God the Creator and God the Architect

When I think of “God the Creator,” I think of a totally insane freestyle rapper, or a crazy rambling toddler with a fantastic vocabulary, just letting it all loose, coming up with everything on the fly. There’s going to be these enormous, constantly exploding balls of gas that fill the universe with light, and rotating around them will be a bunch of other spheres made off all sorts of different stuff, and there’s going to be one with lots of water with a molten core called Earth, and all sorts of crazy shit is going to happen there. From a primordial oceanic volcanic soup these weird little self-repeating patterns called “life” will form, and they’ll start merging together into more and more complex patterns, and they’ll be able to absorb light from the exploding gas balls, mainly one specific one called the sun, and use it for energy. And then there will be other things that eat those things that eat the sunlight. And then shit will get crazy, there will be an ocean and it will be full of insane creatures with claws and teeth and shells and eyes all swimming around eating each other and all of these plants, which are also getting pretty elaborate and crazy with all these fractal structures. And then they’ll start squirming around slightly off the coasts of the ocean onto the land, and grow legs and start walking around, and some of them will grow wings and fly through the air. And there will be trees and bushes and they’ll grow fruit, and what is a fruit you ask? It is basically this tasty object that’s full of these tiny seeds, which are just little pebbles that can grow and explode into, like, a copy of the plant that made them. But why are they tasty? Because all of the monsters roaming around will eat them, shit out the seeds, and the seeds will LOVE the shit and thrive in it, and everything will be eating and shitting all day long. And then these animals called humans will come along, and gradually they will learn to SPEAK, just like you and I are speaking. It’s so META. And they will kill each other, constantly go to war, enslave each other, study all the stars and learn how they move because they have nothing better to do with their big brains for a while. (This God does not hold back on suffering and darkness - it’s just whatever comes to mind, beautiful, obscene, loving or cruel, epic or boring.) Then they’ll get better at figuring out what all the rules are and start making all sorts of crazy inventions. And then, and then… (I don’t know the next part, unfortunately.)

And then there is another God, God the Architect, who sits around listening to this babbling madman and it all makes perfect sense to her, and she takes all the ideas and organizes them, interconnects them and weaves them together so it all just feels right, so that it all retroactively makes sense. This God is much more of an intellectual, more of a bookworm, very meticulous and detail oriented. And she works out all of the practical details of how to make it all happen. Yes, I see it, this is a wonderful artistic vision. So, how do we do this… and she sits around thinking about it and does all the math, figures out what strict laws of nature are necessary for it all to work out how the Creator described it in broad strokes. And she sit around tinkering and tinkering, and honestly keeps fucking up again and again before she get it right - oops! Jeesh, my bad, accidentally made a little Hell there didn’t I, better shut that one down. And sometimes she makes something crazy and beautiful that was nothing like what the madman described, a kind of happy accident, and she lets that universe run its natural course because it just seems like it’s got a good thing going. And God the Creator comes around and checks out what she’s working on for inspiration.

And once all the technical details are done, we, the living creatures, get to fill in all the particulars and play our own little role in creation. We come in and it’s like a video game - there are strict rules defined by a technical system, but you have freedom within that system. The rules are necessary because if they were too loosey goosey it would be total chaos, and you would not be able to make sense of anything that was going on from one moment to the next. Life is Hell if it’s not at least a bit reliable and predictable. Try to imagine if all the laws of nature just occasionally behaved completely different for short periods of time. For one, you would probably instantaneously die. But even if you didn’t, it would still be quite unpleasant - you would feel like you had no control, because none of the knowledge of prior experience would help you function from moment to moment.

And sometimes these two like to trade places because both jobs have a charm to them. And they just fuck around for the hell of it for all eternity, because at the end of the day, it can really only be for the joy of it. Why is it this way? Why is it that way? Why these laws of the universe? Why three dimensions and not four? Well, why not? If you think about it long enough, this is all startlingly arbitrary, and yet it seems to make perfect sense - but how could it be any other way? Maybe we’re not so far from the gods (if they exist, this is all a nice little story I came up with, really.) Maybe we’re actually gods in training, and we’ll get to try our hands at creation at one point or another. Or maybe we already are - maybe when we write fiction, there’s another world where someone ends up living our fantasies. Who knows? Maybe anything is possible.

Finally, I admit that I am stealing from Nietzsche here, who articulated the idea of Apollonian vs Dionysian art in his book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” He was influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who found out later that his ideas were quite similar to Hindu metaphysics. So I am stealing from the stealer of a guy who found out that he happened to arrive at conclusions people in a distant time and place had long ago articulated. Hindus are so annoying, if you go online and look at discussions on religion and metaphysics, there is always some Hindu guy in the comment section saying, “neener neener neeeener, we did it first!” Yeah, yeah, we know. On the one hand, there is something beautiful about the fact that many people striving to articulate their thoughts on the nature of reality have independently arrived at similar conclusions. But here’s a thought - maybe humanity is simply united by the propensity to make the same mistakes. If these are the ideas that obsessive individuals come up with when they take their personal stab at figuring it all out, maybe it is reflective less of the nature of reality and more of something about human nature. Or maybe it is reflective of how sensitive we are to our historical environment - India is the seat of much of the beginning of human culture, so it’s possible that ideas developed early in that part of the world have stayed with us subconsciously in aspects of culture and language.

I looked into it, and from my understanding my characters seem most aligned with Brahma and Shiva, two of the Trimurti. I’m not exactly an expert on Hinduism so maybe one of the two characters has qualities of Vishnu, the third in the Hindu Trinity. Of course Hinduism evolved over time and different Hindu sects describe the roles of the Gods differently. Brahma is depicted as a bit of a madman, confused, drowsy and temporarily incompetent, and a kind of “secondary creator” of the universe, creating all forms, himself emerging from the primordial Brahman. He’s got four heads, which is cool. He is also the least worshiped - Vishnu and Shiva are much more important, and considered superior. I think he only has one major temple in all of India (don’t quote me on that.) But if you ask me, he’s my kind of guy. Shiva is “The Destroyer” and re-creator of the universe, and Vishu is the Preserver who intervenes when there’s chaos and protects dharma. I can understand why people like Vishnu, but “The Preserver” just sounds a bit boring to me. Give me the crazy four headed guy.

You can probably tell who I imagine myself as at my most narcissistic - the Creator, babbling nonsense for all eternity. But I enjoy technical stuff too, so I don’t know. I just know there would have to be epic, ridiculous journeys in Heaven if it were to be any kind of Heaven for me. That’s where we find ourselves - a strange and arbitrary world which feels a bit absurd. But absurd relative to what? Every possibility feels absurd until you realize there is no universal norm against which anything could be measured as more or less normal. So let’s enjoy this strange voyage through life - this is a unique place, and if there’s an afterlife, we can’t be going anywhere “better” or “worse,” only different. Maybe we’ll look back and wish we could have had more time on this crazy Earth. Maybe we’ll look back and think, “it was truly divine to be human.”