What is God?

A deep dive into the ultimate mystery

God is a loaded term. It carries with it the cultural baggage of centuries of religious ideas.

But what if all the ideas we have of God are wrong?

Rob Bell, a wonderful mystic Christian, has a line he uses when someone tells him they don’t believe in God, he asks them: “what God do they not believe in? “

Because he doesn’t believe in that God either.

If you were raised like me, you were taught that God is a being in Heaven who is omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal, and infallible. I held onto that version until I swung hard into atheism. But after a few mystical experiences, I landed on a more Eastern, New Age perspective. Now, God isn’t a guy in the sky; He’s just another name for Source. It’s like, the universe experiencing itself. It’s... all one, man.”

These are probably the 2 main versions of God in today’s spiritual zeitgeist. Now I’m humble enough to admit that I don’t know what God really is and probably never will. However, I do know that both versions of “God” leave something to be desired.

The traditional view raises impossible questions: If He is perfect and content, why create the universe? Why allow suffering? But the view of God as “Source” has issues, too: Is there no higher will guiding us? Is the universe impersonal? If God is just energy, what was Jesus?

I may never know the full truth, but I think sitting with these contradictions is a vital practice for our spiritual metacognition.

Luckily we have sages like Gurdjieff whose own “whim” (to him that meant his most sacred spiritual goal) was to “live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word.”

So what was Gurdjieff’s version of God?

In his book “Life Is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’”, Gurdjieff talks of God as a sort of fractal being, a mirror of a human existence. God, he says, possesses the same powers and qualities as we do, only at a much larger scale. This echoes the hermetic principle of “as above, so below”.

God is essentially a human writ large. That means that God is powerful, but not all-powerful, he lives a long time but is not immortal, and that even God will eventually die.

And what is powerful enough to kill God? Time and entropy, which Gurdjieff names as the merciless “Heropass”.

According to Gurdjieff’s creation story, in the beginning, God (the “Most Holy Sun Absolute”) noticed that the volume of His dwelling place was slowly shrinking. He realized this was caused by the “Merciless Heropass”, the flow of time was eating away at the absolute perfection of the divine realm.

To solve this, God created the Megalocosmos (the universe). By creating a universe of constantly moving, eating, and evolving beings, God created a perpetual motion machine. This constant exchange of energy neutralizes the destructive power of Time.

At least for a time, eventually the Heropass will win and God will die. This corresponds neatly with the scientific theory of the heat death of the universe.

But all is not lost. We must distinguish between “God” (the Creator/Being) and “Source” (The Void/Substrate).

If Gurdjieff’s God is the current manifestation of the universe, “Source” is the canvas upon which he is painted. This is where modern physics offers a glimmer of hope. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose has proposed a theory called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC).

Penrose theorizes that the universe isn’t a “one-and-done” event. Instead, the universe undergoes an infinite series of deaths and rebirths. The Heat Death of our current universe (the moment “God” dies and entropy wins) becomes the geometric singularity that sparks the Big Bang of the next Aeon. In mythology, the void is not nothing, but the womb of creation where everything arises. As the Buddhists say “emptiness is form and form is emptiness”. God is form and source is emptiness.

So perhaps the New Agers and the Traditionalists are both half-right. God is a being fighting for survival against Time, destined to die. But Source is the eternal cycle that allows Him to be born again.

This idea of a God fighting for survival surprisingly aligns perfectly with the ‘My Big Toe’ theory proposed by physicist Thomas Campbell. Campbell argues that God (or the ‘Larger Consciousness System’) is a finite digital system whose ultimate enemy is High Entropy (disorder).

Just as Gurdjieff’s God built the universe to fight the Heropass, Campbell’s System built our physical reality as a ‘simulation’, a school designed to help consciousness evolve and lower its entropy. In both views, God isn’t a distant King; He is a struggling system, and we are the energetic fractals of himself he created to help sustain him.

The Biological Analogy: We Are God’s Mitochondria

The easiest way to understand this is to look at your own body. You think of yourself as one single person, “I.” But biologically, you are a massive colony of roughly 30 trillion individual cells.

Every single one of those cells has a job. They take in nutrients and, through their mitochondria, produce ATP: the energy currency of life. You, the “Over-Soul” of your body, rely entirely on these tiny units to keep you alive. If your cells stop producing energy, you die.

