Many people in this world are seeking the truth. Well, guess what, I HAVE IT! Yes, I do indeed. It's both simple and extremely complicated at the same time so read carefully and consider everything written. I swear, this is as close as we can get to ABSOLUTE TRUTH!
Ok, so first, check this. There is a single Ultimate Existence that Is Was and Always Will Be. This ultimate existence is a single unified conglomeration of everything else that exists, but exists purely and simply as both everything and nothing at the same time. This means that all of existence basically adds up to zero - which in divine mathematics is somehow equal to infinity.
This ultimate existence is all that is really real. Everything else is less real than that, and it gets worse until we make it down through the four worlds and ten major emanations to this world, which is only kinda real.
So this world, right, it was created because the Ultimate Existence has to create. That's just this thing about Him (and note that I call the Ultimate Existence a Him because people exist more than things, meaning anything that really exists must be a Him and not an it). So He created this world. If I were Him I would have done things a little differently, but that's only a sign that I can't fully appreciate this world because obviously the Ultimate Existence is far smarter and more capable than I am and so if He created the world this way then it must be for a good reason. No, the Greatest Most Perfect of Reasons.
And what is this Greatest Most Perfect of Reasons? Why, to give of course! Didn't we already say that? the Ultimate Existence HAD to create - He HAD to give! That's not saying that He was compelled to do anything of course, because The Ultimate Existence can do anything He wants, being so super and ultimate and everything. So really it's that He WANTED to give, really really badly! And since He still exists exactly as He always has, being eternal and endless and always perfect in every way, this means that He STILL Wants to give so badly that He just can't help Himself! So that's what He does - constantly spewing forth... whatever He gives.
And what is it that He gives? Well, He gives what is best to give of course, or at least He wants to. Being all perfect and everything He will of course give the best thing in the universe. And what is the best thing in the universe? Didn't we already say that? It's Him of course! That's right, He wants to give Himself to the universe! But... well... that's not really possible even in divine logic because He is Him and He is intrinsically Him and there can only be one of Him. And he's so frikkin huge and inconceivable that if He were to give Himself to... wait, what's He giving Himself to again? Well that's another question we have to answer first I guess - how can we talk about what He gives if we don't know what He's giving too?
Ok, so the Ultimate Existence needed to make something the get what he wants to give. So we'll call that the Perfect Vessel. But see, he wants to give Himself. It's a fact that anything He would create would be inferior to Him and even by divine logic something inferior can't hope to contain something superior, the Perfect Vessel would shatter! And just to prove that that's what would happen, He did exactly that - He made the perfect vessel able to contain the most of anything and everything, and BOOM! it shattered! He even made more than one, 'cus He can do that, and tried to give Himself to all of them. Not part of Himself to all of them because He doesn't have parts, being singular beyond oneness and absolutely simple and perfect beyond simplicity and perfection.
So what now? How could The Ultimate Existence give its Divine Supernalness to an inferior something? If it were me, I'd give up right then and there. It's a tough problem and really doesn't make any sense to me. But not Him. Oh no, the Ultimate Existence wouldn't give up - He had to give, and the only direction he could give was down!
So He tried again and this time He didn't give Himself to a vessel, but rather to a channel! What brilliance! If He could somehow give Himself little by little to something else and that something else could experience it then let it flow through, then eventually He could give all of Himself to something!
OK, that's great, but there are two problems with that idea. The first is that He is infinite and what ever He makes would have to be finite, or at least less infinite than He is. Whatever the case, it would take infinitely long for Him to give Himself to anything. The second problem is - where will He go after He passes through the somethingness? This isn't even mentioning the problem of how His Ultimate Simplicity can be made to pass through something slowly without being made to differentiate Himself or split Himself up, since He has no parts or gradients to Him. Well, that last question is actually the easiest to answer - He does it by making the something change and differentiate while He remains static. Yeah, that's a confusing paradox but it's all we've got.
As for the problem of infinite length of time, that's a problem we're dealing with and have been dealing with for about 16 billion years, or 6 thousand years depending on how you wanna look at things.
