5

Ashur, Yahweh, the Church, and the Ultimate Transcendence of Duality

WOMEN AND THE HOLOGRAM OF GOOD AND EVIL

We have now seen how dominance and subjugation emerged in the social arena as a result of the downloading of the Hologram of Good and Evil produced by the Sixth Wave. A noteworthy thing is that the history of the subjugation of women seems to run in parallel to those of slavery and warfare. There is no archaeological evidence from the Paleolithic, with its nonfiltered Fifth Wave mind (fig. 4.2), indicating that women were in an inferior position to men. On the contrary, the many female statuettes found from this era indicate that women may have been held in higher esteem than men. The oldest known representations of humans, Venus from Hohle Fels¹ and Lion Woman,² both about forty thousand years old and found in present-day Germany, are both female. But after the downloading of the pre– Sixth Wave (fig. 4.6) some ten thousand years ago and with the resulting rise of agriculture (see The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization, p. 139), men became dominant. The rest is, as they say, his story, and at least up until the twenty-first century CE, men have been the dominant gender in the political and economic arenas.

How did this shift to a subordinated role for women take place? As I hinted at above, the best explanation seems to be that the Sixth Wave hologram played the instrumental role for developing a patriarchal society. The fact that the subjugation of women, slavery, and warfare all seem to be correlated with the Sixth Wave (and its pre-wave) indicates that they are all results of its emerging hologram. In his excellent book The Alphabet versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain points out that in the ancient Mediterranean cultures whenever writing comes in, the worship of the Goddess goes out. This by itself is a strong argument that women became subordinated as the Sixth Wave hologram eclipsed that of the Fifth Wave. Because we know that writing came with the Sixth Wave (3.8), this would mean that it was also the Sixth Wave that killed the Mother Goddess, symbolizing the subjugation of women.

We should be aware, however, that the duality between men and women (or among people of different races) is not something that exists “out there” in the external reality. Men and women are simply different kinds of human beings with different spiritual energies, and the only way that an oppressive or conflictual relationship between them could have emerged is through the projections of a dualist mind. Thus, the Hologram of Good and Evil did not change the external reality in itself but only the human perception of it. As a consequence, if it were not for the dualist mind there would be no conflicts or oppression in human relationships. The power of the Sixth Wave hologram has, however, been such that women for a long time came to be subjugated by men. What is more, this subjugation has often been legitimized by religious doctrines claiming to embody a higher truth. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is such a doctrine.

THE ASSYRIAN TREE OF LIFE

As mentioned earlier, the oldest representations of the Tree of Life known to us are found in Mesopotamia, and an early Sumerian depiction of the “lord of the good tree” (also called the Tree of Truth)³ was shown in figure 3.12. The Tree of Life seems to have continued to play a significant role in Mesopotamia even as its dominant civilization changed from Sumerian to Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian. It may actually be the Assyrians, militarily the most powerful of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, that developed the most prominent worship of the Tree of Life. Hundreds of reliefs are, for instance, known from this kingdom where a king (often as in fig. 5.1 with a mirror image of himself) tended the Tree of Life. Naturally, this had a political function as the king through his connection to the Tree of Life gained legitimacy for his rule and so wanted everyone to see this. Yet, remarkably, there does not in the Assyrian records exist any explicit explanation as to what this Tree of Life actually is.

Figure 5.1. King Ashurnasirpal II tending the Assyrian Tree of Life together with a mirror image of himself and Ashur, the One God, hovering above the tree, from wall relief at Nimrud, 865 BCE. (Courtesy of Paul Williams)

This absence of information poses an enigma. It is possible that the existence of the Tree of Life was so obvious to the Assyrians that there was no need to give an explanation. It is also possible that the Tree of Life was so sacred that it should not be mentioned in word or text. Yet another possibility, which I consider the most likely, is that the actual knowledge about the Tree of Life was kept secret from people at large. When considering this, we should take into account that the knowledge about the Kabbalistic Tree of Life⁴ in the Jewish tradition for the longest time was taught exclusively to married men over forty years of age and was kept secret from most people until somehow it leaked out a few hundred years ago and became part of Hermetic Kabbalism.⁵ Possessing knowledge about the Assyrian Tree of Life, which most likely is the origin of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, may similarly have been seen as so important that it became the prerogative of a few.

To provide a modern understanding of the Assyrian Tree of Life, I would like to quote from an article about it by Benjamin Daniali.

The Sacred Assyrian Tree of Life is the divine knowledge. The Tree is ancient wisdom. “It is a path for human to become a ‘perfect man.’” The Tree is a bridge between the world and God and His Heaven. It is a ladder to be climbed through ascetic life and a device to receive divine powers and knowledge. “Tree generally represents the forces behind Creation on all levels; from microscopic to macrocosmic.” The significance of the Tree is seen in the ancient world among Assyrians and Egyptians. Jews later on inherited the concept of the Tree, apparently from Babylon, slightly modified it and formed Sacred Teachings of the Kabbalah, a Jewish mysticism that means “called Ghabel Alahah,” in English “Accept God/Receiving.”⁶

Many of these statements resonate strongly with what has already been verified in this book. Hence, the Tree of Life is described as a path to becoming a perfect human, and very notably to become this we need to climb a ladder. Also, as has been described in the fractal-holographic model, the tree manifests creation at all levels, from macrocosmic to microscopic. Yet, to scholars, it has been a mystery what the Assyrian Tree of Life, which appears in so many reliefs from Assyria, actually refers to and why it was such a central focus of worship. In this book, I have proposed that the Tree of Life is not a fantasy but something that has existed from the beginning of time, and so much of the mystery disappears. Nonetheless, certain aspects of the role the Tree of Life played in the religion of the ancient Assyrians may still seem mysterious. Fortunately, however, there is circumstantial information about this. Based on such, Professor Simo Parpola, an Assyrologist at the University of Helsinki, has re-created the Assyrian Tree of Life (fig. 5.2a) based on the nine most significantgods⁷ of the Assyrians and the qualities and numbers associated with them.

To be able to analyze this composite Assyrian Tree of Life in figure 5.2a, I will use the image of the hologram of the Sixth Wave (fig. 5.2b) for comparison. This hologram, as we know, created civilization through its favoring of the left brain with light and leaving the right brain in the shadow. In figure 5.2b, the right side of the head from our perspective (which is the left brain from the model’s perspective) corresponds to the right column in the Tree of Life in figure 5.2a and vice versa for the left side of the head. The central column in figure 5.2a then corresponds to the Cosmic Axis, which is also reflected in the straight vertical line through the face in figure 5.2b. Based on the Assyrian Tree of Life reconstructed in this way, I assert that this is in fact another representation of the Hologram of Good and Evil, which is more elaborate than the one from Sumer/Mesopotamia shown in figure 4.4b. The parallel to this eight-partitioned dingir symbol becomes clearer if we look upon Ishtar in the center of fig 5.2a as connected to eight other gods.

