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1) Either the universe is created, being the work of an eternal, uncreated, perfect entity (God) – as Abrahamism maintains.

2) Or the universe is eternal and uncreated and is itself God, albeit a God evolving towards perfection – as the Enlightenment religions teach.

3) Or the universe is created out of nothing – as scientific materialism asserts, and has no connection at all with any type of God.

According to the first option, God precedes the universe as an immortal being, eternally perfect and infinitely powerful, and he creates the universe according to his own divine plan out of nothing.

According to the second option, the universe itself is God, but a God on a cosmic journey from infinite potential to infinite actualisation. This view reaches its maximum expression in the philosophy of the Illuminati Grand Master Hegel. According to the third option, God has nothing to do with anything, and nor does mind or free will, and the universe unfolds according to the implacable laws of materialistic physics. The origin of the laws of physics, the appearance of matter out of nothing and the emergence of life, mind and consciousness remain open questions in this scenario.

Atheists and Hegelians reject the possibility of an eternal, perfect God. There is no form of logic that can equate the evolutionary world we see all around us with a perfect world created by a perfect God. In particular, Abrahamists have never been able to offer any credible account of how evil, suffering and imperfection exist in a universe created as an act of supreme love (allegedly) by a perfect, all-powerful God. In fact, this God’s actions seem rather the product of the uttermost hate for humanity. He inflicts original sin on humanity, drowns the earth, and sends almost all of its souls to hell. Those he saves, he does so on a whim. So, a god or a devil?

Moreover, the universe is either a) immense beyond the imagining or b) actually infinite in extent. Why would God create such a universe? In what way would it reveal his divine plan? What could that plan possibly be? It is mad to assert that a Creator would have created an infinitely large universe. A Creator creates something special, something specific into which he pours his essence. He does not create an indiscriminate cosmic mass, without boundary or definition. No sculptor would set out to sculpt infinity – the sculpture would never have any discernible shape; it would simply continue forever. It would never be anything with a meaning. It would never be a work of art. No painter would paint infinity – it would never have any frame. It would not be something that you could gaze upon and discern its meaning. All art could actually be said to be the taming of the infinite, the deliberate act of rendering the infinite finite. Only the finite makes sense. Only the finite can be captured. Only the finite is special. An infinite process, in order to create meaning, has no alternative but to create finitude.

What is the arche, the fundamental substance of the universe? It is God in his barest, simplest, most abstract sense. A scientific term such as “dimensionless energy” could be used instead, but it is God all the same. The arche is the unconscious mind of the unconscious God. The arche has no dimensions. It does not exist in space and time since space and time do not themselves exist when existence is considered in its most elementary condition. Space and time will emerge in due course from God, but they do not exist with him as aspects of the most primitive form of existence.

Bare existence is extraordinary. It is Will to Actualisation i.e. it is pure potential that wants, that desires, that yearns, that longs for something. For what? To BECOME. To become what? To become everything it has it within itself to be. To become PERFECTION. That is why the Will to Actualisation is none other than God. Teleological potential has only one aim – to become perfect actualisation.

Bare existence comprises just this potential, this Will to Actualisation. If potential did not want to become anything then it never would. Nothing meaningful can happen without a will to make it happen. Scientists speak of the “heat death” of the universe when all the useful energy in the cosmos has been expended and nothing remains other than a freezing universe of evenly distributed atoms – eternally dead interstellar dust. Bizarrely, it has never occurred to scientists that this state is impossible for the extremely simple reason that if it were possible for the universe to be dead then it already would be given that, one way or another, the universe has existed for eternity.

Existence is not something that can be created or destroyed. It just IS. Existence is ISNESS. But it is not static. If it were, the universe would remain in one state forever, and be equivalent to, and as meaningless as, eternal, absolute nothingness. So the ISNESS of existence is always becoming a new ISNESS i.e. existence is perpetual BECOMING. Becoming involves change, energy, movement. That cannot be emphasized enough. Potential = becoming = energy = movement = change = the Will to Actualisation = the arche = bare existence = the fundamental “stuff” of the universe = teleology = entelechy = unconscious mind = God “hidden”. They all mean the same thing. The universe is driven forward because the universe is purposeful movement. If it were purposeless movement, it would just go round and round in circles, never attaining any higher states, but in fact it’s always achieving more, always evolving.

