A Fiction Writer’s Take on Reality

Special thanks to author Ernest Dempsey for being a sounding board for some of these ideas. Check out his amazing work at http://ernestdempsey.net

I’m going to start this by stating a fact: I am a fiction writer by trade (though I do other non-fiction work, too). So everything you read from here on out should be considered in that light. And the only caveat I’ll make is to point out that fiction has often been used to explore, discover and share profound truths. We end up learning a lot about ourselves in fiction.

Consider Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which is a deeply spiritual book framed as the story of a young boy in search of his Personal Legend. The story is fiction in execution only — otherwise it shares a lot of truths about humanity, life, the pursuit of goals. If you haven’t read it, go do that now. It’s worth putting everything else aside.

Or consider the teachings of Christ, who used parables and metaphor extensively to explore and encode complex ideas in a way that ultimately made them simple but multi-layered truth cakes. Delicious, sweet, kind of fun. You can read the teachings and sayings of Christ again and again, at different points in your life, and discover profound new ways of looking at the world and at yourself each time. I consider Christ the greatest teacher, and the greatest kind of teacher—one who encourages you to seek the truth for yourself, and empowers you with all the resources you need to do that.

So fiction is a way of looking at the truth indirectly. A little like looking at a photo of the sun. You can observe it and learn from it, and not be blinded by it.

The following model of reality isn’t fiction in the strictest sense, but it is the musings of a fiction-writing brain. Take whatever truth you can from it. I believe truth hides right in plain sight, in myriad forms. And as we’re told in Matthew 7:7, it’s up to us to seek, ask, knock our way to finding it. This is me seeking, asking, knocking.

What Does “Made in His Image” Mean?

I’m working on something in my head. It’s built around the idea that we are essentially a manifestation of God. Beyond that, I’m exploring what it means to be a manifestation of something, or to be made in God’s image.

I’ve never quite liked the idea of “we are a manifestation of God” because it gets used by a lot of new-age types who want to be God, and I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t believe that we are God, but maybe more of a part of God. A tiny piece that represents a larger whole. Like a fractal (more on this in a bit).

I was thinking about the known laws of physics and about quantum physics, as I understand them.

In Newtonian physics, we have the law of conservation of energy. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed. Shaped. And matter at its most fundamental level is energy. We know we can “destroy” matter, but ultimately we’re really just changing its shape. The constituent parts of matter — atoms, subatomic particles, quanta — aren’t ever truly destroyed, they just revert to their natural state. They all go back into the universe, waiting to become something else.

I was thinking about that, and my hypothesis is that if energy can’t be created or destroyed, then the universe is really a construct of the energy that existed before everything we know and will exist after everything is gone. Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end. God, in other words.

In this model, we’re made of God. We’re not God ourselves, but a manifestation of God. Or, in the model I’m proposing, a tangle of God-stuff. A pattern of God energy.

Waves in the Ocean

I was listening to Oprah Winfrey interview Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements. In the interview, Oprah said that she thought of life and the universe in terms of an ocean.

I’m paraphrasing, extrapolating and expanding a bit, but here’s what I took from it:

The ocean is there, and then there are waves. The waves have a beginning and an end, or a lifespan. When the wave comes to the shore it dissipates, but it isn’t destroyed. It just becomes the ocean again. Another wave appears, similar to the first but not exactly the same—never exactly the same. The new wave is made up of different particles of the same ocean, making a slightly different pattern.

It reminds me of a quote from Heraclitus:

You could not step twice into the same river.

The river is there, the water is there, the observer (the person stepping into the river) is there. But the water moves and changes, and each step into it means entering a new river, every time. The same river, but changed. The old river has moved on, and a new one, similar but not exactly the same, has taken its place.

I think that’s the way the universe is built. And I think quantum physics supports that, because of the “spooky” dual nature of light (and by extension all energy).

I’ll talk about that next, but for now I thought you might want to take a moment and listen to Oprah’s interview with author Don Miguel Ruiz:

The Spooky Dual Nature of Energy

In 1927, two American physicists named Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer conducted an experiment to confirm the de Brogile Hypothesis. To put that simply, Louis De Brogile hypothesized that electrons and other particles had wave-like properties. Meaning that no only where they particles by nature, but they also behaved as if they were a wave.