In the tree in figure 5.2a, the gods in the central column are Anu, the father of the gods and the god of heaven, Ištar (Ishtar), the goddess of love, and Nergal, the god of death, central deities keeping the basic balance of the axis mundi (compare fig. 3.12). What is then interesting to see is that the gods in the right column (which corresponds to the light in fig. 5.2b) consistently have higher numbers than those in the left column, signifying higher values as gods. The gods in the left column are Sin, the god of the moon, Šamaš (Shamash), the god of the sun, and Adad, the weather god, in other words, nature gods. Going back to the right-hand column, we find Ea (called Enki by the Sumerians), Marduk, and Nabu,⁸ deities that express left-brained civilization. Ea, at the top, was often portrayed as overtly sexual and is associated with virile masculinity. He also had the significant function as the keeper of the gifts of civilization. On his part, Marduk, who later became the most prominent god in the Babylonian pantheon, may be best known for having killed Tiamat, a primal goddess or Earth mother. Tiamat was also sometimes seen as a serpent,⁹ and we might see this victory of Marduk as a parallel to Yahweh cursing the serpent in the Garden of Eden story. Nabu became the god of writing, progressively taking over this function from the goddess Nidaba. Initially, he was a minister of Marduk but later became his coregent as the head of the pantheon.

Figure 5.2. a. Reconstruction of the Assyrian Tree of Life with the nine great gods and their associated numbers. [From Parpola, Journal Near Eastern Studies “Assyrian Tree of Life” 52:3 (1993) Figure #9 (pp. 183 to 183). Used by permission of University of Chicago Press.] b. The hologram of the Sixth Wave.

This is the Assyrian understanding of the Tree of Life, and it tells us things about how the Tree of Life was perceived in the Sixth Wave that the symbols in figure 4.4 do not communicate. Through this analysis, it becomes possible to flesh out the Hologram of Good and Evil so that we may more clearly understand what effect this had on people at the time. For instance, this representation of the Tree of Life tells us (based on their numbers) that the gods of the left brain were seen as dominating. In contrast to the nature gods of the opposite side, they were also responsible for bringing civilization to humanity (which indeed the left brain does). They were also very masculine and deposed significant female deities who may have held the positions the male deities co-opted. Certainly, Marduk killing Tiamat was an important myth that symbolized the shift to male dominance that happened through the Sixth Wave.

It has been suggested that the Assyrians viewed their supreme god, Ashur, as the totality of the nine great gods, and the image in figure 5.2a helps us understand how polarized the ancient Assyrians experienced this god. Or more correctly said: this is how polarized the Divine was perceived after the Assyrians had projected the Hologram of Good and Evil onto it. The Divine was seen as dominated by the masculine powers that held the highest numbers, and the role of the only feminine power, Ishtar, was to keep everyone connected. Again, the nine great gods in the tree in figure 5.2a were most likely aspects or qualities of Ashur, who is hovering above the tree in figure 5.1. In this interpretation the Assyrians saw Ashur as the supreme deity who killed the female goddesses of the past (except for Ishtar). Maybe it is then not surprising that the Assyrians are reputed to have been the cruelest people in antiquity. Julian Jaynes speculates¹⁰ that they became this way when they lost direct contact with their personal gods, which people commonly had in earlier times, and so became desperate. This loss would have coincided with their transition to believing in a single god, and the god they turned to, Ashur, who was often shown as a war god with a bow and an arrow, would naturally have been much feared.

THE CHALDEAN-JEWISH-CHRISTIAN TRADITION

From the perspective of world history, the Assyrian version of the Tree of Life is interesting for a few different reasons. One is that the Assyrians may have been the last significant power emanating from Mesopotamia (not counting the short revival of the Babylonian Empire). Their trajectory toward monotheism may then be looked upon as the completion of this ancient civilization, whose history goes back to the very beginning of the Sixth Wave. Another reason to pay attention to Assyria, is that in the history of religions, Mesopotamia is sometimes viewed as a starting point of the Chaldean-Jewish-Christian tradition. Israel and Judea had in fact belonged to Assyria in the late seventh century BCE, before the Babylonian captivity, in which the Jews remained until the mid–sixth century. Even if Chaldea, where according to legend Abraham came from, is not the same as Assyria and Babylonia, all three cultures were part of Mesopotamia and so shared a number of beliefs about the world and the gods. In fact, in the ancient world, these cultures had a prestige rivaled only by the Egyptians, and it seems obvious that the Jews, who lived under Mesopotamian empires for such a long time, would have borrowed significant religious ideas from them. It is no secret that some of the stories in the Book of Genesis, such as that of Noah and his ark, find their origin in Mesopotamian beliefs. This is a somewhat hidden connection to the past, and the Assyrian Tree of Life may through this have influenced not only Judaism but also Christianity and Islam.

This is not to say that the Jews simply copied the views that were prevalent in Mesopotamia. Most likely they were, however, given knowledge in captivity, which if they resonated with it would have modified it and from this created a variation around their own god, Yahweh. To believe that they just made it up or copied it without having any experiences of it of their own would be to completely miss the point. It is a central theme of this book that the phenomenon of the Tree of Life is real and that the duality it created could be directly experienced early in the Sixth Wave. Yet, there were cultural variations in how this experience was expressed, such as the Assyrian version and the Jewish one. Most likely, the Mesopotamian view of the Tree of Life, whether mediated by the Assyrians or the Babylonians, then strongly influenced how Yahweh, the Jewish god, was perceived and re-created by his people.

There is also little doubt that the Assyrian Tree of Life (fig. 5.2) is the original version, from which the Jews later developed the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The original Jewish view of the Divine may then have been similar to that of the Assyrian Tree of Life (fig. 5.2a) and the male dominance this expresses. This would mean that Yahweh was also a projection of the Hologram of Good and Evil and so would express the very same imbalance. Although this admittedly is a reconstruction, it is reasonable and holds a strong explanatory power for the continued history of the Abrahamic religions.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN STORY IN GENESIS

This leads us to the Book of Genesis and the view the biblical story conveys about the Tree of Life. According to biblical chronology, Genesis may have been written as early as 1500–1000 BCE, but modern scholars¹¹ believe that it was finally put together much later, around 500 BCE. Because this happened after the Jews returned from their Babylonian captivity, we must seriously consider that Mesopotamian laws and ideas about the Tree of Life had a bearing on it. Genesis, in the Torah or the Pentateuch of the Christian Bible, however, contains many different parts. The first¹² is a description of how God created the world, which is similar to many such accounts from other traditions and is by itself not controversial. It also conveys the key knowledge that creation takes place in seven DAYS and six NIGHTS (if we count the resting DAY). This is indeed the rhythm of creation that was verified in chapter 3 (provided that we look upon the waves as leading up to the current time). The second part of Genesis is about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and their expulsion from it, which has many questionable elements that we will look into here. The later sections of Genesis are about the continued history of the Jewish people and will not be discussed (see, however, The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization, which deals with the Flood and Noah’s ark).

