Thoughts in the mind of God. Unamuno, Life 7.25
Unamuno
presents a deist version of the philosophical outlook that views the
universe as a simulation. Are we all thoughts in the mind of God?
Might he be the great awareness that hosts our personal existence as
an indelible part of its eternal memory?
¿No
es que acaso vivimos y amamos, esto es, sufrimos y compadecemos en
esa Gran Persona envolvente a todos, las personas todas que sufrimos
y compadecemos y los seres todos que luchan por personalizarse, por
adquirir conciencia de su dolor y de su limitación? ¿Y no somos
acaso ideas de esa Gran Conciencia total que al pensarnos existentes
nos da la existencia? ¿No es nuestro existir ser por Dios percibidos
y sentidos? Y más adelante nos dice este mismo visionario, a su
manera imaginativa, que cada ángel, cada sociedad de ángeles y el
cielo todo contemplado de consuno, se presentan en forma humana, y
que por virtud de esta su humana forma, lo rige el Señor como a un
solo hombre.
«Dios
no piensa, crea; no existe, es eterno», escribió Kierkegaard
(Afsluttende
uvidenskabelig Efterskrift);
pero es acaso más exacto decir con Mazzini, el místico de la ciudad
italiana, que «Dios es grande porque piensa obrando» (Ai
giovani d’Italia),
porque en Él pensar es crear y hace existir a aquello que piensa
existente con sólo pensarlo, y es lo imposible lo impensable por
Dios. ¿No se dice en la Escritura que Dios crea con su palabra, es
decir, con su pensamiento, que por éste, por su Verbo, se hizo
cuanto existe? ¿Y olvida Dios lo que una vez hubo pensado? ¿No
subsisten acaso en la Suprema Conciencia los pensamientos todos que
por ella pasan una vez? En Él, que es eterno, ¿no se eterniza toda
existencia?
Couldn't
our own living and loving, in other words our suffering and
compassion, occur inside the Great Person who includes all of us,
individual persons who suffer and feel compassion, and every being
that struggles to make itself personal, to acquire conscious
awareness of its pain and its limits? Are we not all perhaps ideas in
the Great and Total Awareness that gives us our essence by thinking
that we exist? Is our existence not a matter of being
perceived and felt by God? Further on in his text, Swedenborg tells
us, in his imaginative and visionary way, that each angel, each
society of angels, and the entirety of heaven, too, presents itself
in human form, and that the Lord rules it, by virtue of this human
form, as though it were just one man.
“God
does not think; he creates. He does not exist; he is eternal.” Thus
wrote Kierkegaard, in his Final Unscientific Postcript.
But perhaps it is better to say with Mazzini, the mystic who
spoke for Italy united (†),
that “God is great because he thinks by working” (To
the Youth of Italy).
For in God, thinking is
creating, so that
the mere act of thinking that something exists causes it to be, and
thus the impossible is that which God cannot think. Doesn't Scripture
say that God creates with his word, or in other words, with his
thought, and that by this, by his Word, all that exists was made?
Does God forget that which once he thought? Don't all the thoughts
that pass through the Supreme Consciousness remain there ever after?
In the One who is eternal, won't all existence become eternal, too?
---
(†)
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) was a Genovese revolutionary who
agitated for political unification of the Italian peninsula—and
the eventual creation of a coherent culture uniting all of Europe,
which he viewed as growing toward one great society in
the wake of the French revolution. He spent much of his life in
foreign exile, returning periodically to fight for the Risorgimento,
though he opposed the kingdom of Savoy that ulimately inherited
its success. His
motto: Dio e Popolo.