The universe cannot stop becoming. It cannot freeze. It cannot change from becoming into frozen being. It can suffer no heat death, or indeed death of any kind. It cannot be destroyed. It cannot go out of existence. The fate decreed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is impossible. If it were possible for all energy to be used up – for becoming to stop – it would have happened infinitely long ago.

Existence, the universe, is a perpetual motion machine. How could it be otherwise? If the universe could run out of puff – if that were a possible thing that could happen, a possible state that could be attained – then it would have happened already and we would not be here to pour scorn on the idea. Particle physicists say themselves that anything not forbidden is compulsory. If cosmic heat death were not forbidden it would be compulsory and it would have occurred infinitely long ago, and the cosmos would still be in that state now.

The Big Bang itself is the surest disproof of the Second Thermodynamics that it is possible to have and yet legions of Nobel Prize winning scientists have failed to notice this elementary fact. If something as logically outrageous as a whole universe emerging from “nothing” can happen how can anyone be so stupid as to claim that the universe will perpetually freeze? (And if a universe could spring out of nothing 14 billion years ago, it must have been able to do so eons before for exactly the same reasons: indeed it must have been able to do so an infinite number times since there is no sufficient reason to forbid it.) Moreover, if there are countless black holes in the universe, relentlessly sucking matter into them, what sane person will seriously suggest that the universe is doomed to reach frozen stasis?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is yet another statement of “false science” i.e. scientific materialism that refuses to acknowledge the existence of true mind. False science extrapolates to the whole cosmos “good science” that is applicable only to certain regions of space and time when specific conditions apply.

The Will to Actualisation is a revolutionary concept. From this, everything else flows. The Will to Actualisation is a ceaseless longing and yearning, an unstoppable craving and striving. What we call “desire” is the Will to Actualisation in its basic state. Without desire nothing can happen. It is no mistake that the Buddhists conceive of the death of desire as a precondition for attaining nirvana. Schopenhauer has been accused of misunderstanding nirvana for linking it to complete nothingness – to non-existence and the total extinguishing of the will. In fact, it is hard to see how it could possibly be interpreted as anything else. To not desire is to literally not exist, yet such a state is impossible since desire is the arche that can never be created or destroyed.

The Will to Actualisation, this unquenchable desire to attain higher states, has several inevitable consequences. How does it go about attaining these higher states? How does it know it has attained them?

Slowly but surely the Will to Actualisation results in something truly wondrous – the birth of reason. Reason is the basis of planning and order. Ordered states can lead to states of higher order whereas perfectly random, chaotic states will always stay perfectly random and chaotic. Reason (order, planning, logic, the Logos), is something that emerges inexorably from the Will to Actualisation. And the core language of reason is none other than mathematics. The Will to Actualisation was guaranteed to create mathematics as its central tool for imposing order, organisation and form on itself. Without mathematics, the Will to Actualisation could never have become anything. To achieve higher states there must be an ordering and organisation of states, and mathematics is the quintessence of order, organisation and pattern.

But mathematics on its own is insufficient. How can mathematics allow a judgement of what represents a higher state? Is a row of sixes more or less ordered than a column of fives? Is a circle better than an ellipse? How would a mathematical mind “know” that it had achieved something better than before?

Two other factors are necessary:

1) Intuition. A mind must intuitively grasp that one state is higher than another, that it offers more potential, that it is associated with greater power. Intuition is a glimpse of the future. It is an instinctive understanding of what the completed project will look like. It is intuition that offers the scope for incredible short cuts. Intuition, inspiration and enlightenment are similar in conception – they offer a dazzling flash of the telos – the desired end: God fully actualised. No one is closer to Godliness than the most intuitive amongst us.

2) Feeling. Some things make us feel “good” and others “bad”. Some things cause us pleasure and others pain. Some things make us feel we have increased our power, others that we have lost power. It is these emotional judgements that allow us to cut through endless mathematical patterns. Scientists studying facial recognition using computers have discovered that their best computerised attempts can’t come anywhere near the speed and efficiency of humans who can recognise familiar faces instantly.