Figure 5.3. Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve (1526). Typically Adam and Eve are shown in such paintings on opposite sides of the Tree of Life (compare fig. 5.1), which creates duality. (Courtesy of the Courtauld Institute, London)

In short, the story about the Garden of Eden begins with Adam and Eve living in paradise in peace with all the animals and with Yahweh. In the Garden two special trees are mentioned, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yahweh tells the couple that they can eat the fruit from all the trees except for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A serpent appears and entices Eve to eat from this tree, and she then leads Adam to do the same. After having eaten from this fruit, their perception of themselves is changed, and they discover that they are naked. Yahweh appears and curses them for having eaten of this fruit, and as a punishment they are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Notably, the serpent is also cursed. Adam is told that he will be toiling for the rest of his life, and Eve will give birth in pain, as all women after her, as a punishment. Yahweh closes the Garden with a flaming sword, with a vague hint that it may at some point again be opened.

Needless to say, this is not about any actual physical garden. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for a state of unity consciousness, which was reflected in the unity with the animals and nature as well as between the genders. Adam and Eve only experienced themselves as separate after eating of the fruit and seeing “that they were naked.” They also experienced a unity with God before they ate the fruit; they could naturally talk to Yahweh. Based on what we have here learned about the Tree of Life and the serpents emanating from it, I interpret the story as a metaphor for the transition from one hologram to another. The serpent symbolizes the Sixth Wave carrying the Hologram of Good and Evil, which introduces dualities and marks an end to the experience of unity of the Fifth Wave. The transition from the hologram of the Fifth Wave to that of the Sixth meant that humans came to experience themselves as separate from both the Divine and nature.

Regarding the two trees in this metaphor, there has been a debate whether they are one and the same or two separate trees.¹³ The solution that I am proposing to this quandary is that there indeed is only one Cosmic Tree of Life, from which waves in both the biological and the mental range in the spectrum (fig. 2.3) emanate. The biblical Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is then only a special expression for one of the holograms carried by these waves, the hologram of the Sixth Wave. The Tree of Knowledge thus shares the axis of the Tree of Life, but its hologram is of another frequency, and hence the former is described as an altogether different tree. The serpent as a symbol of the Sixth Wave seeks to manifest itself through Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which is none other than the Hologram of Good and Evil. Eating its fruit simply means downloading the hologram of the Sixth Wave, with all of its consequences, including many aspects of knowledge as well as duality.

The notion of “the Fall,” as this event has sometimes been called, really reflects the shift in consciousness that was precipitated by the downloading of the Sixth Wave hologram. This was indeed a fall in the sense of a departure from the earlier state of unity, but it was also an elevation to a higher frequency, which allowed humans to create civilization. Later Judeo-Christian interpretations have been eager to blame humans, and especially women, for this “Fall,” and so have failed to recognize that one aspect of downloading the Sixth Wave is the creation of civilization, which in itself was a positive step.

Figure 5.4. Hunahpu uses his blowgun to shoot down Seven Macaw (a symbol of the hologram of the Fifth Wave) from the Tree of Life. Note the serpent hanging in the tree to the left, symbolizing the Sixth Wave. Similar to the Garden of Eden story, this story represents the transition from one wave to another, where the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque introduced duality. (Courtesy of Linda Schele)

The story of a transition from a world of unity to one of duality, such as that in Genesis, is one with which several other ancient peoples would also resonate. The Chinese legend about Fuxi and Nuwa (fig. 3.11)—the serpentlike couple that brought civilization—is one¹⁴ and the Mayan story about the hero twins shooting down the vainglorious Seven Macaw¹⁵ from the tree is another describing the end to unity. Seven Macaw, in this story in the Popol Vuh, was a symbol of the seventh DAY of the Fifth Wave and its unity. While he was sitting in the Tree of Life, he was shot down by Hunahpu (Hun Ahau = One Light) using a blowgun with the help of his dark twin Xbalanque (X = feminine aspect, Balam = Jaguar, a night animal): the two symbolize the duality of the Sixth Wave, which would take over after the unity of the Fifth Wave. In the Popol Vuh stories, the transition from one hologram to another was described as a matter of fact, as the Maya saw the shift as part of a cosmic plan, and these shifts were not condemned. Among the Maya and many Native American peoples, the serpent, for instance Quetzalcoatl, was, instead, honored for bringing civilization.

When we consider transition myths from cultures other than the Jewish, where humans were not condemned, we may wonder what is wrong with seeking knowledge or knowledge about good and evil and why it would have been considered a “sin.” Is it not obvious that if humanity is to evolve we will have to seek knowledge, including about ethics? The transitions between different waves and frequencies of evolution are the very mechanisms that cause life on Earth (as well as everywhere in the universe) to evolve. If Yahweh is the creator of the universe, why would he punish those who seek to perfect themselves by transiting to higher states of mind? Through Yahweh’s vilification of Eve and Adam for eating the fruit, they were brought into a situation of “cursed if you do, cursed if you don’t.” And if the Tree of Life is the manifestation of the Creator, then who is Yahweh? It seems that what is unique in the Garden of Eden story among the creation stories of the world is the guilt, punishment, and concept of sin that was inflicted on humans and especially, through the “sin” of Eve, on women. Ironically, however, this is the creation story that, through its adoption by other religions, has become the most widespread.

I suspect that the origin of the condemnations in this story is that the Assyrian view of “god,” which favored male dominance, is lurking behind the actions of Yahweh. Yahweh of the Garden of Eden story is similar to Ashur of the Assyrian Tree of Life. Yet, regardless of what influence Ashur might have had, Yahweh himself was a projection of the Hologram of Good and Evil by the Jewish priesthood. The author(s) of the Garden of Eden story most likely had a patriarchal and conservative agenda as they themselves were dominated by this hologram. We also must understand that women had been subjugated by this hologram for a long time when the Book of Genesis was written. The Garden of Eden story essentially served to legitimize the already existing plight of women.

The consequences of this primordial myth about the origins of humankind have been far-reaching and largely negative. If we assume that it was formulated before the midpoint of the Sixth Wave by a group of Jewish patriarchs, we may understand its purpose as political or, in other words, one of asserting power. It was to keep people, and especially women, down and to blame them for gaining knowledge, enjoying sexuality, and engaging in many other things that come with the curiosity of life and the eating of the fruits of creation. The doctrine of Original Sin—although invented much later by the church father Augustine¹⁶ (ca. 430 CE)—is directly based on the cursing of Eve in the Book of Genesis. The concept of Original Sin, no matter how absurd, has for centuries been used by Christian churches, and especially the Catholic Church, to denigrate women.

