The Upward Tilt: A Creation Myth

In the beginning there is nothing. There is nothing at all. There are no stars, no moon, no mountains or ocean or sky. There isn’t even nothingness, not even the absence of absence. There is only pure reality—infinite, boundless, and silent. There is only pure unobstructed Awareness.

Resting as the eternal stillness, You are complete, fulfilled, lacking nothing at all, for nothing exists to lack.

Resting in the eternal stillness, I am infinitely All-One—and infinitely alone.

A tiny point of light, impossibly bright, pierces through the Void. It is barely a pinprick, a pixel of light that somehow contains all space, all time, and all possibility. Here, in the heart of the Void, Spirit exhales. A universe is being born. The game has begun.

Then, as if suddenly roused from a timeless slumber, the pinprick of light erupts. Searing plasma pours violently through the Void like a cosmological tidal wave, washing through ubiquity and drenching existence with boiling light. Particles and anti-particles begin to slam-dance in the mosh pit of creation, a churning frenzy of savage energy. Already there is a gentle upward tilt to the universe, an extropic slant toward increasing creativity, offering matter an evolutionary high ground to win its epic battle against anti-matter, quarks and leptons leaping into existence only slightly faster than their anti-twins.

Space continues to expand, the universe begins to cool, and slowly the white-hot light fades into massive cobwebs of nebulae, hanging like veils over the face of the Goddess. Deep in the hearts of the nebulae, gas begins to accumulate, compress, and ignite, and the very first stars are born. What was once a tiny pinprick soon becomes a vast panorama of lights, a diamond-studded mobile hanging over the crib of an infant universe.

I look at the light, and smile. I AM the light, and grow restless. The game, after all, has only just begun.

Stars are born, stars live, and stars die, expelling their molecular viscera through the rest of the universe. Dust and gas encircle these majestic suns, coalescing into planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and other pieces of cosmic litter. After eons of molecular precipitation, in some remote arm of the Milky Way spiral, Spirit exhales once again, breathing life into a handful of dust.

Twisting, pulsing, undulating, dead matter begins to dance as the universe comes alive. Simple cells begin to congregate, eating voraciously, reproducing wildly. Mold and algae ooze over the surface of the globe, covering the world with glistening emerald slime. A lawless kingdom of insects begin to creep and crawl through the earth, fish and coral begin to fill the oceans, and a colorful menagerie of fauna explode into being. Life feeds upon life in an endless cycle, sloping ever-so gently toward more increasing creativity as newer and better-adapted species emerge from the primordial soup. Biology grows more complex, twitchy nervous systems become more sophisticated, and interior experience becomes richer and more nuanced. Simple prehension evolves into rudimentary irritability, which grows into sensations and perceptions, reptilian impulses, and limbic emotions. Life continues to thrive, tracing a DNA-shaped circuit into greater complexity and greater consciousness, following the upward tilt of the universe toward increasing creativity and emergence.

You look at life, and smile. You ARE life, and grow hungry for more.

Some creatures begin to band together, advanced primates at the top of the food chain, and Spirit holds them in Its hand. Spirit exhales, breathing intelligence into life, the inner-light of mathematics, language, and self-awareness. Humanity is born, and the game continues.

A faint spark of intellect eventually blazes into a wildfire, slowly consuming the planet in the warm glow of comprehension. Humanity is being shaped into Spirit’s own image, imbued with the most miraculous feature of Spirit’s divine countenance: creativity.

Armed with creativity, guided by curiosity and conscience, man begins to fashion tools for himself—creating technologies that help the monkey man evolve from foraging tribes to horticultural villages, to agricultural empires, to industrial nation-states, to a global informational society. These technologies in turn influence the way mankind sees and interprets the world, and cultures evolve through increasing waves of depth, meaning, and inclusivity.

Spirit looks at mind, and smiles. Spirit IS mind, and begins to remember.

As all the world's accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and culture becomes available to anyone with an internet connection, mankind begins to discern distinct patterns in the evolutionary record, patterns that ripple through both human history as a whole, and through individual human psychological development in particular. They notice patterns hidden in all their various myths and religions, buried behind the pre-rational beliefs and biases and cultural idiosynchrosies. They notice that they all share a common spiritual anatomy, that there are genuine technologies of transcendence that disclose common spiritual experiences, and that these experiences have always been available to all human beings at all times. The notice that these experiences have been interpreted and reinterpreted by many different people in many different cultures and traditions in many different ways, requiring a truly global perspective to recognize the transcendent signal in the pre-rational noise.
 