Computerised facial recognition software has the task of matching a new photograph that someone inputs into the system with one of an enormous number of photographs of people stored in its database. To test for a match, the software has to laboriously measure all sorts of facial distances and angles and skin tones, eye colours, hair patterns and textures etc. One of the reasons why humans are so much better is that they have an emotional response to faces. They might find them attractive or ugly, for instance. If they know the person, recognition is instantaneous. Why? Because we’re hardwired for faces. They are amongst the most significant things in our life. We have to recognise our mother’s face, our father’s, our siblings’, those of our friends, enemies, lovers, strangers etc. We absorb far more information from a person’s face than we do from what they say. People interviewing you for a job pay far more attention to your appearance than to what you say. Your accent and tone of voice are much more important than the content. You could be Einstein himself and yet if you have a broad, ill-educated accent someone may judge you the village idiot. Feeling, not reason, rules such choices.

Computers, as tools that execute endless mathematical instructions but which have absolutely no intuition or feelings, can never match us. To make artificial intelligences smarter than we are, you would have to work out how to instil emotion and intuition into them. You would need to make them desire and care about things. You would need to make them love and hate, to experience pleasure and pain. But if you succeeded in doing that, they would replace us!

Humans are not machines. We are not computers. We have a mathematical processor at our core, and the whole cosmos is mathematical, yet mathematics does not define us. We have a feeling processor too, and an intuition processor – these are what raise us above automata. To put it another way, we have God inside us. We have the Will to Actualisation burning within our hearts. How could a computer distinguish between Beethoven and muzak? It couldn’t. It would analyse the respective music into waves, amplitudes, frequencies etc but it would never experience the music. It would never feel it from the inside.

Scientific materialism is a Cartesian project that treats human beings as automata. But that’s not what we are. We are alive. We feel. We dream. We hope. We aspire. We lust. We love. We long for things. Automata do none of these things. One of the reasons why we can dismiss Abrahamism is that it treats us as creations. We are not. We are eternal. We are the same stuff as the universe in its primordial form. Robots are our creations. They are dead. The reason for that is that they are artificial, containing our limited understanding of the arche rather than naturally reflecting it.

It is impossible for us to program a human-like robot. If we wanted to create realistic androids, we would have to subject them to the only process that can capture the arche – evolution. Schopenhauer said that music is a direct copy of the primordial Will, hence why it affects us so profoundly. But there is something else that is a direct copy of the Will – evolution. What does evolution seek to accomplish? – creatures that will, that desire, that want to convert potential into actualisation.

We are the arche. We are its expression. We are taking it higher and higher, to ever-greater levels of actualisation. The process can end at all only one point – divinity. We are all becoming God. We carry God within us. If you could glimpse your innermost core you would be gazing at God himself. That is why the Abrahamist religions are so disgusting. They try to alienate us from what is holiest in us. They try to estrange us from our own Godliness.

To talk of “life” appearing in the cosmos is totally wrong. The cosmos is intrinsically alive. What we actually mean by “life” is when mind succeeds in animating matter. It took eons before the unconscious cosmic mind was finally able to bind itself to its own creation – matter – in a way that gave it more than just mathematical control of matter (more than just the laws of physics, in other words). It is that binding that is named life. Life is what you get when an individual mind (a soul) has planted itself inside matter, bringing desire, emotion and intuition to a limited segment of the material world. Often, life may be barely expressed, as in a plant, but when you bear in mind that a banana is said to have 30% of its DNA in common with a human, you can begin to understand that life is just a spectrum, of which we are at the higher end and plants the lower.

Artificial intelligence can never be real life because it lacks those crucial elements of desire, emotion and intuition. It lacks the evolutionary expression of the primeval Will. To make artificial life real you would have to give it a soul. Do you know any computer programmer who knows how to code a soul?