Davisson and Germer did a number of experiments, many of which failed to prove out the hypothesis, and eventually they landed on what has become popularly known as the double-slit experiment.

Without getting into some pretty heady details and maths, we can boil the double-slit experiment down to its basics:

A powerful but controlled light source (such as a laser or a photon gun similar to the cathode ray tube in an old television) shines light onto a plate that has two parallel slits. The experiment reduces the flow of light particles until only a single packet of light, called a photon, is fired at the plate at regular intervals.

A light-absorbing screen is placed on the other side of the plate. This is typically something that can register the “hits” of individual photos, such as a phosphorescent material that glows at each point of contact. This screen is how we see the result of the light particles passing through one or the other of the two parallel slits in the plate.

When photons are fired one by one at the plate, they’re randomly either deflected by the surface of the plate or they pass through one or the other of the two slits. When we observe the results on the phosphorescent screen, we see a random pattern of hits. Light, behaving as a particle.

If we let the experiment run over time, however, something pretty amazing happens. Eventually the light particles passing through the slits at random start to create a pattern more consistent with a wave. Somehow the individual particles passing through each slit interfere with each other, despite pssing through at random and at different times, and this creates alternating bands of light and dark on the sheet. These bands form a pattern that is consistent with the characteristics of a wave.

The conclusion is kind of bizarre, and utterly fascinating: Light has the properties of both a wave and of a particle simultaneously.

But hold on, it gets even weird/cooler. Because everything changes if we’re observing the phenomenon.

When we detect which slit the photon is going through, as the pass-through happens, a really bizarre outcome occurs: We never see the wave pattern form on the screen. We see only the random patterns of individual particles, just as we would expect to see.

When we observe the light, it’s behavior changes.

Weird, huh?

The real nature of light, at the quantum level, is influenced by observation, or awareness. So when the light is observed it behaves as a particle, a single quanta with its own unique nature.

When the light is not observed it behaves as a wave, part of a greater pattern that is part of a greater source still.

In the model I’m working from, human life acts the same way.

We’re a quanta, a single packet of information in the form of a lifetime of experiences. But we’re also part of a species, a community, and a race of humans. And beyond that we’re part of an ecosystem, and a solar system, and a galaxy, and a universe.

SIDE NOTE: I happen to believe that the many worlds interpretation is a reality, and that beyond our universe we’re a part of a multiverse, or a collection of alternate universes. I even take that idea even further, and think of our multiverse as part of an omniverse. I write about all of this stuff in my YA fantasy series, Sawyer Jackson, if you’d like to explore it in a fun way.

In the model I’m kicking around, we’re all a wave that manifests as individual particles with finite lifespans, and we all eventually return to the source. That source, as well as the observer who makes us behave as individual “particles,” is God.

The first source. The source of all the energy in existence, and therefore the building blocks of all matter and all life. We’re all built in God’s image.

I think of that like fractals.

I Promised I’d Talk About Fractals

A fractal is a geometric construct in which each smaller component is identical to the whole. No matter how closely you look at a fractal, you’ll see the same pattern. Go deeper and deeper, and the pattern persists.

Here’s a trippy video that shows what I mean:

Fractals show up in nature all the time, but we’ve also been able to create fractals using computers, and they get used in computer simulations to create “natural” environments. If you want to auto-genreate a forest or a mountain range or clouds or a lot of other natural phenomenon, fractals are your friends.

I think our relationship to God, and the fact that we are made in God’s image, as fractal in nature. We are tiny representations of the whole. We are patterns in a fractal tapestry, individual and unique because we behave like particles, but uniform to the greater source, because we are reflections of the first and truest pattern.

We’re made from God, and we’ll continue to live on forever as part of God.

Death, the Soul, and The Problem of the Law of Conservation of Energy

What happens to us after we die?

I have no idea. Other than, of course, the general ideas I’ve come to believe based on my upbringing, my faith, and my experience. Like every college-student-turned-philosopher, I’ve had a lot of conversations that started with “Dude, what if …?”

