The Ancient and Religious History of the Grid
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Deep inside the fabric of matter and energy, there are gods and goddesses in embryo. Waiting to be born.
—Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
—John 14:2
If science is about the structure of the universe, then spirituality is about the essence. We can never really understand the nature of reality unless we find a theory that encompasses both the implicate and the explicate. The microcosm and the macrocosm. As above, so below. The inside and the outside.
Dorothy couldn't understand Oz until she saw what, or who, was behind the curtain pressing the buttons and pulling the strings. Whether or not we believe in anything spiritual or religious, we can certainly appreciate the depth of wisdom of ancient religious traditions whose writers and creators pondered the same questions about the universe they were observing as we do today. From the dawn of recorded history, humans have whispered of what lies behind the curtain, beneath the shrouded veil of everyday reality. Beyond the door of ordinary perception and experience. They wondered about how it all worked, what laws were present, and what fundamental truths governed the movement of the stars and planets and even the atoms that make up all matter.
The physicist Heinz Pagels said, “I think the universe is a message written in code, a cosmic code, and the scientist's job is to decipher that code. This idea, that the universe is a message, is very old.” This code is the Grid in action, and it is not a new idea born of quantum physics theory or laws of modern science. It is an idea as old as time itself.
Creation myths and stories from a variety of cultures speak of a void of “nothingness,” or a sea or field of vibrating energy from which everything comes and may one day return. This fundamental level of reality is the source and everything exists in this level, and yet nothing exists at all, simply because it has not yet been given physicality.
From the ancient primary texts of the Hindu Vedas, the Christian New Testament, and even the cosmogenesis stories and myths of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and ancient Egyptians, creation is said to come from a formless void containing the building blocks of life and physical existence, and this void or field (or Grid) permeates every inch of space-time. Think of the Kingdom of Heaven of the New Testament, described in the Gospel of Thomas as a formless field that is “inside you and outside you . . . spread out upon the Earth, but . . . men do not see it.”
The levels of the Grid are implicate . . . and invisible, but somehow the whole of the Grid must have an origin point, one level from which the other levels spring forth when nothingness is acted upon by the forces of creation to manifest physical objects, matter, and form. To scientists, this could be the origin of sound and light itself that then, via some mechanism such as vibration or resonance, was utilized to give form to energy and matter. This sounds like the zero-point field of quantum physics, a field of superposition and potentiality that serves as a ground state for all matter. It is from this level that we come and to this level that we return, as we too are made up of particles vibrating at different frequencies, just like the “stuff” in the ZPF.
For many cultures and traditions, this level of reality was the primordial waters or the soup from which the chemical and biological reactions occurred to form life. In Egyptian creation myths, this primal field of the waters of life was called Nun, and all matter and form came from this infinite field. Nun was often called the Father of the Gods and was said to permeate every inch of space and time.
Many Eastern traditions would refer to this as the Supreme Mind or Supreme Consciousness, the force behind all physical manifestation. The Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of realms of higher dimensions or divisions within as bardo (“intermediate state”). The seat of the gods is within us as unlimited dimensions or realms of reality. Hopi Native Americans in the Southwest believe there is a force behind form and physical manifestation called the heart of the cosmos, just as the Mandaeans in Iraq speak of a supreme and formless entity that expresses itself through both spiritual and physical creation. This parallels as well the fourth century BCE Chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching, which describes a void that is featureless yet complete, and born before heaven and Earth, thus implying three separate levels of reality (much like David Bohm's superimplicate, implicate, and explicate orders).
The concept of three levels of reality or process levels by which reality is manifested is common throughout many religious traditions, myths, and folklore. Going back to primitive traditions that emerged into shamanism, we have the three worlds by which shamans or medicine healers could journey to retrieve souls, heal the sick, and gain access to vital information from spirit and animal guides. These worlds, which are mirrored in many Native American traditions, consist of the upper world, the middle world, and the lower world.
The upper world is the home of higher beings, angels, and spirit guides with wisdom and information not accessible on the lower levels. This is where the teachers of humans exist, ready to impart their knowledge to the shaman who has journeyed there, usually to the rhythmic sounds of drumming and rattling designed to facilitate an altered state of consciousness.
The middle world mirrors everyday reality.