YAHWEH

Because the Hebrew scriptures were incorporated into the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, Yahweh—even if he was a feared ancient war god at least partially modeled upon Ashur and Marduk—has much more widely come to be a model for what “God” is supposed to be like. This view has prevailed well into modern times as Yahweh has had a great influence not only in Judaism but also in the Christian church and Islam. More than half of humanity today belongs to the Abrahamic religions, which have all in significant ways inherited traits of Yahweh in their concepts of God. In reality, these traits were projections of a particular Hologram of Good and Evil, which has served to cement the power structures of these religions. Whether Moses, the presumed Egyptian prince who led the people of Israel from slavery back to their country and received the law from God on the way, is a historical person has also been questioned.¹⁷ No Egyptian source seems to corroborate the story, and it may have simply served to cover up the Mesopotamian origin of Yahweh, whose male gods he seems to have more in common with than with the Egyptian pantheon.

In the Bible, Yahweh defines himself as jealous,^*1 and his cursing of the serpent may be an expression of this jealousy. As we have seen, the serpent was the first symbol of humanity’s experience of a power in the otherworldly realm. Yahweh may then have seen the serpent as a rival, much as Marduk had seen Tiamat—more than modern people have probably understood—and Yahweh’s long curse of the serpent supports this explanation. In Genesis the serpent is referred to as the “craftiest of the animals.” The serpent, as we now know, is notably a symbol of an evolutionary wave and the directed progress that humanity is supposed to go through. Cursing the serpent (for encouraging Adam and Eve to seek knowledge) then really means cursing evolution and progress, much in line with the desires of a conservative patriarchy, whether Mesopotamian or Jewish. By cursing the serpent, Yahweh attempts to keep humans, and women in particular, in a state of guilt for having embraced the continued evolution of creation. Yahweh (quite in contrast to the Popol Vuh, see fig. 5.4) curses what was meant to happen according to the divine plan, namely the transition from one level of evolution to another. Indeed, eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was the right thing for the humans to do. Rather than facilitating the transition from the world of one hologram to that of another, Yahweh seems to have made it more difficult.

At the time the Garden of Eden story was written, its author(s) were probably convinced that Yahweh was the Divine All That Is. Because the Hologram of Good and Evil indeed emanated from the Source and was experienced as such, there was probably only a vague perception that the holograms would later come to shift. Although the Christians, through the New Testament, redefined humanity’s relationship to God, compared to in the Old Testament, the Christian God was still looked upon as if it was the same entity as Yahweh. In the first centuries CE, there were discussions among the early church fathers as to whether the Old Testament with Yahweh should be included in the Christian Bible. Yet, the power of the Hologram of Good and Evil was such that it would defeat the critical voices, and the church as an institution accepted this veiled Ashur as “God.” Although it may not be relevant today to reveal the origin of Ashur in the Hologram of Good and Evil (since he has no direct followers in the modern world), Yahweh remains an expression of this hologram that still profoundly impacts our world.

Before discussing this, I think it is important to recognize that in the ancient world there were many tribal and national gods that were war gods. Yahweh of the Jews was by no means the only one with such characteristics. Yet, he is the only one that has survived to the present time. He has become the model for all three of the Abrahamic religions for what “God” is, and this indeed seems to be a limited and very politically motivated view. As a consequence, when atheists today argue against the existence of God, they usually argue against some concept of God derived from that of Yahweh. Moreover, much of the current religious strife in the Middle East goes back to the view of God as jealous and of someone who condemns those who do not follow him. This is a perception that likely will never generate peace no matter what the protagonists of the Abrahamic religions say. On the contrary, the concept of a god to be feared and whose laws you have to obey is likely to block the road to lasting peace. For this very reason, this very powerful perception from the Sixth Wave is still influencing the world.

THE RISE OF RELIGIONS

Why then, if Yahweh was not the Divine All That Is but a dualist perception of the Divine, has he become so influential? The answer is that the Hologram of Good and Evil, because of its dualist nature has favored that some people have power over others. We saw this already from the emergence of slavery and warfare in the previous chapter. Subjugation was a universal consequence of the resonance with the Sixth Wave and was as such by no means created by the Assyrians or the Jews. Nonetheless, given this characteristic of the era, its duality, as we have already seen, profoundly influenced the kinds of deities people came to recognize and relate to.

Especially after the midpoint of the Sixth Wave in 551 BCE, people began to develop religions and thought systems around these deities. When, at this point in time, a prewave to the Seventh Wave was activated, one of the most significant paradigm shifts ever resulted. All over the world, human individuality (including the ego aspect) emerged. Historians refer to this era as the Axial Age.¹⁸ The hologram that most people downloaded shifted in such a way that direct immersion in the spirit world (essentially the Fifth Wave experience) largely disappeared. In its place came religions, organized theological and ethical collective thought systems. Naturally, to the extent that people were then disconnected from their own direct experience of the world of spirit, they would become more inclined to subordinate themselves to a religion based on the experiences of a prophet or a founder of a religion.

The direct contact that people previously had with a whole range of spiritual entities, such as city gods, tribal gods, personal gods, demigods, legendary heroes, animal spirits, and so on, underwent a dramatic change around 550 BCE as religions with doctrines, or at least elaborate thought systems, started to emerge (fig. 5.5). We can see the effects of this shift on all continents as the entire spiritual and psychological makeup of the human beings underwent this dramatic change, within a very narrow time frame. Different cultures altered their relationships to the Divine and developed new religions to account for their new experience of this. Hence, in Mesoamerica this is the time that the tzolkin first appears (ca. 550 BCE). In China, the wisdom teachers Confucius (551–479 BCE) and Lao-tzu (sixth century BCE) started to teach. In India, Buddha (born 563 or 552) and Mahavira (599–527), the founder of Jainism, appear, both proposing paths to enlightenment. The great epics of Mahabharata and Bhagavad-Gita were also compiled, and the belief in reincarnation established at this time. Another important religion to emerge was the dualist Zoroastrianism (550–523 BCE) in Persia, which at the time was the world’s largest power. Pythagoras (570–495 BCE) began to teach about the harmonies of the spheres.

Figure 5.5. Pyramidal representation of the Sixth Wave with the explosion of religions at its midpoint. (Diagram by the author, design courtesy of Bengt Sundin)

All of these religious thought systems emerged within fifty years from the actual midpoint of the Sixth Wave, a shift that had manifestations on a massive scale. Because of the global nature of this transformation, it is fairly obvious that all of these new religions and philosophies were reflections of a shift on the level of the global mind almost as profound as at the very beginning of the Sixth Wave (3.8).

