Your Own Wonderful Human Imagination

 

“Relax, enjoy and explore.” ~ Donald Hoffman

I Corinthians 15:45 KJV "The last Adam."

I have often enjoyed a “conversation” with Donald Hoffman. He is a brilliant man, and he has a very good heart and disposition. For this reason, I continue to follow him. Hoffman is the type who had to deconstruct his ontology before. He grew up in a Christian home, raised by a Christian father who was also a strict evangelist of not only the religion, but a faction of the Christian faith as well. This checks with the story of my life in a few ways.

I had a father who was something along the lines of a Buddhist/Christian and then a mother who was completely immersed in Doom-Christianity: a fear-based religion, without any rewards in the present.

Without knowing it, my parents were stringing the lines for my foundation by driving in stakes on either side of where I’d later build my ontological foundation. I looked carefully at what each parent was getting right. And I looked even more carefully at what they’d gotten wrong. I based my judgments on what they practiced and not what they said.

My dad, for instance, took great pleasure in nature. He was a botanist without a degree, a biologist without credentials, and a poet without a pen. He was a realist painter who could somehow capture what he saw and convey the deepest parts of it. For that reason, the army assigned him a special kind of reconnaissance, where pilots would come back from missions and tell my father what they saw, and he would put everything on a map for future explorations. He was said to be one of the best such artists, working alongside his friend, Roger Medearis, whose regionalist paintings now hang in museums all over the US, including The Smithsonian. Growing up with my father, I knew he had at least one lens I wanted to peer through someday; his guesses about reality were the filters he used to construct his inner world of pure joy and perfection.

Mom’s views were vastly different from Dad’s. Because of her fire-and-brimstone upbringing, everything about the present moment was a means of survival, and joy was to be attained after the fight for survival was over, and not before. It was stifling for her. She was to eat for tomorrow, raise children for tomorrow, and place all of her hopes in a happy afterlife. For the fundamental, full gospel, holy-ghost-filled believer, this entire life-experience was just preparation for the next life. There was not joy as much as there was hope for later joy. However, through her lens, I know she saw a God who understood her needs and was able to strengthen her where she needed it. She told me that God loved us and ultimately wanted us to be happy. Somehow, this same God would be completely opposed to what Mom’s faction would label as “Prosperity Gospel.” According to Mom’s faith, God was not committed to happiness for followers until after their deaths. Joy in the present was frowned upon. The valuable lesson I got from Mom’s views was that there was a Higher-Self who loves His creation and has the means to miraculously create on our behalf.

With one lens for each view, I developed a three-dimensional concept of reality, and I still wear my own “I-glasses.”

I don’t believe I have the best view or the only correct view of reality or deity; it’s just the right one for me.

My ideas are still developing, and I still get excited when I see something for the first time.

Donald Hoffman usually begins his conversations with, “Consciousness is fundamental.” And today, I heard him tell one interviewer that this was something his fundamental, Christian father could get behind. This checked with a Christian perspective in a way.

I think my parents would have also agreed with Hoffman to this point. I agree with Hoffman up to this point as well, but I don’t stop there. Neville Goddard gave me the one key I needed to get to the next level of my own belief system; Goddard said—emphatically, I might add—“Christ is your own, wonderful human imagination.”

This was a shocking way to put it back in the 1960s, but what Goddard was trying to say was that we are an integral part of our objectified world. Today, science is bearing this out. We are, in fact, projecting and observing phenomena simultaneously. Our imagination is an artist with prior experience, making models of what we sense within our minds. This does not negate a reality “out there,” and it doesn’t mean that “life is just a dream.” It means that our senses and the outside world are a single event.

I go beyond Hoffman with my own token miracle: that consciousness is only fundamental for conscious beings, but consciousness is the first cause to arise out of Love, the only environment more fundamental than consciousness.

Love is the only miracle I need for my theory.

Here, I am using the word Love in its purest form, which is not desire, passion, or even emotion; Love is all there is when there is No Thing. Love does not have an opposite or a background. It is not two-sided. Love, one might say, is a field, but I prefer to refer to Love as The Allowing Environment. This, I believe, is why some ancient texts say things like, “Let there be light.”

Letting is allowing, and allowing is not creating.

In order for there to be light, in this case, all that is needed is a Way. The Way is The Allowing Environment.

When The Environment is there without light, what causes light? Duality. Duality is the first act of consciousness. Light would still be No Thing to this day were it not for darkness. Love would not be able to consider Itself without allowing consciousness to erupt and grow by a chain reaction of opposites, the first of which would likely have been light and darkness.

In order for there to be conscious agents, only knowing and not knowing are necessary. Not knowing is the beginning of all conscious agencies, and anything known by the same agents will be a point of consciousness within the agent and perceived as personal experience.

Consciousness experienced within a conscious agent is only yesses and nos, ones and zeros, ons and offs. What some refer to as awareness is to awaken to the fact that all experience can only be felt because of the anti-experience on the far side of the same coin.

Adam, which is a state and not a person in this case, is that state of beingness barred from the knowledge of opposites. The second Adam-state is called The Christ-State, achieved through the quickening of awareness.

The Adamic nature of man is that of a body with a physical life, having single-sided experiences as a conscious agent, with senses which project and process an objectified world by perceiving what is in contrast to what is not.

The Christ nature is to become aware that what is and what is not are inextricably linked.

This awareness is referred to as the imagination. The word imagination means to render a copy of. While an adamic mind senses and experiences a world out there, the christ-mind renders models of the outside world within the adam-mind.

The miracle is that the imagination renders the outside world to match the hopes, fears, and dreams which begin within the adam-mind.

In modern scientific papers, it is not uncommon for someone to explain how certain effects can be explained by what Anil Seth refers to as a controlled hallucination. This is where our imagination is largely responsible for taking the data gathered by our senses and providing us with a mental representation of reality within our minds.

What is not always discussed is the fact that the imagination could just as easily do the same thing with reality. Awareness sees the imagination as creative, whether that which is rendered is within the mind or without.

The color red is just my imagination running away with me. But if my imagination is capable of rendering red in my mind, it is capable of painting red things red in the real world.

The imagination is a two-way-swinging door. Sensory data pours into my mind, and my imagination builds me a model of the world for me to consider. In the same way, my thoughts pour out of me, through those same doors of imagination, and build a world based on my model.