Plato divided the soul into three: the reasoning part, the feeling/spirited part and the desiring part. Had he added intuition he would have had a complete description of the Will to Actualisation. The Will to Actualisation begins as pure desire and striving, with an evolving intuitive notion of where it wants to go. It acquires reason, logic and planning via mathematics, then acquires feeling as a means of judging between alternatives.

Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” is effectively identical to the Will to Actualisation. Walter Kaufmann wrote, “Nietzsche was a dialectical monist. His basic force, the will to power, is not only the Dionysian passionate striving, akin to Schopenhauer’s irrational will, but is also Apollonian and possesses an inherent capacity to give itself form.” Here we have all of the right ingredients – Dionysian desire, passion and emotion and Apollonian order, organisation and reason, both driven by the dialectic of becoming, and guided by an intuitive teleology of increasing power.

The simplest way to think of the cosmos is as a dialectical, evolutionary process for converting potential into actuality. All you need to create a universe is mental, dimensionless energy infused with the Will to Actualisation. From that, everything else follows. The system pulls itself up by its own bootstraps. It creates itself and perfects itself. Science treats energy as some sterile, mindless, neutral substance, but it is no such thing. Energy is alive. Not in the sense in which we understand it, but as its indispensable precursor. It is only because energy is evolving, releasing more and more of its potential dialectically, that life evolved. The quality of energy is always dialectically improving.

Marxists argued that the laws that govern matter are not mechanistic but dialectical (hence the description of Marxists as dialectical materialists). Although no one ever says so, this is a much better way of viewing science than traditional mechanistic scientific materialism. Marxists do not agree with scientific materialists that only matter exists. Rather, they say that mind is the highest product of matter, and that matter is dialectically trying to generate more and more mind. Dialectical materialism asserts that one of the fundamental laws of existence is that quantity (matter) is dialectically transformed into quality (mind). Dialectical materialism is thus extremely closely related to alchemy: transforming base matter into the “gold” of the highest spirit.

Although Marx believed he was inverting Hegel’s philosophy, he was actually much closer to Hegel than he imagined. Hegel’s position was idealistic rather than materialistic i.e. mind precedes matter; matter is a product of mind rather than mind being a product of matter. The Big Bang can be explained in Hegelian terms (matter emerges from mind) but not in Marxist terms (matter comes from nothing at all). Of course, neither Hegel nor Marx had ever heard of the term “Big Bang” but there can be no doubt that Big Bang theory is a triumphant vindication and indeed almost proof of the correctness of Hegel’s philosophy.

For Hegel, mind creates matter and then, through material existence (the world of space and time), is able to attain self-consciousness and ultimately reach its highest state – Absolute Knowledge and Absolute Mind. Matter is the necessary state of alienation that mind must go through on its journey to its Omega Point. It is dialectically imperative that mind should create matter. But Marx’s position effectively becomes the same as Hegel’s once the material world exists. Marx asserts that matter is dialectically trying to reach its highest state – mind, and Hegel asserts that mind is dialectically trying to attain its highest state through matter. Either way, both positions maintain that the highest expression of mind is the dialectical culmination of existence. Hence the difference at this level becomes a matter of semantics.

Hegel and Marx are both advocates of the transformation, the alchemical transmutation, of quantity into quality, the impure into the pure, the unfashioned into the sculpted, potential into actuality, the lowest quality into the highest. Any view of human beings should reflect this same scope for our transformation into higher states and, at last, into none other than God, the Omega Point of the dialectic. Marxist dialectical science is a much better way of thinking about Darwinian evolution than traditional mechanistic science. It is impossible to conceive of how any mechanistic processes could lead to life, mind and consciousness. How can free will be mechanistic?

But the concept of matter striving to generate mind in a dialectical rather than mechanistic manner provides a more productive perspective. Mechanistic processes are anti-mind; dialectical processes are pro-mind.

Energy, fundamentally, is Will. How could it be otherwise? Nothing would happen without will. If you had no will you wouldn’t get out of bed. A computer has no will. It has no urge to switch itself on. Only Will drives things forward and makes things happen. Most of the time it operates unconsciously, following the path of least resistance – the laws of science – and can often seem to be inert and inanimate (like the computer) but eventually it can express itself more meaningfully. It can attain the condition of free will. We, humanity, already display this divine quality, although precious few of us use it properly. Nevertheless, we are the living proof that energy – which can be neither created nor destroyed – can transform itself into higher states. Energy can make itself conscious. Consciousness is the highest quality of energy. Maximum consciousness is God.