In this model, we are the cells in the body of God. When we grow, learn, and act with love (low entropy), we generate the spiritual equivalent of ATP. We literally power the system. But when we devolve into chaos or fear, we become like cancer cells: we consume the system’s energy without contributing back to the whole, effectively making God “sick.”

The Question of Loosh

This brings us to the darker side of energy harvesting: the concept of “Loosh.”

The term comes from Robert Monroe, the pioneer of out-of-body experiences (and actually Thomas Campbell’s mentor). In his journeys, Monroe discovered that human emotions generate an energy he called “Loosh,” which is harvested by non-physical entities. Initially, Monroe was horrified, viewing Earth as a farm where humans are cattle, bred to produce stress and fear for parasitic entities to feed on.

However, Campbell (and Monroe in his later years) refined this view. They realized that while “lower” entities might feed on the low-vibration energy of fear and pain (much like a cancer feeds on a host) the highest form of Loosh is actually Love.

This resolves the conflict between “parasites” and “God.”

• The “Cancer”: Negative entities (demons, etc) or high-entropy forces may “eat” our fear and chaos. They are the parasites of the cosmos.

• The “Host” (God/Source): The Larger Consciousness System requires the high-quality energy of Love and evolution to lower its entropy and survive.

So, we are indeed energy generators. The only choice we have is what kind of energy we produce, and consequently, which part of the cosmic ecosystem we are feeding: the cancer, or the patient.

The Promethean Revolt: Are We Slaves or Saviors?

But is this arrangement fair? Not everyone thinks so.

The philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani offers a radically different take. In his view, which he calls Prometheism, humanity’s goal should not be to serve the system, but to break free of it.

Jorjani views the entities that demand our energy (whether they are “Gods,” “Archons,” or even the “LCS”) not as benevolent hosts, but as cosmic tyrants. He draws on the myth of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods to empower humanity. To Jorjani, we are not here to be dutiful mitochondria keeping a dying God on life support; we are here to seize the “fire” of consciousness and technology to become autonomous Gods ourselves. He rejects the obligation to the “Whole,” viewing it as a form of spectral slavery.

This creates the ultimate spiritual dilemma. If Gurdjieff and Campbell are right, and God is a struggling, dying organism, then Jorjani’s rebellion is dangerous. If a liver cell decides it wants to be “free” and stops serving the body, we don’t call that liberation, we call it cancer. And when the body dies, the cancer dies with it.

Perhaps our duty isn’t slavery, but survival. If we are indeed the cells of God, then serving Him isn’t submission; it’s self-preservation. We feed the Host because the Host is the only house we have.

The Middle Path: From Battery to Architect

So, where does this leave us? Are we destined to be mere batteries for a dying God, or rebels burning down the cosmic house to steal its fire?

Perhaps the answer lies in a synthesis, a middle path that honors both the Promethean drive for autonomy and the energetic necessity of service.

Jorjani is right about one thing: we are not meant to remain unconscious cattle. The urge to develop a crystallized will, to seize the “fire” of consciousness, and to become something greater than our biology is the defining trait of the human spirit. To suppress this urge is to deny our potential. But the Promethean mistake is assuming that “becoming a God” requires destroying the one we already have.

Gurdjieff offers a more sophisticated framework. He distinguished between two great cosmic impulses: World Maintenance and World Creation.

World Maintenance is the automatic duty of the universe. It is the “mitochondrial” work, the exchange of substances, the eating and being eaten, the payment of our energetic debt to the system that sustains us. To ignore this is to become a cancer; to consume without contributing is to accelerate the entropy that kills the Host.

But World Creation is the possibility of something new. It is the work of the individual who has paid their debt and begun to generate a surplus.

In this view, God (or the Larger Consciousness System) doesn’t want slaves; He wants apprentices. A master carpenter doesn’t resent the apprentice who learns to hold the hammer, nor the one who eventually builds their own house. He fears only the arsonist who burns the workshop down in a misguided fit of “liberation.”

Our goal, then, is to develop what Gurdjieff called our “Whim”, our unique, crystallized, unshakeable will. We must strive for the Promethean fire of individual consciousness, but we must wield it in harmony with the cosmic ecosystem.

We do not serve the System because we are forced to; we serve it because we are it.

By lowering our own entropy, by choosing love over fear, creation over destruction, and awareness over unconsciousness, we are doing two things simultaneously. We are keeping the “Merciless Heropass” at bay, buying time for the universe to survive. And, in the process, we are slowly, methodically graduating from being the mere fuel of the universe to becoming its co-creators.