I heard anamusing line in a movie the other day. I hope you like it.
Boy: Who isGod?
Elder: Youknow, when you close your eyes at night and wish for something. He’s the one whoignores you.
A littleresearch into the origins of religion quickly produces a similar pattern.Around the time people settled and moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian one, their spiritual beliefs were classified as animism.Archaeological evidence from different locations on the planet shows the sametransition from animism to shamanism over a period from as early as 65000 yearsago (65kya). The Natufian culture showed this transition in the Levant around 12000 – 9000 B.C.E.
Thegeographical isolation of different tribes has led to the emergence of distinct languages as their cultures have evolved. So, the same reason can explain theirdiffering religious beliefs. However, underlying each religion is a fundamentalprinciple. Over the millennia, the different cultures and their religions convergedon a similar idea: there is one ultimate source/principle. The names differ:YHWH/ALLAH and BRAHMAN; so the obvious reason God has different names iscultural.
It is notpossible to give God a known name, as it would automatically align with anexisting culture. So, I will call Him the Universal Mind (UM). The reason forthis will become evident as we progress.
For UM toexist, UM must have a mode of existence. The notion of UM as the creatorof the universe immediately places UM outside the universe, not as somethingearlier in time, but as something more fundamental than the universe itself. This will be the first part of anexposé on the UM.
I’m suresome of you will be familiar with the higher-lower-dimensional relationship.
We start with shadows. Wecreate them all the time. What is a shadow? A shadow does not exist as aseparate object in space; it appears as a two-dimensional pattern ofinformation on a three-dimensional surface, such as the ground or a wall. Whilethe surface itself has depth, the information carried by the shadow isconstrained to length and width alone.
The shadow possesses measurable properties — shape, motion, and intensity —yet it cannot exist independently of the three-dimensional object that producesit. It reveals something real about its source, while remaining incapable ofexpressing the full structure of the object itself.
In this way, lower-dimensional information can be expressed within ahigher-dimensional substrate without exhausting the reality from which itarises. By analogy, the universe may be understood as a structuredmanifestation within a broader fundamental framework, rather than the totalityof what exists. Within this framework, the Universal Mind is not spatiallycontained within the universe, but stands as a higher mode of existence whoseconstraints and order give rise to the reality we observe.
By extrapolating the higher–lower dimensional relationship, UM canbe understood as existing in a higher dimension relative to our own. By dimension, Ido not mean an additional spatial axis, but a higher, more fundamental degree offreedom — a mode of existence capable of generating and constraininglower-dimensional reality without itself being contained within it.
In the same way that a two-dimensional shadow cannot exist without athree-dimensional object to produce it, a three-dimensional universe need notexhaust the totality of existence that gives rise to it. We know ourselves tobe three-dimensional entities inhabiting a three-dimensional universe; it istherefore coherent to propose that the Universal Mind exists at a higherontological level, transcending the spatial and temporal limits of the universeit generates, while remaining causally effective within it.
This way of thinking also reframes how we approach consciousness. Iflower-dimensional patterns of information can be instantiated withinhigher-dimensional substrates, then consciousness need not be an accidentalby-product of matter alone. It may instead be understood as another constrainedexpression of a deeper informational order — one that appears when physicalsystems reach sufficient complexity, but which is not reducible to thosesystems themselves.
From this perspective, consciousness is not something the universeinexplicably “produces,” but something the universe permits — a windowthrough which aspects of a more fundamental reality become locally expressed.If the Universal Mind is a higher mode of existence, then individual minds maybe understood not as separate creations, but as limited, localisedmanifestations of that same underlying source.
This raises a natural and unavoidable question: if theuniverse is a structured manifestation of a deeper reality, and consciousnessis one of the ways that reality becomes knowable from within, then how exactlydoes the Universal Mind relate to individual conscious experience? Thatquestion — the relationship between UM, consciousness, and the sense of self —will be the focus of the next part of this exposé.
