The God Principle

 

 

 

 

Somewhere in time, on a planet circling a small yellow star in the spiral arm of a typical galaxy with billions of stars, an ant picked up a greenish brown leaf from an outcrop of rock and proceeded to carry it to its nest. Making its way through the jumble of leaves, twigs and grasses that adorned the winding mountain path, it looked up for a moment to find something enormous and alive regarding it with fascination. As their eyes met, the ant paused and considered a while, its antennae moving as it tried to make sense of this newcomer that had intervened in its world. It soon seemed to have come to a decision, for it proceeded along as if the intruder didn’t matter at all.

 

Aliyah felt a quick sense of insignificance sweep over her, which then turned into wonder as she considered the ant’s own world of perception. How busy it was with its own! Yet it knew nothing about the size or complexity of the world around, nor experienced the emotions or thoughts of a higher being such as herself. If she could communicate with an ant, would it understand any of her concepts? The scale of being that separated her from the ant was so enormous, that any direct meaningful communication was impossible.

 

And yet the ant’s brain was next in wonder to the human brain, for it had the capacity to learn, an amazing feat for such a tiny insect. And the way an ant colony functioned was even more amazing. The ants formed a real society under their queen, had assigned jobs, collaborated on tasks, ran nurseries for their young ones, farmed, harvested and stored, domesticated, constructed and used tools. They also cleaned and tidied up their dwellings, went to war with other colonies, some even made slaves, picked up their dead, took thought for the morrow and took care of one another. And they did all of these without someone to control and direct their actions. Here indeed was a reflection of a human society, perhaps the best possible on such a tiny scale. Still it was but a faint reflection, and no ant could possibly recognize or understand a complex and technologically advanced human society. Here was an analogy that likewise pointed to higher levels of being and organization above man, levels which Aliyah was probably utterly incapable of understanding.

 

Above her, beyond the mountain, was a grander cosmos, at such an enormous scale that it was literally mind-boggling. Her own comparison of scale with the ant seemed insignificant compared to that of the earth within the unfathomable vastness of the universe. Yet the universe had a homogeneous appearance throughout, with structures repeated at higher as well as lower scales, such as stars clustering into galaxies, galaxies forming clusters, and those clusters forming super clusters, and so on. Even the microcosm of the atoms with its nucleus and electrons resembled something as expansive as a solar system. There was an uncanny similarity between appearances of structures at various scales. The rocky stretch at her feet looked very much like a miniature mountain range, and the little grass and shrubs growing profusely on the ground resembled a forest. It was sometimes hard to distinguish the scale of a terrain in photographs of nature. One could be looking at a close-up image or perhaps a large-scale view. It required something else in the picture to set the scale, such as a bottle or a coin highlighting the close-up shot of some rock strata, or a person or dwelling against the backdrop of a larger terrain. And one could easily lose sense of distance in the seemingly endless rocky desert, unable to fathom whether a stretch of rock seen in the distance was just one mile away or perhaps twenty. Not only rocks, but many other features on the earth, such as trees, rivers, clouds, mountains, coastlines, snowflakes, sand dunes and other structures, tended to show a self-similarity of the whole to the smaller elements they were composed of. Did not the branch of a tree by itself look like another tree? These fractal manifestations seemed to represent a cosmic order, the working of universal principles that resulted in similar phenomena on various scales. By her system of correlations, there had to be like manifestations in the realm of the body, mind and spirit, at various scales, from the minuscule to the mind-boggling.⁽¹⁾ The ant moving about at her feet seemed to be a case in point.

 

Rising up from the hazy red of the earth under her feet were the grasses, shrubs, plants and trees that covered the earth with the colors and hues of green. Looking higher up, she encountered the milky blue vault of the sky. The colors as they progressed from the earth upward shifted from reds to greens and then to blues, frequencies of light that were progressively higher in vibration, the red color being the lowest frequency, green an intermediate one, and blue a high frequency. This progression also seemed to represent a spiritual direction, that of raising one’s vibrations from involvement with earthly pleasures, signified by the low vibrational color of red, to higher levels represented by green and blue. The green of the plants and trees were indeed growing away from the red of the earth towards the blue of the sky. The colors red, green and blue were also those the human eye was attuned to, for the cones in the retina of the eye were similarly designed. There were three types of cones, one responding to red frequencies, one to green, and another to blue. These colors were also known as the additive primaries, for red, blue and green-colored lights could be combined to create lights of any other color. The totality of a spectrum of color, a gamut as it is known, could be created from their combinations. This was how a television tube or computer display worked, mixing red, green and blue in various proportions. This was also how the human eye functioned, to generate the sensation of other colors. Thus red, green and blue functioned as primary and essential building blocks of colors.

 

Was it a coincidence that the same additive primaries were now stretched out before and above her? Did they not represent the very fundamental and the resulting totality of experience that the earth offered to its inhabitants? Combining red, green and blue lights in equal proportions resulted in white light, representing the bright Sun high up in the sky, such as at noon. The progression then was even more stark, from red, green and blue, to the white which represented a synthesis or union of all. Once again the Sun represented this sublime spiritual source in her analogies! But the visible spectrum of light was only a very narrow span within the complete range of frequencies of the solar electromagnetic spectrum, most of which extended beyond and higher than violet and could not be distinguished by her eye, representing levels of experiences as yet unfathomable to her.

 

And interestingly, the sunlight was not pure white to the human eye, but had a tint of yellow. Even more curiously the human eye could not distinguish the yellow frequency of light from a mixture of red and green frequencies. There were no cones in the retina for yellow, but the yellow light equally stimulated both the red and the green cones, resulting in the perception of yellow by the additive combination of red and green. Combining red, green and blue in equal proportions resulted in white light, and if the contributions of red and green were increased, the white attained a tint of yellow. The more the red and the green were given prominence, the more yellowish the light appeared. But the red and the green were also colors that immediately surrounded her in the environment, colors that represented the baser and earthly inclinations. Did the sunlight, by its yellow tint, point out a hidden significance in mundane earthly experiences?

 

By now, the sky was awash with color. Brilliant streaks of red, yellow and orange with hints of pink were stretched across its vast canvas, the beautifully colored strokes painted by the evening twilight, setting the stage for the Sun to drop out of the horizon. Darkness would soon engulf the land. Here was a planet of day and night, where light and darkness followed one another in succession, each calling to its own. Unlike most nearby solar-type stars that formed binary or twin-star systems, the Sun was solitary, thus casting shadows and light in equal progression on its planetary bodies. This light had always been associated with goodness, virtue and other positive aspects of the spirit. Darkness likewise evoked the ideas of selfish, destructive and negative tendencies. The earth indeed was a planet where both these aspects of the spirit co-existed, where one followed another in waxing and waning cycles, depicting an endless struggle between opposites. And to compound matters, in the midst of darkness a light existed, the light of the moon, which purportedly gave its own light but was truly not a source by itself. It represented that which confused and deluded man in the name of the light, appearing to be as big or bigger than the true source. The interplay of light, shadows and darkness on the earth was indeed a reflection of what took place therein.

 

(continued here)

 

 

1. See chapter 'Desert'