At this midpoint both Mesopotamia and Egypt, the ancient cradles of civilization, were conquered by the Persian Empire (550–330 BCE). The fact that these ancient civilizations were no longer able to uphold their old traditional beliefs is a confirmation that this shift generated something fundamentally new in the human relationship to spirit. The direct experience of spirit, which seems to have prevailed especially in Egypt, was replaced by more abstract religions. The oldest civilizations of our planet, instituted at the beginning of the Sixth Wave by “the gods,” consequently came to an end. There is thus somewhat of a conflict between spirituality based on personal experiences and religiosity. The new mind field created at the midpoint of the Sixth Wave was no longer conducive to the ancient semishamanic ways of Mesopotamia and Egypt. After the conquest of these cultures by Persia, they were conquered by Alexander the Great, as the leading edge of the Mediterranean culture decisively shifted west to Greece and Rome, cultures with markedly individualistic traits.

Seemingly paradoxically, the emergence of religions on a worldwide scale coincided with the birth of the self-conscious individual, notably in Greece. This represents the end point of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; it is really only after this shift point around 550 BCE that we know of individuals, such as Plato, Aristotle or Solon, whom we could imagine shaking hands with and having an interesting discussion with. Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–546 BCE), sometimes called the first mathematician and sometimes the first Westerner, is also from this time.

I will not here go further into the big topic of human individuality as it is outside the main focus of this chapter. Yet, I feel it is good to be aware that the first human beings who were self-conscious, self-reliant individuals, who could make choices without relying on the gods to make the decisions for them, emerged at this time. Individualism almost certainly had the same origin as the religious systems, as people at this time lost the direct contact they had previously had with the spirit world, and so what we have come to call the Western mind began.

THE MONOTHEISM OF THE JEWS

It is as part of this global shift in consciousness, leading toward the creation of organized religions, that the Jews developed their monotheism. The Jewish priesthood who had returned from captivity in Babylon around 550 BCE developed a theology that could serve as a basis for a theocratic state. The intention was for Yahweh to be the supreme leader of Israel and for its people to be subordinate to his rulings. Very importantly, at the time of this shift, Deutero-Isaiah (second Isaiah), who wrote the latter part of the Book of Isaiah, also expounded the view that Yahweh was the One God of the entire world (and not only of the Jews). This by itself provided a significant step toward a monotheism that could become a global religion. It is important to realize that the various steps in the development of religions do not simply appear out of the blue but are caused by shifts in the waves of creation that underlie our experience of reality and the Divine.

In Israel in this era, it was not the king but Yahweh who supposedly had given the law of the Ten Commandments to Moses. In the theocracy that developed, the priesthood made the important decisions, and the king became fully dependent on the prophets sent by Yahweh. The citizenry were obedient to the laws of Yahweh, because if an individual or the people deviated from this law, the revenge of Yahweh was expected to be gruesome. As the Jewish nation stuck with these laws, it remained a select, closed group; outsiders could only become Jewish with difficulty, and marriages outside the community were discouraged. This to some extent set the Jews apart from the mainstream of humanity and may explain the often hostile attitude that has been expressed toward them. They did in fact look upon themselves as a divinely chosen people and followed a law of their own. It is easy to see the parallels of this theocracy to the papacy in medieval Europe or the Sharia laws of Islam.

But then again, was Yahweh, who later significantly influenced the view of who “God” is in Christianity and Islam, truly the Divine All That Is? The Garden of Eden story indeed indicates that Yahweh was a projection of the Hologram of Good and Evil and by inference so does the Assyrian Tree of Life. We may also note that the Law of Moses was very much about creating separations—the pure from the impure, the Jews from the gentiles, and kosher from nonkosher. Mosaic law with its 613 commandments,¹⁹ out of which 10 are famous, seems many times to maintain exactly such separations that you would expect from the projection of a dualist hologram.

Some of these commandments may be said to serve the orderly functioning of society, but others are not. The fourth commandment, “You shall not make any graven images,” is, for instance, one that is not necessary for the peaceful functioning of a society. Although it is not observed by many Christian denominations, it still is in Judaism and Islam. Why have such a rule? It could be argued that a human could not make an accurate image of the Divine. True, but, on the other hand, no spoken or textual descriptions, which are not forbidden in the Torah, could give correct descriptions either. So why was a law instituted particularly against images? Part of the reason may be that jealousy was projected onto the Divine, but an even more significant projection is likely to have been the left-right duality of the Hologram of Good and Evil. For this argument, we shall remember that, overall, human language abilities, whether spoken or written, are mediated by the left brain (which is why someone who has damaged the left side of his brain may become unable to speak).²⁰ Images, on the other hand, are mediated through the right brain. Thus, the rule against graven images is really a law against communicating with the Divine through the right brain. Moreover, to allow only textual information about God will notably exclude those who cannot read or write, which will also allow a male priesthood, not relying on the intuition of the right brain, to control the connection of others to the Divine. Thus, the fourth commandment limits the direct connection to the Divine through the right brain so that the view of “God” will be one shaped by the left brain. All of this seems consistent with the suggestion that Yahweh is a perception of the Divine through the Hologram of Good and Evil.

Because people everywhere at the time were dominated by this same hologram, there is nothing surprising about this, and I should point out here that this is not meant to be an argument specifically against Jewish beliefs. Many of the new religions and philosophies that emerged around the midpoint of the Sixth Wave, such as Zoroastrianism and Confucianism, were markedly dualist as well. Yet, because the Jewish view of the Divine later profoundly colored both Christianity and Islam (the name Moses is mentioned 502 times in the Qur’an,²¹ more than any other person), the effects of the ancient Jewish monotheism are of paramount importance also in the modern world. Rather than encouraging every person to develop his or her own relationship to the Divine, the Abrahamic religions have thus been limiting. Ultimately, these limits come from the boundaries inherent in the Hologram of Good and Evil, which has made people project the left-right duality onto the world, and this is what we today need to become aware of.

It is in this context of emerging religious systems and the birth of human individualism that took place in the Axial Age around 550 BCE that I believe we can understand the success of Yahweh in being seen as “God” on a wider scale. Ultimately, the shift that took place at the midpoint of the Sixth Wave goes back to the new interference pattern between waves, which created a hologram with even less divine light than the Hologram of Good and Evil. It is interesting to note that organized religions did not emerge because of an increased contact with the Divine. It seems to have been the other way around. They emerged because a new wave, a prewave for the Seventh Wave, emanating from the Cosmic Axis, hit Earth, and this began to eclipse the more direct spiritual contacts people had previously experienced.

MONOTHEISM IN THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF THE SIXTH WAVE

The reader may now ask: What does the history of religions have to do with the fractal-holographic universe? Everything, it seems. The history of religions is very much a product of the movement of the Sixth Wave and includes the entire Chaldean-Jewish-Christian tradition. The hologram that rules in the DAYS of the Sixth Wave tends to favor steps toward left-brain-dominated monotheism as we can see in the upper row of figure 5.6. In the time periods that are DAYS, a hologram with a light-dark polarity dominates, while during the NIGHTS the filter is complete. The periods that are DAYS are also, as we may see in The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization, the time periods that favor the rise of new civilizations. Thus, the same hologram has given rise to both the religions and the civilizations. The periods that are NIGHTS often lead to the downfall of civilizations, and this incidentally is the reason why so many ancient civilizations have disappeared.