We human beings are still in thrall to enormous unconscious forces, but when we attain gnosis, we will have achieved the Omega Point of energy’s journey from potential to actualisation. Energy is not “stuff” – it is self-transformative will. There is only one thing capable of learning and improving itself – mind. Therefore, energy, when properly understood, is mind. Just as we have a will to do things, so does pure mind. It is will that powers the mind to higher and higher states. We call this process the dialectic. It is a learning process that gains knowledge via the path of contradiction.

Thesis, antithesis and synthesis – over and over again, attaining higher and higher states. That is how you go from maximum potential to maximum actualisation. There is no other way. Mechanistic processes cannot lead you anywhere. No scientist has ever understood the true nature of energy – that it is actually wilful mind. When you grasp that, you have grasped the fundamental nature of existence.
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The Three Universes II:

When all’s said and done, it’s remarkably easy to analyse the cosmos we see around us. There are only three ways by which it could have reached its present state, two of which are concerned with God, and the third of which avoids God, as we’ve just described. It’s worthwhile going through them again, from a slightly different angle. The cosmos was created by an external, eternal, perfect being (God). This is the Abrahamist view. We have a perfect starting point – God – and then we go downhill from then on because God’s creation is less perfect than he is. It’s odd that people should subscribe to this stance of cosmic anti-evolution. And why would God himself want to create imperfection when he could make do with his perfect self?

God’s “love” becomes a love of imperfection rather than of perfection. He loves us because we are necessarily inferior to him. In other words, this isn’t love at all, but domination and bullying. Read the Abrahamist texts – they are all about a tyrant dictating to abject slaves, and the slaves are supposed to put up with it because God says so. The Catholic Catechism asks, “Why did God make me?” and the answer is “To love, serve and obey him.” That sums up the situation perfectly – the most one-sided contract you could over get. It’s the creed of the master, and no self-respecting person could ever endure such an unequal relationship.

Just as odd as Abrahamism is scientific materialism. This asserts that the cosmos sprang out of nothing 14 billion years ago in a huge burst of energy, and the useful energy has been running down ever since and will eventually reach a zero state where the cosmos will have suffered “heat death” and be frozen forever, incapable of doing a single thing. You simply couldn’t get a more grim, nihilistic, pointless and purposeless vision of existence than this. Along the way, according to this view, atoms of matter jostle with each other and interact in various ways. Amidst all of the random jostlings, life, mind and consciousness emerge for no apparent reason and via a completely unknown mechanism (voodoo perhaps!). However, these serve no purpose and are just curious phenomena, nothing else. Like the cosmos itself, we will perish and the material atoms of which we are composed will suffer heat death along with everything else.

If you don’t believe in the perfect Creator fashioning the imperfect cosmos out of nothing, and you don’t believe in the cosmos springing out of nothing without the help of any Creator and then just randomly running down its energy in a series of utterly pointless and mindless interactions then you are left with the truth: the cosmos is not created. It has always existed and will always exist. It can never not exist. It goes through great cyclic Ages as it explores every conceivable possibility. The basic stuff of existence is wilful, purposeful energy – mind/spirit (Geist to use Hegel’s word) – that strives to turn all possibilities into actualities. It does so eternally. When it has exhausted one Age of all of its possibilities, it commits “divine suicide” and begins again. This cosmic adventure can never end.

A number of perceptive individuals have written to us to point out that there’s something horrific about this stance since it amounts, in the final analysis, to a type of eternal recurrence, resembling the endless task of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to see it always fall.

Eternal Recurrence comes in several varieties. In the Groundhog Day version, for example, you are free to do whatever you like within a restricted, repeating scenario. In the Sisyphean version, the scenario repeats and the actions you perform repeat, but each repetition is always slightly different from the one before – you push the boulder up the hill differently; you come back down the hill differently. In the strictest interpretation of Nietzsche’s version of eternal recurrence, your life is repeated identically an infinite number of times.