Now regarding the problem of where he would go... well, the answer to this question is coupled with the answer to another question: if He created a channel, it would be a channel to where? And another question, what is this somethingness channel anways?
All the questions in the universe eventually have one ultimate and unified answer. It's hard to see it though. But these three questions actually have an easy common answer. Well, relatively speaking that is.
The answer is that this somethingness channel is the thing most similar to The Ultimate Existence as He could make. We'll call it the penultimate existence. So this penultimate existence is similar to the Ultimate Existence. How? Well, it too wants to give! How do you like that? The major difference between the two is that the Ultimate Existence intrinsically has what to give (being Himself), while the penultimate existence only has what to give extrinsically (being that which the Ultimate Existence gives to the penultimate existence, namely Himself). So the penultimate existence gives what it's got and gives it to the tertiary existence. The three gives to the four, the four gives to the five, and so on down the line.
In the middle there things start to get confusing (as if they weren't already), but somehow in all that giving things start to differentiate from one another, at first only by degree of reality (The Ultimate Existence being the most real existence and all other existences being proportionately less real as His Essence gets passed down from layer to layer) and later by other factors such as by who His Oneness gets passed down, how long it takes for His Oneness to get passed down, and other simple concepts like that. Things start to get extremely convoluted and yada yada yada, until they get to a level of complexity similar to the physical universe as it is today, with all kinds of complex differentiations based on extremely simple ones. And the greatest thing is that things get exponentially more complex as the convolution moves down from level to level, until what is really a very simple unity gets to a plethora of discriminable objects. It just so happens that this level of extreme complexity is very close to the edge of what can be considered to have any degree of reality whatsoever, because at this level things are so confuddled and convoluted that existence has decided to start taking instead of giving - and something that keeps just taking and taking will eventually shatter and not exist (see above). So this level of existence is basically the final one. At least, that's what everybody thought (who could follow this kind of stream of thought until about this point) until computers and virtual realities came around... but that's another topic altogether.
So anyways, here we are. At this level of differentiation it's possible for something or someone to start taking and stop giving. It's also possible to keep giving - mostly to the takers, which is a moral paradox in and of itself. That means that at this level, existence has gotten so convoluted that it can actually CHOOSE to keep existing or not! That's right, we (at this level of existence) can choose to live (by continuing to give and be generous) or die (by not giving but instead taking, making us opposed to The Ultimate Existence and thus different enough from Him that any semblance of existence we would have from similitude would be gone).
And here we see the ABSOLUTE GENIUS of The Ultimate Existence!
Up until this point we've seen things as a random evolving purposeless process that just happened to get to this point. But no, you see, it was this point that was aimed at when the whole confusing process began! Or rather, it's the next point. Which, incidentally is where I'm heading with this article/post/topic thing as well. No, in actual fact THIS WORLD is the whole point of existence (or rather it will be in the timeless future which already exists somehow somewhere else since it's timeless).
You see, one of the things that makes The Ultimate Existence what He is is the fact that He is completely and utterly intrinsically self-determined. Everything else is not self-determined, but rather has been determined by Him in His Great Wisdom. In fact, Him being everything in actual fact makes everything else completely determined by Him. Until this point of extreme convolution! Any more real and things MUST give, making their actions predetermined entirely. Any less real and things MUST take. We are balanced in the middle where we can choose to either give OR take! We exist at the exact point of confluence between good and evil, ego and submission, life and death, truth and falsehood. This being true, we have the ability to choose good, life, existence over evil, death, non-existence. By choosing good we are choosing to exist over not exist, meaning we are essentially CAUSING OURSELVES TO EXIST! That means we are SELF-DEFINING OURSELVES (at least partially), making us more similar to The Ultimate Existence than any other level of existence that exists.
And now we have reached the point, the end, the culmination of the whole process of creation and writing. The whole point of existence is having us lowly choosers choose to exist, making us more similar to The Ultimate Existence than anything else that was created. By becoming similar to The Ultimate Existence we are essentially partaking of The Ultimate Existence, both because He is giving us the experience and because we are becoming the experience. The latter is because of a principle I've only hinted to up until now, which is that in spirituality closeness and similitude are synonymous with each other. So paradoxically, by being so far away from The Ultimate Existence, we have the potential of coming so close, of partaking so directly of Him.