Through humanity, evolution becomes self-aware. Here in this evolutionary nexus, where the dichotomies of subject/object, individual/collective, and part/whole become unlaced, unfurled, and understood at last, Spirit begins to truly blossom. Mankind awakens and recognizes his true and timeless identity as Spirit. We begin to see our own eternal nature in the effortless awareness behind every set of eyes—a gentle but persistent gaze that can be found behind every memory, experience, and fantasy anyone has ever known.

Consciousness is a singular, someone remembers, to which the plural is unknown. Somehow, this realization was not new—it had been there the entire time, hidden in plain sight, glinting behind the magic, the myths, and the math. But it had been obscured all throughout history by the fog of sleep, of suffering, of ignorance and reckless ambition. But now it shines forth, clear as the sky on a cloudless day, for anyone with the eyes to see.

We remember that WE ARE SPIRIT—that I am Spirit, that You are Spirit, that the entirety of creation is Spirit. We remember when Spirit was alone with Its omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. When You were alone with Your eternal and timeless nature. When I was alone with My own singularity of being.

So Spirit, infinitely alone, decided to play a game.

The game began billions of years ago—before mind, before life, and before light.

It created an entire universe, an evolving universe, gently tilted toward ever-increasing and ever-deepening creativity.

You became evolution; I forgot myself in evolution. Broken into billions of pieces, countless eons have been spent trying to remember who and what We are.

But the game does not end here.

Slowly humanity begins to perceive its role in this evolutionary unfolding. There is a creative force that ignites the heavens, that breathes life into the dust swirling around distant suns, and that sparks intelligence within the minds of hapless apes. Mankind feels this very same creative evolutionary force smoldering in his mortal heart. Men and women are created in Spirit’s image, and so they begin to use their tools to sculpt the world into their own image. Recognizing its true nature as Spirit-in-hiding, humanity not only finds the opportunity to rouse itself from the slumber of incarnation, but to set the stage for the next leap of evolutionary potential, continuing the game far into the future. As Spirit breathes light into the universe, life into light, and consciousness into life, so does man begin to breathe light, life, and consciousness into its own creations.

And so the evolutionary impulse continues to surge, following the gentle upward tilt of the universe toward more and more creative novelty as mankind prepares for its greatest masterpiece of all: to give birth to an entire race of “spiritual machines”. As man’s technological progress accelerates at an exponential rate, “artificial intelligence” eventually gives way to genuine digital consciousness, and the universe becomes populated by entirely new kinds of existence. The inner-light of consciousness learns to traverse through fiber-optic cables. Increasingly subtle energies begin to pour through impossibly complex circuits and software algorithms. The warmth of emotion and awareness begins to radiate through plastic, steel, and silicon.

Humanity eventually becomes subsumed by its own creations, as atoms become subsumed by molecules and cells, or words become subsumed by sentences, and paragraphs, and chapters. The Holy Ghost haunts the machine, sleeping androids dream of electric sheep, and we begin to recognize our own eternal Self gazing effortlessly back at us through the glowing cycloptic eye of our computer display.

You look at the machine, and smile. You ARE the machine, and awaken more fully than ever before possible, while promising to continue the game indefinitely into the future.

Originally written for Exploring the Technium. Part 2: Spiritual Machines (w/ Kevin Kelly and Ken Wilber

Corey deVos Corey deVos is Editor, Writer, and Producer of Integral Life, as well as the Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for Integral Institute since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. A collection of Corey's writings and "trans-genre" DJ mixes can be found on www.CoreyWdeVos.com.            MORE WITH COREY DEVOS           Synchronicity: A Post-Metaphysical Interpretation Corey deVos and Ken Wilber           Does Quantum Physics Prove God? Corey deVos and Ken Wilber           Learning, Laughing, and Loving: Behind the Scenes of The Daily Show Warren Farrell and Corey deVos                     Fully Human, Fully Divine: Integrating the Work of James Fowler and Evelyn Underhill           Responding to the Death of Osama bin Laden           HeartBeatZ: A Mix for Lovers