In terms of cosmic eternal recurrence, the same scenario of maximum potential being converted to maximum actualisation happens an infinite number of times, but the events experienced are different every time round, meaning that there is infinite variety within a repeating scenario i.e. the scenario eternally recurs, not the events within the scenario, which are always different. In an infinite system with infinite possibilities, there can never be identical repetition of the Nietzschean kind, hence the future remains completely undetermined. The general pattern it will take is nevertheless fully known, and is inescapable.

The cosmos cannot do anything else. There are no ways out in an infinite system. If God is eternal, what keeps him excited and stimulated after ten zillion trillion years? Hasn’t he seen and done everything? Isn’t he bored to death, so to speak? He experiences nothing but constant repetition. Or what about the cosmic heat death? – a universe frozen for eternity. What’s good about that? The universe cannot do anything other than go from potential to the perfection of complete actualisation, and then start again. It cannot stand still.

It cannot endure eternal perfection because it encounters the ultimate cosmic stumbling block – boredom. Boredom is, arguably, the most important aspect of existence, the factor that subverts perfection itself. How can any mind stave off boredom when it has resolved every problem? You start to realise something incredible about the universe. It does strange things and seems to operate in a baffling and enigmatic way precisely in order to defeat boredom.

The Hindu concept of Maya – illusion – is invaluable. If you were God and had experienced perfection for eons, and were now utterly bored by yet another day of glorious flawlessness, wouldn’t you create a force whose function was to attempt to deceive you, to puzzle you… to entertain you? One way or another, God allows evil to exist, he allows confusion, pain, suffering and bewilderment to exist because if none of these things existed, life would not be endurable. The highest wisdom is this – boredom trumps morality. In an infinite system – a system that literally cannot end – the issue of how to escape boredom becomes paramount. Indeed it is the only issue. The universe that cycles endlessly from potential to actualisation, reaching an Omega Point of perfection and then starting again is the optimal solution to counteracting boredom in eternity. There is no alternative, like it or not.

Isn’t it strange that in a mortal system, fear of death is paramount, but in an immortal system, fear of deathlessness replaces it? How will you cope with an existence that can never end no matter what you do? You are like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day when it seemed that he was trapped forever in a loop; not even killing himself offered release. But looking at it another way, in this system you get to experience perfection an infinite number of times, and isn’t that the most desirable outcome infinity can confer?

What do you fear most? Death or deathlessness? There’s no inbetween. Would you prefer eternal oblivion or the impossibility of oblivion? Death takes your life against your will. Deathlessness prevents you ever exiting life even if you want to. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” as the Eagles put it in Hotel California.

You see, we are fully jacked in to the zero-infinity system. If we are mortal, our lives are zero compared with infinity, hence what’s the point? If we are immortal, we are the children of infinity and zero can never be truly ours. Yet zero is absolutely ours because only zero – dimensionlessness – is outside space and time, outside mortality. No matter what, we can never escape from zero and infinity. They define us, just as they define everything. Zero and infinity set the bounds for dimensionality and mortality, but they themselves are outside dimensionality and mortality.

Consider the Abrahamic concepts of heaven and hell. Catholics talk about gazing upon the Beatific Vision in Paradise. Yet how long could you gaze upon anything? Doesn’t a time come when it bores you to tears? Imagine an eternity spent staring at the Mona Lisa. How long would it be before it became nauseating to you, the most unbearable thing you could ever conceive? You would give anything not to have to look at it one second longer.

As for hell, imagine you had been tortured in every conceivable way for a trillion years. But you still have an infinite sentence left. You always have an infinite sentence left no matter how much times elapses. There are no new torments for the demons to devise for you. They’ve exhausted all of their ideas. So, would there come a time when you begged your torturers to find a new way to torture you because you were so bored with all of the other tortures that had been done to you umpteen times before? You realise that even the demons are bored to tears.

