A popular movie of the mid 80’s had a phrase that was used over and over, “There can be only one!” I am speaking of the movie “Highlander” in which a man lives forever battling immortals, like himself, until there is only one immortal left. What if in truth it wasn’t “there can be only one” but “there is only one”? I was an only child, well in truth I had a half brother but he was eighteen years older than I and moved out about the time I was born. I never knew a time living with anyone other than my Mother and Father. As you may have guested they were older parents and didn’t have much energy to spend with their child. At least not by the time I was old enough to be able to remember.
No other children my age near by I spent a great deal of time by myself. One thing I would do when I was really bored was play checkers. I’d make a move then spin the board around and make the second move. It was obvious this was just an effort in futility. I knew both moves and there was little hope that I would do more than obtain a tie. What if there was a way that I could play checkers with myself, but have two different sets of memories, learning, etc… To be able to “forget” that I was the person that just made the chip move from one square to the other. At this point it would at least seem challenging and I would be pitted against someone of the same age, skills, etc… Now we’re talking about a much more interesting game!
So many times you see things in the news, or sadly sometimes in your own lives that makes you question.. “Why would God allow this?” I know I have especially when children are involved. The extermination of the Jews during World War II comes to mind as well. So many things, horrible things, that people do to people. There may even be things that we do that have unintended consequences that hurt people many years down the road.
Recently I was watching a show where they postulated that our universe is merely a hologram, a simulation. They spoke of the pieces that make up matter being so small and spaced so far apart that there was more nothing than something in everything and all of us. That force fields is what bump up against each other when we touch something. The Higgs Boson field is what makes everything REAL. Dark matter and dark energy necessary for galaxy formation and our existence. A delicately balanced set of settings necessary for everything to work as it does.
Have you ever played an online video game? Any would do but I’m thinking primarily of the first person video games. You move around a world full of things that you can touch, bump into, shoot just like reality, and when you die you can leave your body until you re-spawn, or restart the game. No one likes dying but in the big scheme of things it isn’t that big a deal.
Then one day one possible answer dawned on me, really as a joke, to explain all this. As I thought of it the more sense it made.
There isn’t a we there is only a me. There can only be one, and the one is me.
In the Christian religion it is taught that those who follow Christ will have everlasting life. Everlasting life, wow, that’s a long time. I remember thinking about this in Sunday school. Be good, go to heaven and you would live there with God forever. Perhaps it was my growing up alone without brothers or sisters and no friend near by, but my first thought was “Boy how boring does that sound!” What would I do in heaven? I don’t have to worry about anything, just exist? I wonder if there would be someone there that would want to play checkers…
What if I am in a simulation. I have no memory of who or what I was before being born. Either I didn’t exist or I did but any memory has been removed, perhaps stored somewhere else. Now I’m brand new! No past information, learning, knowledge. Also I have to deal with learning things in my new environment. That even includes this body and this brain. Now I can sit down at the checker board and play a game and my experiences, learning, motivations are all different that my opponent, even though it is me.
This is crazy, you say? Of course it is until I started thinking more on the subject. The golden rule for example, Luke 6:31 “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” It’s a great rule and scripture and if we all (or I) practiced it the world would be a much better place for us (me.) How about that how can God allow this question. Well if everyone is me then I am only hurting myself. All the suffering that has ever happened or will ever happen is just what I do at my own hands.
How is it possible for one person to be in two places much less 6 billion. Yes I really am talking about everyone on the planet. Well let’s go back to the online game scenario. If you played online you’ll know that sometimes the data transfer to the server, or to you is interrupted. Gamers call it LAG, and no one likes it. The game pauses, or strange things happen until the data is back at an acceptable level. Now you notice this because you are OUTSIDE the game. You are controlling a simulation inside the game. If you were actually in the game you wouldn’t notice the lag. Your perception would be that time was passing normally even if it was paused for a fraction of a second, or a thousand years. I mention outside of time because this is how God is described in the Bible. Something that science is giving us the ability to understand. Time exists inside the universe. If you are outside the universe there may be time but it is separate from time inside the universe. Now let’s think of something else that I mention, ever lasting life. Well if you just take the 6 billion people that are currently living on Earth today and take a average life span of say 50 years (some people die very young) and multiply those two together… That comes to 300 billion years! If we are all the same person then our life span, not including the people that have lived or will live, just the people alive today is 300 billion years! That is 283 billion years longer than the universe has existed!
What would the possible reason for this be? Why would anyone subject themselves to such a delusion, or even something as sadistic as torture, murder, sexual abuse, or being burned alive in an oven. Well if you are not your body, if you are somewhere else and only in a simulation then these things I have described would be something horrible of course, but we do seem to like things that scare us. Besides without the issues in life we wouldn’t, couldn’t fully appreciate the good things.
I have also heard we are here to learn. If you remember the movie “Ground Hog Day” the hero of the movie was doomed to live his life over and over again. So many times that he was easily able to predict the future and learn many personal things about the people he interacted with. If we live 6 billion lives then we would learn so much. So much about every aspect of life. We would be able to predict things with a fair degree of accuracy. Something as simple as throwing a piece of trash at a trash can we can predict what will happen, this is based on our experience. What could we predict after living 300 billion years and from every single person’s perspective on this planet?
Something else that has always bothered me. The Bible says when Jesus returns there will be 1,000 years of peace. Now how in the world is Jesus, with free will available to us all, going to be able to unit everyone on the planet and live in peace? There are some very stubborn people on this planet and some of them don’t believe Jesus is the son of God. How would he convince them? I can’t imagine they would be killed, or removed from this planet. The Christian God is about love. So what is Jesus told us and in a way we could understand and believe him absolutely that we were really just the one person. Raising a hand to strike my neighbor would make as much sense as me raising a hand and striking myself. What would be the point?
If you start thinking about this and what you’ve been taught, or heard from other belief systems, and religions, you can start to see how this would be possible. Now I’m not going to claim all this is true. It’s just a thought that I had and I really believed for a long time it was an original thought. Shortly after sharing this idea with my wife, she found something online that seemed to be the same basic story, however in that story we (I) was a child, a God in training. Learning about life so that the person in the story could rule over their own universe. I guess that a nice tied up knot in the ending of that story, but it seems a bit too simplistic for me.
I believe we are much more than what we appear to be. I believe we continue on after our life ends. One of my greatest fears is we are all just electronic simulations of real people and even though we are sentient we exist only in some futuristic database and our lives are merely a way to gather data is billions, or trillions, of “what if ” scenarios and God is the person running the tests.