
Most of us completely forget our birthing and the first three years of life. Wordsworth describes that infancy in our bodies as “trailing clouds of glory,” as he identifies in that beginning the essence of the unknowable in the naked appearance of a God in each newborn. Just as the child sees the world as new, so the soul looking at the world through spirit sees its miracles, its order, its wholiness.
IV
According to science, our inherited nature is created and formed by a history of ancestors, their gene pool, and the memory programmed within those genes.
…a basic tenet of modern science and of quantum theory is that information is always preserved. From the material in the smoke and flame of a burning book…, one could figure out whether it was the Bible or the Kama Sutra; the same would be true of the fizz and pop of black holes.*
Where did that Nature come from? Spooky action at a distance?
We still don’t know. Three axioms:
- All human beings alive today are related to each other; the furthest away any of us can be from one another is 42nd cousin!
- All human beings have the same four lettered genes, yet of the seven-and-a-half billion humans on the earth, there is not one duplication of genes. Each human is a unique, singular, incomparable being. Why?
- All human tribes and cultures have had a Source to which they turn for explanation of cause and effect and to which they feel indebted for both what they can see and feel.
Humans are programmed too. The search for meaning to this earthly life is a paramount constant in all human values and activities. And all human societies identify the translators of that alien world: parapsychics—priests, magi, ministers—who try to explain the unexplainable—smoke and flame of what is.
Scientists are the new-world magi, and like the magi who predicted a “new king is born,” the scientists give us reality checks of unseen forces of creation we either don’t understand or don’t believe or both.
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
—Albert Einstein (1879-1955)*
Einstein understood he was on the shoulders of a whole history of magi who tried to explain the purpose of Being—the real.
V
Consider this: The earth as God’s school and playground.
VI
Entanglement: What if each of us is a virtual being: a projected image of our Self from another dimension? That self as Spirit can project its being—its imaginal Self, the actress—on the projected stage called Earth. And on that stage, she tests and refines her powers of choice, action, process, play, and replay until she perfects the roles she has chosen, accepted, and learned what she needs to know in order to return to Spirit. To do that, she needs to communicate with the Self from which she came. Entanglement. Particle whispering to particle. Known to unknown. And each pain, conflict, agony, ache, has meaning, significance, and implications that are different than joy and happiness. Pain brings conscious attention to solving the problem; joy loves its state and wants to stay in it.
So that small, still voice is the other particle that wants us to know what we don’t already know.
This Stage is her testing ground to perfect her imperfect perception of spiritual wholeness. The process of living in this world is to choose to know or not to know what the other particle is whispering and to act on that knowledge instead of the earthly instructions. The progression on this earthly stage for humans is Love/Laughter/Language/Logic—in that order. If you don’t receive one, the next and next are affected—Nature and its laws are affected.
In the cosmic world smoke and flame can tell us if it’s the Bible or the Kama Sutra, and our lifetimes have the same residues as well.
God does not play dice. —Albert Einstein*
VII
The Laws of Nature are interdependent for a reason—Growth. There is no act, no thought, no decision, no word that is lost, or has no consequences, or no repercussions. All affects All.
And for what reason?
The loving logic behind all the laws is to make us conscious enough to recognize that the Source is within and with-out us and the natural laws abet the Source in returning us to what feels like a “natural” state—the Source within us.
So that small, still voice that is the other particle wants us to be conscious enough to be free to choose what we already know—The Source.
VIII
No information is lost. Our lifetimes have residues billions of years in the making and remaking. The role ends, not the Being.
IX
Why Death and dying?
Every sliver of experience is part of a conspiracy, in the best sense of the word, to reveal and reflect our relationship to the whole. The freedom to choose to know—consciousness—liberates the human from the material construct of the body to explore possibilities that are the transforming dimensions of Being and Source. Death is the end of the show. An actor’s virtual life is on the stage. Her real life is in the wings, preparing to die.
Death always prioritizes the Real, and the Self begins to understand what is critical in this play of life. In the role she has chosen in which the Source has set the Stage, she can stand in the wings watching herself watching herself…
Another season, another show…
*All italicized references are from Dennis Overbye, “Einstein and the Black Hole,” The New York Times, August 13, 2013.
About the Author:
Sarah A. Odishoo is a poet and writer who teaches at Columbia College Chicago and who was nominated for Best of Net Anthology for “Euclid’s Bride,” published by Diversevoicesquarterly.com (2014) and “Germane German” Under-the-Sun.online.com (The Pushcart Prize ,2015, and most recently, published “Virtual Reality is the Real…” (2016)
with www.michiganquarterlyreview.com.