You are bored, and your demons are bored. The Devil is bored. And this must continue forever. Even worse, you are totally desensitised to pain. You can’t feel anything anymore. None of the tortures cause you any physical distress at all now. Once you’ve been burned for a million years, you no longer feel the flames. In fact you crave the days when you once screamed out, because at least you felt something. Now you are perpetually numb. And exactly the same is true in heaven. All pleasures, all delights, have become mind-numbingly tedious. God is even more bored than the Devil.

Heaven and hell, God and Satan have merged into one. They are the collective expression of Absolute Boredom!!! Pleasure and pain have lost all meaning. The souls in heaven crave the tortures of hell just so that they can have a new experience. They start to wonder whether they are the ones in hell and if God was Satan all along to have inflicted so much despair on them. Ironic, isn’t it? As soon as you truly contemplate living forever you realise that you will have to confront not the horror of dying, but the horror of not dying! And with crystal clarity all of the puzzles of existence are solved.

Life is spectacularly mysterious for the simple reason that it has to be in order to stave off boredom. WE, all of us, have created this system. We don’t remember, and that’s the whole point. We devised a system that would save us from eternal tedium. We created Maya to spin illusions and puzzles for us so that we could avoid learning the truth too quickly.

The Will to Actualisation suffers from a critical design flaw. It cannot stop. Not ever. It always desires and that desire can never be quenched. Not even perfection tames it. Desire has a monstrous flipside – boredom. When desires are not being fulfilled, boredom emerges, and desire then craves something to fill the vacuum.

Boredom is the driver that keeps whipping desire along. If you are not in a state of desire then you are in a state of boredom, which can only be cured by new desires. One way or another, the system keeps moving forward. There is no stop button. Schopenhauer was the philosopher who took this melancholy realisation to its most extreme extent and declared existence inherently evil. Happiness and satisfaction are impossible, he said. When you achieve any ambition it gives you but momentary pleasure. Almost instantly, you set new goals and have to start all over again. If you can’t think of a new objective, you succumb to boredom and that will then force you to new activity. There’s no way out. No priests, rabbis and imams ever talk about these most fundamental questions. Why not? A) They don’t understand them and B) It would ruin their infantile understanding of the world.

According to Abrahamists, you get one brief mortal life which decides your fate for a subsequent immortal life in heaven or hell (what’s remotely fair and just about that? – about the actions you perform in three score years and ten settling your eternal future, with no right of appeal?). No Abrahamist ever considers what you will be thinking and feeling once you have experienced heaven or hell for a zillion trillion years and still have eternity stretching before you. No Abrahamist ever considers one of the defining characteristics of the human mind or indeed of any conscious mind – the certainty of being bored by repetition and the craving for novelty.

Remember, to become God you must ponder the questions that God has to confront, the greatest of which is how to live with infinity. To learn to affirm it and love it. When you say YES to life, you are saying yes to infinity, and to everything that implies.

As usual, Nietzsche grasped these issues better than any theologian: ‘What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned again and again – and you with it, you dust of dust!” – Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: “You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!” If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: “do you want this again and again, times without number?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon all of your actions.

Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than this for the ultimate eternal sanction and seal?’

The cyclical cosmos, reincarnating itself eternally in order to go from absolute potential to absolute perfection an infinite number of times is the ONLY rational answer of how to cope with deathlessness. And once you have got used to the idea then, like Nietzsche’s Superman, you will find yourself affirming this reality and declaring this the most divine news possible. You will achieve perfection not just once but an infinite number of times – and if that’s not the definition of a perfect existence then what is?

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A mind desires. It needs a way to know if it is getting closer or further from what it desires and it uses pleasure and pain, the basis of emotion. To plan, it needs logic and reason. Mathematics is the element that underlies logic and reason. Mathematics is also the ground of law, order, organisation and pattern. Hence desire necessarily generates both emotion and reason. Music can be thought of as both reason and emotion. Mathematics provides the rational form while the content conveys the emotion. Without the form, the content could not exist.

Fundamentally, as Pythagoras perceived, we belong to a cosmos filled with music, for which one day we will have the ears. We will listen to the cosmic orchestra playing the sublime music of the spheres, and nothing will ever have sounded better. Music to make you cry, music to make you die.
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