Figure 5.6. Top: The Sixth Wave and some of the most significant events in the development of monotheism at the beginning of its DAYS. Bottom: The rise and fall of the Roman Empire during the fifth DAY and the current transformation of Christianity during the same time period. (Diagram by the author, design courtesy of Bengt Sundin)

These shifts between DAYS and NIGHTS in the Sixth Wave account for much of the evolution of the theologies of the Chaldean-Jewish-Christian tradition. Steps in the direction of a more marked monotheism, and also the further expansion of this in the world, are taken in the time periods that are DAYS, because this is when new light enters to inspire its protagonists. Because the light is limited to one brain half, it is, however, a limited, compartmentalized perception of the Divine that has emerged from this development.

It should be noted, however, that especially in the first half of the Sixth Wave it is difficult to know what is historical fact and not, and while the dates of Abraham and Moses in the biblical chronology (fig. 5.6, upper row) may fit with the DAYS, their historicity is questionable. Moreover, it is not always easy to identify which religious changes took place in the beginning of NIGHTS in the first half of the Sixth Wave. Yet, it is noteworthy that the two final NIGHTS—when we do have accurate datings—begin with the introduction of the dogma of an Original Sin (ca. 430 CE) and the Inquisition (1231 CE), respectively. Hence, it seems the theologies developed in the NIGHTS may have a quite different character from those of the DAYS. Islam, on its part, took its beginning at the midpoint of the fifth NIGHT (in 632 CE), and so its most expansive periods have been in the NIGHTS of the Sixth Wave, which it consequently is more in resonance with.

FROM JESUS TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

The continued road from Jewish monotheism to the message of Jesus to the establishment of the Catholic Church and later to the Protestant reformation is complex even if it is directly conditioned by the upturns and downturns of the waves of creation. The appearance of Jesus in Israel at the beginning of the current era, preaching about a God of love and compassion, obviously presented a great challenge to the priesthood of Jehovah or Yahweh, which, at least partially, was based on dominance and fear. In significant regard, the teachings of Jesus were different from all beliefs (not only Jewish) of earlier times, emphasizing forgiveness rather than revenge. The world would arguably never be the same after this message, and a hope of a more loving relationship to the Divine emerged.

After Jesus’s crucifixion in 31 or 32 CE, his message began to spread outside Israel. Several different groups looked upon themselves as the inheritors of Jesus’s legacy, and the world at the time seemed to be moving on a broader scale in the direction of monotheism. One movement emerged around Jesus’s brother James, leader of the church in Jerusalem;²² another movement, possibly a church, developed around Jesus’s wife, Mary Magdalene, later forming the Gnostic tendency,²³ and yet another movement, especially of gentiles, formed around Paul.²⁴ With the Council of Jerusalem in 50 CE, the latter group broke with the Law of Moses,²⁵ stating that male members of the Christian community were not required to be circumcised (meaning, members did not need to be ethnically Jewish), and so the religion opened itself more broadly to the Roman world.

I think it is important to understand the emergence of these currents against the background of the fifth DAY of the Sixth Wave in 40 CE (see the lower part of fig. 5.6). The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, a very significant civilization in human history, has in this figure been blown up to be visible in detail as a function of the ascending and descending phases of this DAY. In the ascending phase of the fifth DAY, 40–237 CE, the Pax Romana, the empire is essentially expansive and yet stable. In this first half of the fifth DAY, Roman authorities still worshipped the traditional Roman pantheon of gods, including the emperor himself, and often persecuted Christians. At the midpoint of the fifth DAY, things started to change. The Roman Empire showed the first signs of disintegration with the third century crisis.²⁶ From this midpoint (237 CE) and onward, it would become increasingly difficult to defend the borders and maintain the unity of this vast empire, which then sometimes was ruled simultaneously by several competing emperors.

The descending phase saw increasing attacks of marauding Germanic tribes, eventually leading up to the collapse of the West Roman Empire at the beginning of the fifth NIGHT. At the latter time, the Roman economy was in shambles, and what followed upon the onslaught of the Huns has been called the Dark Ages of Europe. Centralized national structures hardly existed, and very few cultural expressions can be found from this era. This fifth NIGHT set an end to the world of antiquity, and the Dark Ages lasted until the beginning of the sixth DAY, in the early ninth century. At that time, the empire of Charlemagne was transformed into the embryos of new nation-states such as France and Germany,²⁷ which would soon be followed by others, eventually leading to an upturn of European civilization.

Because the holograms keep shifting between DAYS and NIGHTS (fig. 5.6, upper row), the human perception of the Divine is not static or immutable. In general, in parallel with the changing political conditions, as civilizations rise and fall in phase with the DAYS and NIGHTS, religions follow a parallel path. Sometimes, as in the case of the fifth DAY discussed above, we can follow in detail the changing theology from the ascending phase of 40–237 CE with a hopeful Christianity seeing the Kingdom of God as imminent. The light that then came in was such that it created expectations of a New Kingdom, especially among the already monotheistic Jews. Without this energetic background, no enthusiasm for a Kingdom of God is likely to have been generated, and hence there would have been little interest in the message of Jesus anywhere. As he was active shortly before the fifth DAY, Jesus, however, sensed and expressed this ascending energy. Thus, several groups based on Jesus’s teachings survived, and a religion was created, even though it would become clear at the midpoint of the fifth DAY that the Kingdom of God would not manifest in that era.

Figure 5.7. The apostle John (left) and Marcion of Sinope (right). (Source: J. Pierpoint Morgan Library MS 748, folio 150 verso)

After this initial phase, the church created by Paul would gradually become more firmly organized, with a hierarchy of bishops led by the church fathers in Rome and Alexandria. The church fathers formulated different doctrines and began to decide what books should be canonized as parts of the Christian Bible. Marcion²⁸ (fig. 5.7) argued that the Old Testament god Yahweh was inconsistent with the loving God of Jesus and should therefore not be included in the Christian Bible. The Gnostics on their part rejected Yahweh altogether²⁹ and looked upon him as the demiurge in contrast to the pure Divine that they worshipped. This tells us that even if a particular hologram dominates an era, there will still be variations in the experiences of the Divine and in the theologies that are developed. In the end, however, the church fathers who advocated for the incorporation of the Old Testament in the new Bible got the upper hand, and this was canonized (meaning that its content was approved by the church authorities and consecrated) in the beginning of the third century CE. This obviously created the idea that Yahweh and the God of Jesus were the same.