The lower world consists of power animals and archetypal forces that are more aligned with the instinctual and the subconscious. This is also the realm where the shaman can access the ancestral spirits of those they're trying to help.
A world tree serves as a center point to the entirety of creation, linking together the lower world, middle world, and upper world. The world tree is also said to be all of creation itself, much like the holographic universe, where each piece contains the entire universe within it.
Norse mythology recognizes three levels as well, divided into nine worlds:
The world tree, here called the Yggdrasil, links these three levels.
Figure 3. The Russian World Tree, Yggdrasil. Artist unknown/Public Domain
The Aborigines also recognize an invisible world of the spiritual, which is often accessed during Dreamtime. Like shamans, they journey to another reality as “real” as the day-to-day one of normal existence. In Dreamtime, it is possible to communicate and interact with spirits, ancients, and ancestors, and the physical world is thought to be a manifestation of the activities of the spirit beings in the Dreaming. The Aboriginal cosmology embraces the understanding of both the spiritual and physical as interpenetrating parts of the whole of existence. They instinctually and intuitively know that the seen reality is not the only one and that other realities are equally important. The Great Father was the source from which all was created, and from the chaos order was given through the spirit beings that formed the physical landscape through the Dreaming.
This concept of a powerful creator or creative force emerging out of nothingness is found in most creation myths. Through a series of progressive events, the creator gives birth to gods and goddesses or beings responsible for the manifestation of the physical world. Everything is infused with the Divine force or breath or spirit, and creation begins from the point of this singular moment. Before then, there is nothing; after there is everything. The big bang of myth in all its varied forms starts, and ends, the same way.
The whole purpose of myth and creation stories is to give order and meaning to the universe, based on common scientific knowledge of the time, which is why these primal stories contain nuggets of truth and even some good, hard science hidden within the fictional contexts of how the world appeared to their uninitiated eyes. In The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters and Others, Alexander Eliot talks about the common elements of all global myths as a way for humans to wrap their minds around the creation of the world, and their role in it: “For members of archaic and traditional societies, myth narrates a sacred history, telling of events that took place in primordial time, the fabulous time of the ‘beginnings.’” Myths are accounts of creation, and surprisingly all myths contain similar imagery and ideas as to how that creation came about.
These same myths recognized that all of nature, and reality, did not exist solely in the seen, but also the unseen. Eliot writes, “The kind of intelligence which creates mythologies is that which recognizes the presence of enormous and incomprehensible forces hidden away in the depths of nature—of worlds within worlds and beyond all the worlds that are directly known to us.” Chief deities and gods and goddesses often existed in or presided over these unseen realms of reality, their effects and influences felt in the natural world as weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the cycles of plant and animal life. What man could control in his level of the Grid, the higher beings controlled from their thrones in the heavens, imparting their star knowledge to humans only when they saw fit to do so.
Meanwhile, humans on Earth had to make sense of the rules and actions of the gods and their hidden worlds. Religion and myth served as a means for creating order out of such disorder, and understanding out of the unknown and unknowable.
The great religions of the East and the West had their own levels or realms of existence. Trailokya is the “three realms,” or worlds, of early Buddhist cosmology. Also described as planes or dimensions of existence, they relate to the principles of karma and karmic rebirth and the brahmanical fourfold world concept of four different levels of reality much like the Judeo-Christian heaven, hell and purgatory:
The Hindu Puranas (“of ancient times”) are ancient texts which describe fourteen realms that are divided into seven higher heavens and seven lower heavens. Lord Vishnu, the Supreme God of Hinduism, lives in the highest of the heavens. Earth exists in the lowest of the seven higher heavens. The lower realms are the underworlds. All are called lokas, the Sanskrit word for “worlds,” which in the Veda consisted of a triple world, or trailokya, like the Buddhist three realms, divided into earth, sky, and heaven. This was the universe of Vedic thought.
The Tao, the Way, of Lao Tzu tells us: “There is a thing, formless yet complete. Before heaven and earth it existed. We do not know its name, but we call it Tao. It is the mystery of the mysteries.” This ancient Chinese philosophical system uses the sacred writings of the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi to formulate a tradition that focuses on the path or way to action through non-action and the Three Treasures of compassion, moderation, and humility.
