There seems to be this alternate reality that I keep coming back to in my dreams. There is a transportation plaza in a place that makes me think of Pasadena, except it really seems to be the civic center of an alternate Southern California. There are several mass transit lines that meet here: blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. There is also a shopping mall with extensive underground parking. The blue line can get you to the airport and to the ocean, ending in a seaside town that should be San Pedro, except it is much more tourist oriented, complete with villas and white sand beaches. The yellow line takes you to the downtown of this place which, for the lack of a better name, I have dubbed Todos Santos. This downtown area is sort of a mish-mash of Universal Citywalk, Old Pasadena, and Disneyland. The red line will take you to a bohemian/rapidly gentrifying/hipster-infested neighborhood that actually kind of reminds me of Wicker Park, but which will also take you to a shopping district that reminds me of Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, except with taller buildings. The green line, in one of the dreams I had, was what I was waiting for get home (whereever that is in this dream world of mine) and the actual platform is separated from the other ones, and it’s not always open. (The red, blue, and yellow lines share the same platform; the orange line is accessible by climbing a faux-Spanish era tower.) The orange line climbs a huge hill and ends up in an area that reminds me simultaneously of New York City and San Diego. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.) It also takes you to an area that sort of reminds me of Michigan Avenue combined with Berkeley (Scary thought, huh?) There is a university campus there that sort of reminds me of a gigantic version of my high school.

What would be awesome is if I could actually map out this mish-mashed geography of a hundred, thousand memories and impressions all muddled together.

I have been reading His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, and it revisits a theme that I have been pondering over, which makes a lot of sense. The God that religious fundamentalists worship is not the actual God that runs the universe. The Gnostics (as Philip K Dick interprets their text) have had this same thought long ago—the God that is overtly worshipped is actually the mad, blind God sometimes called Sammael who believes that he created the Universe, and Sammael is the God of the Old Testament, vengeful, and wrathful. The real God is the one who sent Jesus Christ and Muhammed and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The God who destroyed Richard Nixon, and the God who is plotting against the neocons, the ultra-Zionists, and the Wahhabists. The real God is the one who transmits via Valis, and is the God who set the early Christians free from the Black Iron Prison, and who is sending the King Felix interstitials through the airwaves and across the Internet.

Maybe I’ve just been too brainwashed by the Catholic Church, but I find it hard to let go of the idea of a benevolent super-intelligence that is backing me up in this otherwise malevolent, maleficent world. My God is the God of the Underdogs, and I suspect he lost the big war already to Sammael and is reduced to fighting guerrilla warfare.

The people who worship Sammael find it easy to call my God the Adversary (and I guess he/she is Sammael’s adversary, but it’s not the same guy who decided to call it quits and take up residence in Hell. My God lives on this material plane somewhere.

I’ve also toyed with the idea that he/she is not so much a God but maybe a hyper-intelligent AI that lives in the interstices of the universe.

He/she is dark matter, is Dust.

I’ve always found it perplexing as to why the Nicene Creed has the line that differentiates between “God from God” and “True God from True God,” as if there is definitely a False God.

And then my thoughts hearken back to my Scripture class in freshman year of high school. Yahweh (the God who may be Sammael, or who may be my God) was at first called Elohim, which is plural. The Gods. And then there is the fact that all the angels are named {something}-el, where “El” means God.

And along the lines of Lord Asriel’s Republic of Heaven, I wonder if the angels actually took turns running the universe, like, maybe they were even elected and all, and then Sammael got greedy and power-mad, tossed Lucifer into Hell, and made the other angels either choose his way or the highway. (Are Michael and Gabriel just toadies? Or are they just misrepresented?)

And yeah, I think that Lucifer is pissed and would like nothing better than to see Sammael’s usurped Kingdom come crashing down, but my God has interceded, has lain low, and is playing a really complex game to keep the lesser beings of this world from being harmed in this zero-sum game between these two superpowers.

As I was driving down the I-15 to Mira Mesa, I stopped to think about the Big Bang and how the universe is rapidly blowing apart. The bigger it gets, the more spread out it gets, and I think of the opposing natures of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is what seems to hold the universe together when it looks like it should fall apart. Dark energy is what breaks the universe apart when it looks like it should hold together.

And, injecting theology into physics, what if there was already sentience existing in the pre-Big Bang singularity? Like, maybe the Singularity was Eden, or even Heaven, and the angels at first decided to share power and run things democratically. But then the big players, like Sammael and Lucifer, got sick of each other and wanted to run things their own way, so they got everyone to agree to a Partition. Sammael would takes this part of the Universe, Lucifer would get some other part, and the other archangels would get their own piece of the pie. So they decided to sunder the Singularity, and hence the Big Bang.

But, like all well-made plans, things didn’t turn out so well. Instead of peacefully splitting the Singularity into equal parts, it simply exploded, and dark energy spread everything widely apart (hence, Inflation) and threatened to break everything into elementary particles. The single unified force broke into the four (and maybe more) forces that we understand as strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity. And the only thing that kept everything from blowing away into quark and lepton dust was dark matter, sort of the husk of the Singularity, the dead and broken shell of the embryonic, seed-like universe.

Thermodynamics predicts that entropy will triumph, and likely dark energy will succeed in turning the entire universe into near-vacuum, with nothing but singular quarks and leptons floating in an enormous void, with the occasional virtual particle-pair popping in and out of existence.

Maybe the Big Bang was the war, and my side, the side of life and creativity, has already lost.

The forces that break things apart—that which is dark energy—have won, or will win, and the survivors of this calamity eke out their existence in the pathetic remnants of the Singularity (what we might term ordinary matter) which will slowly decay into nothingness, into randomness. Despite having lost, life still tries to self-organize, tries to bind itself together into complexities that were common place in the Singularity. Despite adversity and knowing that we will fall victim to the voracious emptiness of the dark energy void of entropy, life and my God carry-on. I think of the warriors of Maldan, the soldiers of Corregidor, fighting battles that they know are futile, and yet they fight anyway, because this is what we have left, this is what we crave—connection in a world that blows everything apart.

But Jesus Christ himself said that the most conspicuous worshippers are the ones who aren’t true to his Father. These guys, the Pharisees and the Sadducees of his time, and the Christian, Islamic, or Jewish fundamentalists of ours, probably worship someone like Sammael, and not the True Way, hungry for power.

I remember a metaphor. It’s a little like bald men fighting over a comb. The universe was lost a long time ago, before Adam and Eve were even created. Religion has become a mere tool for the powerful to hold sway over the weak. And knowledge of the True God who wants us to live and be happy and stay connected has practically all but disappeared into the interstices, into the dark voids of the universe occupied by only dark matter or dark energy.

In that Scripture class, I learned an elegant definition of Sin: that which sunders. Specifically, that which damages or breaks one’s relationship with one’s self, with other sentient beings, with Nature, or with the True God. (Whether it merely damages or whether it actually completely breaks is the distinction between venal and mortal sin.) So in this moral framework, it is obvious that hatred of any kind, intolerance of any kind, is Sin. So all you racists and gay-bashers and misogynists, all you haters out there, no matter how many times you go to Church or pray the rosary or whatever other stupid ritual of Sammael you perform, without actually facing your wounded relationship with the universe, everything you do is Sin. So there.

Then again, maybe this is all random, and we do live in successive illusory worlds where there is a false memory of the universe persisting, powered by nothing more than statistical chance and the laws of thermodynamics.

The most I can say is that I am an agnostic who is trying to master the Way.