There’s only one way to know for certain what happens to us after death, and that is to die. Few people are lining up to pursue that field of study.

But we can speculate and we can extrapolate, and in that I think we have some clues and hints.

Let’s start by assuming that our model is pretty close to accurate. We’ll agree that God is the baseline energy of the universe, and that everything that exists—organic or inorganic, alive or inert, matter or energy—is made of God. If we can keep that for the moment, then we can start looking at the nature of reality and drawing some conclusions about life after death.

If we really are a fractal image of God, and a wave in the ocean of universal energy, and a particle being observed into existence, then there’s really, really good news:

We go on.

As particles, we live our lives as individuals. We have free will, we make our choices, we have an impact.

As waves, we run our course, and when that’s done we return to the source.

We are a duality, expressing itself as a singularity even as we remain a part of a greater, homogenous source.

So we life and we die, but we don’t cease to exist. We revert back to God-stuff. Our pattern fades, but we go on.

Which begs the question: What was the point of the pattern?

If God is our observer, and by observing us imbues with the qualities of an individual, then the real question becomes “why?” Why do that? Why put us through life at all, if we’re just going to rejoin the great ocean of life or whatever?

And I believe the answer to that is … ok, well, impossible to know for sure. After all, Isaiah 55:8–9 makes it clear that God’s thoughts are on a higher level than ours. Which makes sense, considering we’re fractals mirroring a greater whole—a tinier version of a greater pattern.

But I can speculate.

It seems like the point of creating something in your image is so you can observe how it behaves under certain conditions. We create computer models of ourselves, for example, so we can observe and explore and experience things vicariously. Ever played World of Warcraft or a similar MMORPG?

Closer to home, for this fiction writer, is the fact that I create characters for my novels, and then put those characters in various scenarios so I can explore their interactions. The characters are ultimately little fractal versions of me—not exact replicas, and not always representative of my beliefs or views or perspectives, but made from me. Manifestations of thoughts I’ve thought and ideas I want to express.

Sometimes those thoughts and ideas aren’t pleasant. I’m not a murderer, for example, but I sometimes create murderers in my fiction, and let them run rampant on the page. They do evil things, and I let it happen, because without them the hero has nothing to challenge him, and no way to express his merit and virtue.

So why create humanity? I think it’s so God can observe and experience his creation. I think it’s so he can add to his memory.

If we fall back to a computer model of the universe, then all this virtual reality is unfolding so that God can observe it, and then it gets stored and backed up.

In the Christian tradition, eventually all the “bad” stuff is going to be cast out and destroyed. The law of conservation of energy says that isn’t possible, though. So what if … dude, what if …

What if God is allowing all the positive stuff to happen, all the good stuff to happen, so that he has those patterns on file? And when he’s ready, he’ll purge all the bad, evil, and wicked stuff, and restore a clean backup. The good patterns live on.

Which means that the more good we do, the more love we generate in the universe, the more of our pattern will be restored, when the time comes.

Now that’s a philosophy I’m happy to believe.

What do you think?

It’s ok if you disagree with any or all of this. It’s a thought experiment. It isn’t right, it isn’t wrong, it isn’t complete. It’s an idea, and a framework for thinking about the nature of humanity and the universe. It’s a truth expressed as a fiction.

I’m not going to argue with any opposition to these ideas. I may not even respond to comments on them, unless I just really feel compelled to. I think this is the kind of conversation we can add to as things are revealed to us. I think it can be altered and expanded and refined and improved.

When I publish a book, I use what I call an “iterative publishing approach.” It drives some people nuts, because it’s seen as “putting a book out before it’s ready.” I respect that perspective. I’m still gonna do it, but I respect the perspective.

Because I believe that books, just like life, are impermanent things, and that they can be improved on with the application of time and thought and experience. And I believe the same about essays like this one.

So highlight things. Comment on sections and ideas. Expand. Share. Contribute. I won’t mind. And if I don’t agree, it’s ok. And if I don’t respond, it’s ok. When you write on a wall, you don’t carry the wall with you. You leave it for others to write on too.

Think. And tell the world what you think.