Inclusively Envisioning
the Universe / God
by Joel Federman

Ultimately, we need to learn to expand our visions to include the many competing religions and philosophies and sciences of the world in a larger whole.

We now too often see humanity as having competing visions or worldviews that are irreconcilable.

But, we have the option of envisioning inclusively and learning to translate each worldview into the terms of other worldviews without losing the essential meaning of any, thus broadening our vision to include seemingly opposite worldviews in a larger unified whole.

What religion and science have in common is that they are both ways of seeing and understanding the world. The process of reconciling religion and science is thus the same process of reconciling competing religions.

In a larger, inclusive, vision, all religions, myths, and sciences can be seen to have truth within them, and we can find a way of seeing and knowing that doesn’t require one to be wrong for another to be right.

Here are some possible elements of such a vision:

  • In this vision, Eden is the Earth, and evolving human beings long ago ate from the tree of knowledge of light and darkness within us, and that is what made us human. By focusing too much on the darkness, we’ve mistakenly thought we’d cast ourselves out of the paradise of Eden and into a nightmare of separateness and fear, but we really haven’t.

  • In this vision, we could reverse course simply by having faith in ourselves and in the universe and choosing the light over the darkness in each moment.

  • In this vision, E=MC2 means that spirit and matter are inherent in each other, that seeing the light releases the sprit in matter with a force unimaginable in the history of the world, and that the name of that force is love.

  • In this vision, the universe is a hologram, and the Gaia hypothesis is true: all living beings on Earth are cells and organs of one larger life. Seeing this, we therefore realize that our separateness is illusion and that every time we kill or harm or think to cause harm to each other we are only harming ourselves.

  • In this view, the coming—or second coming--of the Messiah is a collective event rather than an individual one. In this vision, another Prophet is arriving—and another, and another.

  • In this view, I—and you—are the Messiah and we are right now in the desert face to face with the serpent, with the fear, with the terrorist that is beyond all name or nationality, including our own.

  • In this vision, we are approaching Omega, the point at which humanity experiences itself as one being, and all the good karma and mitzvahs (good deeds) of all our relatives and ancestors, buoyed by grace and Eros (life energy) and Agape (universal love), is quickening our Buddha-nature and giving birth to a time of Greater Peace and Justice on the Earth, and all the children of Lucy are being born again into the womb of Eden, our Earth Mother, swimming among the stars, once and for all.

Using this kind of inclusive vision, when we use the word "God," we can mean it in the same way that Einstein did when he said that all of his scientific endeavors were attempts to understand the "mind of God."

From this "topian" perspective, in contrast to authoritarian versions of religion, physics and theology are not in conflict, but are branches of each other.

We can use the term "God" interchangeably with "Nature" or the "universe," or in popular culture terms, the "force," or the "Matrix."

God is the larger whole of which we are a part, and the essential energy that we experience as "life."

In this view, as Gandhi said, there are as many religions as there are people, and that therefore there are as many understandings of God as there are people.

This reality unites us equally as much as it divides us. It is completely humbling and empowering at the same time: God is completely beyond our comprehension, yet is the core or ground of our existence.