The Tao is based on the concept of the attainment of the Way and the understanding that the Tao can be found everywhere, from the lowliest to the highest. There is no place the Tao is not: “The power that makes things what they are doesn't have the limitation that belongs to things, and when we speak of things being limited, we mean that they're bounded in themselves. The Tao is the limit of the unlimited, and the boundlessness of the unbounded.” We hate to keep bringing it up, but the Tao sounds an awful lot like the Grid, or the totality of the unlimited, even with its inclusion of the limited.
In the Tao, the energy present everywhere that makes all form, matter, substance is called chi. Remember the zero-point energy that permeates every inch of “empty space”? The influential fourth century BCE philosopher Chuang Tzu describes the Tao as such: “It has both reality and substance, but it does nothing and has no material form . . . Before there was Heaven and Earth, from of old, there it was, eternally existing . . . it fills Heaven and Earth and envelops everything within the Universe.” Like the Kingdom of Heaven of the New Testament, the Tao is everywhere and anywhere, all through us and all around us, and yet we cannot see it. It has no physical form. It is a hidden infrastructure of reality upon which everything seen and physical and manifest is built.
The Western religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity adopted a similar notion of creation coming from nothing, a void into which God spoke and then created light and form and living things. Judeo-Christianity also recognizes the trilevel reality of heaven, hell, and purgatory/Earth, which may have originally symbolized the higher spirit world, ordinary reality, and instinctual, survival-based existence. Some more metaphysically leaning writers and teachers equate heaven, Earth, and hell with spirit/soul, mind, and body. The body is not evil or “hellish,” but rather the most basic and fundamental level of survival, the instinctual and primal. The mind represents the earthly realm where the body is able to express itself. Heaven is the realm of the spirit and soul and all forms of higher thought, intention, and consciousness.
In the Talmud, we find seven heavens called shamayim that make up the Judaic concept of the universe, with the throne of the Lord located at the highest of the seven realms. The number seven is found in many religious and sacred texts, as it represents completion. In Islamic thought, the number seven may also have corresponded to the knowledge of seven celestial bodies (other than Earth) at the time: the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. It would make sense that what was in the heavens was mirrored in the stories of sacred texts. As above, so below.
Figure 4. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life or Sefirot. Courtesy of PuckSmith/Public Domain
The Kabbalah teaches of the Ein Sof, which is God before manifest form. From the Ein Sof emanate different realms through which God expresses and creates, each an aspect of the Divine. These are the ten sefirot (also spelled sephirot) of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Again notice the tree motif, which serves as the unifier of the cosmos. These ten sefirot were said to have emanated into the cosmic womb in order to create the universe. Something from nothing, manifest made from unmanifest. Levels of reality that begin with a foundational source or field or void or primal soup from which all of physical nature is given form.
The ten sefirot, in descending order, consist of:
These qualities of God are often divided into four realms or worlds by some modern Kabbalah practitioners—the Divine, the Creative, the Formative, and the Physical—and given the name olam to mean different dimensions or levels of reality that are all part of the greater Tree of Life. Each of the four worlds is governed by a different angel or entity or hierarchy of entities. These four levels of reality remind us of Bohm's orders, with the superimplicate working on the implicate through the “holomovement,” which is the process of the enfolding and then the unfolding of the explicate into physical reality.
The ten sefirot are a part of the Ein Sof, again as if part of a hologram. The creation of all from empty space is referred to in some Kabbalistic traditions as a withdrawal of God into itself to create a void from which all manifestation comes forth. This may sound a bit like the big bang of physics, where the known (and possibly unknown) universe sprang out of nothing that then became a tiny point, imploding inward then expanding outward. In the Zohar, the foundational text of the Kabbalah, we learn, “Before He gave shape to the world, before He produced any form, He was alone, without form and without resemblance to anything else.” Perhaps this was the state of superposition of quantum physics. Science and religion often speak the same language, albeit using different terminology.
The Tree of Life and sefirot of the Kabbalah are surprisingly similar to the Egyptian Tree of Life and the Kemetic Tree of Life, both of which were said to have influenced later Kabbalistic thought. Kemetism is a form of ancient Egyptian paganism that is found in many African tribal traditions. In fact, the concept of the ten-point Kemetic Tree of Life is thought to have African origins, representing the cosmos as expressed and manifested by the goddesses or gods of each appropriate tradition.