In a nutshell, that's the basics of everythingness. Beyond this is a whole bunch of specifics of HOW to choose life/good/giving/selflessness/truth/ex istence/eternality. The specifics include generosity, gratitude, inspiring generosity(aka. learning to receive instead of take), the process and principle of transmition of goodness etc. But essentially it all boils down to the following statement: "Do not do to others what you yourself abhor. Everything else is commentary - go and learn it!"
And if you can understand why this statement is both different and superior to "do unto others what you would have done unto yourself", then you truly have a grasp on The Ultimate Truth.
DX-weazel
... I lost track around the 6th paragraph, but this is wat i got; HE (who I've usually titled as GOD, but thats not the point) Is All mighty, all knowing, and pure. Being an entity of such greatness, must do whats moraly correct, and to keep His own divinity to himself would be "wrong". The concept of the perfect vessel is pretty vauge for me. But the final paragraph helped me with the altogether message. "Do not do what you dislike to others," is what I comprehended.
From my stand point (taken a lot from the Abrahic religions), this is how I see it. God, being perfect and Holy, wanted to share his his divinity with others, so he created man (being incapable of making an equivalent being) and gave him his own kingdom of Earth to give him the gift of godhood. Eventualy man is flauded with sin and God punishes humanity by removing them from there seat of power (like a Parent would ground their child for doing wrong).
I'm not sure if it's right but that's what I can figure. Correct me if you think I'm wrong.
ThePeasant (Updated )
I think you got it almost right.
Problems:
- man was never given 'godhood', rather a minor form of rulership. That's really just a semantic point.
- The punishment is more complex than just being grounded, but G-d's punishment was meant primarily to teach us how to correct our own behaviour and not to do something bad to us because we did something bad. Parents should try to do the former with their kids as well - make a punishment appropriate to the crime which contains within it the method towards repentance.
So what was the punishment? First, understand what was the sin. And to understand what was the sin, first understand what was the situation.
The situation was, metaphorically, two naked people, a snake, a tree and a fruit. And, of course, The One Ultimate Existence. The One Ultimate Existence said 'don't eat the fruit! Or else you will die!' So one naked person said to the other 'don't touch the tree, or else you will die!' The snake was like 'man, that's not fair! The second naked person is so hot - why does the first naked person get her? So the snake went to the second naked person and pushed her into the tree and said 'you didn't die! see? And you know what? The fruit is awesome!' So the second naked person ate some fruit and gave some to the first naked person. Then The One Ultimate Existence asked the first naked person what happened and he said it was the second naked person's fault. He asked the second naked person and she said it was the snake's fault. Then all of them got punished. That was the situation.
So where was the sin? The first naked person sinned when he told the second naked person that The One Ultimate Existence told them not to touch the tree. This means one aspect of the original sin was clouding the truth. The second naked person sinned when she listened to the snake's temptation and not the first naked person. So another aspect of the original sin was giving in to temptation. The snake sinned when he tricked the second naked person into doing bad things. So a third aspect of the original sin is purposeful deception motivated by jealousy. Then, at the end, both the naked people refused to take the blame. So a fourth aspect of the original sin was tattling on others and speaking poorly about them.
So we have four aspects: Making your own rules, Following Temptation, Jealousy, and speaking poorly about others.
They are also Deception, Deception, Deception and Deception. All the sins were different sides of deception.
So, what did The One Ultimate Power do? He put the two naked people and the snake in a world full of deception, which was a world of their own making. Then he said 'really, you made this mess. So go clean it up.' That was the punishment.
And now, thousands and thousands of years later, we're still making more of a mess and not really cleaning much up. But the solution is simple.
Don't make up your own rules - just do what is natural and what is good. Don't follow temptation, follow the truth that you know. Don't be jealous of others, just be happy with what you have. Don't speak poorly about your brother, be good to him. In short, be good to each other!