It is noteworthy that the two tendencies, the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the church hierarchy, developed in parallel in the descending phase of the fifth DAY. The Christian church then evolved into a worldly power through its church fathers and bishops to become the spiritual arm of the Roman Empire. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and decriminalized the religion in 313, the tendencies converged. Constantine’s conversion was presumably a desperate attempt to maintain the unity of the empire, whose capital was then moved to Constantinople, as the city of Rome was already in decline. At the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, a unified creed was agreed upon,³⁰ and the Christian church became a monolith in which Paul’s theology dominated.

Books that did not fit into this theology were relegated to the flames. Emperor Constantine is known to have said about Arius, a leader of a theology that diverged from his own: “If any book written by Arius be found, it is to be consigned to the fire, so that not only his corrupt teachings may vanish, but no memory of him at all may remain.”³¹ We can be certain that this decree was not unique. During the reign of Emperor Theodosius, the Library of Alexandria was burned down in 391 CE, presumably with a similar motive.³² Thus, we can understand that some of the books reflecting the views of the original followers of Jesus, such as the Gnostics, have disappeared, and the only reason some of them have survived to our own time is that they were hidden.

At the time that the Sixth Wave shifted into a NIGHT in 434 CE, Augustine introduced the doctrine of Original Sin (notably based on the Garden of Eden Story), as the Catholic Church became the main political power to succeed the Roman Empire. Around this point in time, the image of the suffering Christ^*2 on the cross became predominant. Although in the beginning of the fifth DAY the power of the devil was downplayed by the church fathers, who believed in the imminent victory of God, he would become a powerful figure in the fifth NIGHT, as the Christian religion adapted to its new energy.

Yet, it should be said that during the Dark Ages that followed, the Catholic Church assured the continuation of certain aspects of Roman civilization. What then manifested, at least in Europe, was a variation of the theocratic power that had originally been envisioned by the Jewish priesthood for Israel. The pope became the center of what was a de facto theocratic superstate to which all of Christendom belonged. Hence, in medieval times, all European royal dynasties would receive their crowns from the pope and so became dependent on him for recognition. Without this recognition, a dynasty would not be seen as legitimate as the Vatican was then regarded as a higher power than the worldly. Emperors, such as Charlemagne and Otto the Great, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, were crowned personally by the pope. The emerging power structure was very much a projection of the Hologram of Good and Evil, and the monotheism that came from the Jewish tradition fit right into this.

The winners of the political struggle in the Christian church proclaimed a theology that was, however, very different from most of the early followers of Jesus, who, in the words of Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson in The Lost Gospel, “advanced a theology of liberation markedly different from the one we have inherited from Paul and his followers. It is a theology based on Jesus’ marriage, not his death; on his moments of joy, not the passion of his suffering.”³³ For generations after the victory of Paul’s theology, in contrast women have been denigrated by the Catholic Church and to this day are barred from holding office in it. Because Eve was considered responsible for the Original Sin, all women were equally condemned (based on guilt by association), and the Roman Catholic Church over the centuries has held women in contempt. This seems to have been in direct contrast with the message of Jesus and really would be counter to any authentic spirituality.

The victorious theology was very much based on the idea that human beings are born as sinners, based on the Garden of Eden story, and that Jesus “died for our sins.” Jesus was said to have been sacrificed by God to heal the rift that had emerged between him and humans as a result of the latter eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Needless to say, this idea did not originate with Jesus but with the later Christian church. We can see the background to this theology in a punishing god inherited from the Old Testament and ultimately from Mesopotamia. With this logic, the Catholic Church came to focus on the suffering of Christ rather than on a life-affirming theology.

TOWARD A MULTILEVEL THEOLOGY

Naturally, the theologies shifting in parallel with the DAYS and NIGHTS of the Sixth Wave raise certain questions as to what we humans may know about the Divine and the purpose of this creation. How solid can any theology be if over the ages the theologies that the humans developed have been profoundly influenced by the hologram that has ruled over them? What I have argued here is that the biblical God, and more broadly the God of the Abrahamic religions, is basically a projection of the Hologram of Good and Evil onto the Divine, which implies that it has become part of the ruling power structure. But we may then also ask if the theologies could have been any different from what they were. Was there an alternative? Regardless of what our answers may be to such questions, if we are now to continue the climb of the nine-story pyramid to fulfill the destiny of humanity, it is necessary to understand on a deeper level what happened in order to relieve ourselves of views from the past that may hamper this climb.

From the perspective of the nine levels of creation, it is not only the shifting DAYS and NIGHTS of the Sixth Wave that have created the theological uncertainty and the various schisms these shifts have given rise to. A fully encompassing theology would need to take into account what is created by all the nine waves and recognize the corresponding relationships to the Divine for what they are. Hence, when we consider that there are five different waves, each giving a fundamentally different hologram to our minds (fig. 5.8), things become more complicated, because each of these generates a particular relationship to the Source. From figure 5.8 we can also understand that each hologram creates the framework for the types of theologies that are developed in a certain era. The waves and their corresponding holograms have been activated sequentially, and through the interference patterns they have created with each other, the waves have contributed to the remarkable variation of religious traditions and viewpoints that have existed on our planet over the past five thousand years. But if humans have developed their views of the Divine based on different holograms, how can we possibly see only one of them as true?

Before attempting to answer this question, I would like to briefly go over the different holograms in figure 5.5 and their consequences for the human perception of the Divine. In the Fifth Wave, going back one hundred thousand years, the relationship of humans to the Divine is based on immediate resonance with unity. Presumably, there was under the influence of the Fifth Wave no experience of conflict between the world of spirit and human beings as people were in a permanent state of consciousness akin to what we today would call a shamanic state. The Fifth Wave created a unity consciousness, albeit at a very low material level of life, and we can liken the experience of the world to a Garden of Eden with no separation.

Figure 5.8. The Destiny Chart of Humanity, continued: Different relationships to the Divine under the influence of different mental holograms. Note that “Shamanistic State of Unity” does not mean that what we today call shamanism was actually practiced at the time. Yet, a state of unity with the spirit world may be the closest we can come in terms of an experience of a modern person. (Diagram by the author, design courtesy of Bengt Sundin)

The Sixth Wave hologram, and the rational mind that it gave rise to, changed this, and humans gradually became more separate from nature, other humans, and the Divine from 3115 BCE onward. All the major religions existing today are products of the Sixth Wave and are based on its dualist hologram. Most of them incorporate traits of a judgmental God, or gods, and a conflict between this God and the human beings. Such a conflict was experienced not only in the Abrahamic religions but also, for instance, in the beliefs of the Maya and Aztecs, who sacrificed humans to appease the gods.

Also in the East the effects of the duality of the Sixth Wave holograms were evident. In the ancient yin-yang philosophy of China, the duality was not only about good and evil; it also influenced many other aspects of human life, such as gender relations. The duality of the yin-yang symbol (fig. 4.4c) can be approached in different ways. One would be to look upon yin and yang as two forces that can be harmonized; the other is to look upon them as forever separated by the duality inherent in our existence. Such different viewpoints are at the core of the two most significant religious-philosophical teachings of China: Confucianism and Taoism. While Taoism essentially advocates that we should go inside and avoid dualist thinking, Confucianism advocates that we should learn how to become “good” members of society. Regardless, both teachings saw the duality of the human mind, what we here have called the Hologram of Good and Evil, as a fact of life that humans had to learn to deal with.