Why do so many of the world's religious traditions have the same imagery, iconography, concepts, beliefs, and understandings of the seen and the unseen? Why do so many of the origin stories talk of the same primal soup, or void, or nothingness, from which manifest reality comes? Why does this occult understanding of the presence of a hidden infrastructure of reality, the Grid itself, permeate all belief systems regardless of how sophisticated or primitive the culture?
In the Qur'an, the holy text of Islam, seven heavens layered one above the other are part of the unseen universe and hidden order, as well as the visible universe around us. This description of heaven does not align necessarily with the “paradise” of Judeo-Christian thought, but instead is the expanse of all realities where angels and spirits abide. The ultimate level of heaven is the realm of the Divine Throne, where the Almighty who created the seven heavens is seated.
In Shi'ite Islamic tradition, the seven heavens are divided into three sections, the lowest, middle, and highest, much like in shamanism and native tradition. The idea of three realms of existence is popular with a variety of cultures and traditions, but may have been the most simplistic way of expressing an understanding of the multiverse or other realities without the benefit of modern physics and scientific terminology. These levels may be “consciousness” or mental levels of experienced reality, but they may also be real, physical worlds that can occasionally be accessed by whatever means necessary. Shamans may not physically leave the spot they are sitting on when they journey to the upper world, and yet a part of them may enter another reality that is quite real.
Experiencing the Grid does not always mean bringing your body with you. In fact, even the great philosophers suggest different levels of reality exist, though they're talking more about the mental kind than the physical. Plato, the classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, and student of Socrates, imagined there were four levels of reality involving forms, which were timeless and transcendental and existed independent of human consciousness. These levels begin with the lowest level of illusion based on external appearances and beliefs. The next level is informed awareness, which serves to distinguish ordinary reality through sensible objects. The third level of lower forms involves deduction and reasoning, and the highest level involves a reality where we move beyond the deductive to the realm of direct knowing and understanding. These realities are more mental, but they still apply to how we view, perceive, and experience the “outer” reality and other hidden realities.
Other forms of philosophy recognize levels of reality that are similar, beginning with the level of physical forms, the level that we humans live in with objects we can perceive and touch and see. Then there is the quantum level, the world of the invisible activity of the subatomic, where particles pop in and out of existence, determining what will be manifested into physical form on a grander scale. And then there is the cosmic level of the universal, on a scale so awesome we may never know the full extent of it. There may also be a fourth level of angels, beings, and spirits that operates beyond the veils of perception.
The Egyptian-Greek Hermetic texts from the second and third centuries CE proclaim “as above, so below,” that what occurs at the macrocosmic level also occurs at the microcosmic. In The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, one of the tracts of the greater teachings known as the Hermetica, there are three levels of reality: physical, emotional, and mental, and what happens in one influences the other two. The microcosmic individual self then mirrors the macrocosmic universal, and vice versa, and Hermes stated that an understanding of the workings of one led to understanding of the other. We are walking universes, tiny holographic slivers of the greater hologram projected onto the cosmic landscape.
The great Hermes, who wrote the wisdom teachings between the second and third centuries BCE, believed that all existed in the mind of God, Atum, and that everything was an idea in the mind. Atum is continuously creating creation, everything beginning as a thought in the Divine mind. Atum is Primal Mind, described as “the Supreme Absolute Reality, filled with ideas which are imperceptible to the senses, and with all-embracing knowledge.” Hermes believed that all things were thoughts, which the Atum thinks, including the cosmos and man.
Interestingly enough, Atum is born out of a big bang of a cry from the turbulent depths of the womb of space, and the light or mind of God emerges and speaks a word to calm the chaotic waters. This first word serves as the beginning of a blueprint or infrastructure by which the ideas of the mind of God will be made into the manifest cosmos. In the beginning there was the light, and the word—sound familiar?
Atum is “hidden, yet obvious everywhere.” He is the root and the source of all. Atum is the whole, which contains everything. The All and the One are identical. The Kingdom of Heaven . . . the zero-point field . . . the holographic universe . . . the Grid.
So we have an image, a vision, of this Grid. But how does it work?