The Seventh Wave, as we will see in the next chapter, essentially created atheism. This, paradoxically, is really a specific relationship to the Divine based on a perception of darkness, even if it is not always recognized as such. This hologram was activated in 1755 CE, when the industrial age opened to a new form of creativity and the focus of many shifted away from religions. No major religion has emerged since this hologram was activated. The Eighth Wave, which was activated in 1999, elicited, on the other hand, a return to a relationship with spirit, based on a duality with an opposite polarity to that which had dominated the Sixth Wave. The shift over to the light at the right brain has created a spirituality that is more holistic and feminine. Typically, the New Age and the eclectic philosophies that emerged under the influence of this wave were often expressions of spirituality without the recognition of the Divine. The Ninth Wave, with its unity consciousness, finally brings a return to a direct relationship to the Divine All That Is with no limits in perception.

When it comes to how we can create a unified theology based on all of these different holograms, I think we should first notice that these have not been randomly generated. Instead, the different holograms do form part of a unified structure, which allows them to be activated at precise points in time according to a preset logic, as we saw in chapter 3. A multilevel theology, where the consequences of holograms of different levels are explored, should then be based on the realization that these holograms are integrated into a whole. It is also important to realize that the different theologies are steps on a climb to levels of higher frequencies.

What in the past has generally been called theology has almost exclusively been limited to the Sixth Wave and focused on religions created by projections of its left-brain dualist hologram. From the perspective that is developed here, this will by necessity lead to a very limited view of the Divine, basically experiencing the Divine only through one of the hemispheres of the mind. Even today, especially in the areas of today’s world where the Hologram of Good and Evil was first downloaded—the region from Egypt to present-day Pakistan—dualist theologies are very much ingrained, and as long as they are upheld, it will be difficult to have peace there. In this regard the subjugation of women may be the most important expression of this duality to overcome. If this does not happen, it may be very difficult to climb to the Eighth Wave, which has an opposite polarity and in principle favors women. The Eighth Wave is also a necessary step for climbing to the Ninth Wave, which is the one that finally leads to the manifestation of the destiny of humanity.

THE ONE THAT HAS NOTHING ABOVE IT

A multilevel theology must also be a unified theology based on the realization that there is a unified intelligence behind all the different human perspectives of the Divine. Even if it is possible to take the position that the Tree of Life and the waves that it emits are just like natural laws that for some inexplicable reason have led the world to what it is today, to me, at least, it seems more logical to conclude that there exists One Divine All That Is, and in chapter 1 I discussed how we may understand this. This Divine then exists beyond all the viewpoints humans have created through the influence of the holograms of the nine waves. That we have now started to resonate with the Ninth Wave would imply that finally we are able to develop and practice a theology of unity.

The idea that there is such a Divine with no limits and nothing above it is not new. Earlier, the Gnostics, which was a sizable group within Christianity in the second century CE and presumably had emerged from an early movement around Mary Magdalene, held the view that there was the One, which was above the Old Testament God. We know a fair amount about the views of this early group of Christians from the Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen Gnostic texts found in Egypt in 1945.³⁴ The Gnostics maintained that there exists the One True Divine, who in all respects was perfect, the head of all worlds in goodness. In one of these texts, The Secret Book of John,³⁵ a creation story is provided that is said to have come from Jesus himself. Interestingly, this is very different from the story in Genesis; in it Jesus actually claims to be the one who induced Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Moreover, in the same book, Yahweh and his father, Yaldabaoth, are not regarded as the One but as limited local gods. Yahweh’s statement in the Old Testament that he is a jealous god and that there is no other god beside him is in this creation account countered by Jesus with the following words: “But by announcing this, he suggested to the angels with him that there is another god. For if there were no other god, of whom would he be jealous?”³⁶

I am not saying that this early Christian text argues, like I have, that Yahweh, as well as Ashur and Marduk, are human projections of a particular hologram from the true Divine. Yet, the text does tell us that already two thousand years ago some Christians thought that the true Divine was something greater than the gods of monotheism embraced by the Abrahamic religions. According to Jesus (at least as it is written in the Secret Book of John) the one true God created a series of eons, each with a male-female reflection of this one true God. This expanded theology seems close to the holographic model that is developed here. In other words, when Jesus talks about the One, it may very well be the Creator, which manifested itself as the Tree of Life, as discussed in chapter 1, which is different from “God” in the sense of a projection of the human ego.

A more clarifying theology than what we live with now would have been based on the insight that each hologram in the Destiny Chart generates a particular projection, a male-female duality if you will, onto the Divine. All religions have in other words been created based on the waves that human beings have been in resonance with at a particular point in time. Upon this, a theology or a belief in a certain nature of God has been developed in practice and in theory. In this view, the nature of the Divine All That Is is indeed something much larger and much more encompassing than a God created exclusively based on the Sixth Wave polarity. In fact, a theology about this Divine All That Is may be beyond what may be described in any scripture, or mentally conceptualized otherwise. It may be that we can only know it through direct experience.

The One is the Source of all the different holograms and corresponding theologies, and from this we may understand that there is no reason to fanatically get stuck in any one of them and reject all the others. Because of the simplemindedness this has created, many people today do not want to use the word God for their experience of the Divine. The reason is probably not only that this word has been used to support a multitude of political and patriarchal agendas and still today is used to judge, condemn, and stigmatize people by means of an ancient theology. The reason may more profoundly be that the concept of “God” inherently reflects a limited view, which does not reflect who the One is. The One That Has Nothing Above It, as the Gnostics would say, is not the same concept as the “God” of the Abrahamic religions.

It is important to recognize that the holograms coloring our perception of the One Divine are parts of a unified whole and also that they all represent steps in a climb. There is a partial recognition in the Abrahamic religions that we are faced with such a climb. In the Jewish tradition, for instance, it is currently believed that, depending on humanity’s actions, we will return to the Garden of Eden, also believed to be a Messianic age, sometime within the next 225 years.³⁷ But how could this happen and why would it be prophesied if there is not a process that could lead to such a return? A mechanism for such a return is provided here in the form of a climb to the Ninth Wave hologram (fig. 5.8). Yet, when this will happen indeed depends on the actions of humanity. For humanity to be able to return to the Garden of Eden, which is its destiny, it seems that a much more inclusive theology needs to be developed than those currently ruling the world. One of the last verses of the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible also points in a similar direction: “Blessed are those that do His [God’s] commandments, that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and may enter through the gates into the city” (Rev 22:14, translation from the King James Bible 2000). “The right to the Tree of Life” then presumably means having part in the Divine and being able to return to the state of unity.