I would completely agree that what you have described in and through your interpretation of CTMU is very similar to Kabbalah. In fact, it's hardly distinguishable in most respects. It no doubt also strikes you that there is a similarity with several eastern traditions approximating 'great chain of being' cosmologies. Then again, it might not surprise us to find that Kabbalah takes a good deal of concepts from these perennial traditions. >The "bad" God or Devil is the "observable universe" of science. The Devil exists for the sake of the full realization of the Absolute, a reflexive self-identification process involving no object, subject, nor media. I would personally want to avoid equating the material universe (or anything which is not pure God-self) with Satan. Evil is a tricky thing to grasp. On the one hand, we could identify evil in terms of a vector which begins at the precise moment of emanation, or in a rough manner of speaking, the very first moment of 'not-God'. I believe, in keeping with CTMU, you might describe this as the very first instant of simulation. I have personally theorized the fundamental (Ain Soph) state of God as **pure self-referential being**. This isn't quite satisfactory for the computational terms of CTMU, nor would I want it to be. But I could make it moreso if instead of saying that God is perfect self-reference, that He is instead an atemporal infinitely recursive function. It's precisely the moment at which God 'refers out' that we might imagine the accident of evil to emerge. I have preferred in the past to think about the pure state of God as an infinite loop of self-reference for the precise reason that *its contrast* is so amenable to a description of the creative act. The precise moment at which God ceases self-reference *necessarily* indicates reference to 'Other'. In the creative imagery of my mind, this just is what something like a Big Bang would be. We could imagine the immaterial, all-encompassing God momentarily losing self-reference, and BOOM, a universe comes into being (or perhaps many, or infinite universes). >The purpose of observable reality is for the Absolute to be realized in the sense of "internal modeling" (of itself) I agree. I've said in the previous comment, and I'll restate here to echo my paragraph just above, I believe that all of reality is a mind. This universal coming-to-be, in what we term a Big Bang, is not something I think of as an *outward* emanation of God, or a 'budding off' of a universe from some fountainhead of universes. No, there is no space or time except within that universe. It is something more like a thought, and of course it propagates deeper into itself at faster-than-light speed because light is the speed of information within that thought, or the speed at which the boundaries of the circles in Langan's Venn diagram propagate outward through space, acting as a kind of 'adapter' between the layers of simulation. I have not figured it out yet, but I actually believe gravity propagates at light speed, and it is not a fundamentally different force, but an inversion. >the sense we know as "conscious awareness", as opposed to it being "realized" in the sense of direct embodiment YES! Hence, symbolic realism, ala my previous, longer comment. >By necessity, self-configuration ultimately entails full self-disclosure and a fully unambiguous self identification (proof) of the totality (Absoluteness) of whatever is self-configured. I agree, but this is where it gets interesting. I am still staggered by how synchronous this is with what @PS and I have been discussing for many months now. I believe this outward emanation that we take to be the timewise separation from God into more fully elaborated, yet differentiated, states of physical existence is something like an 'escape'. A thought is able to escape the mind-source only so long as it maintains difference. Just like when we are reading a fictional story, at any point there is 'fully unambiguous' self-identification of ourselves *with the story*, the story ceases and we are pulled back into ourselves. We must *escape* ourselves to enter fictional worlds. I take this to be an apt analogy for what our very cosmos is. The moment that self-identification occurs, the universe (or simulation, if you'd rather) collapses back into the non-existence of the primordial God-state - i.e., back into the perfect, infinite self-referential loop that is God. Therefore, existence is always hanging on a delicate balance, and this is what necessitates *evil* in existence. For the goodness of Being to be realized in all of these myriad, differentiated ways, the evil is necessary to prevent God from perfect self-realization - to keep us barreling into the 'not God', constantly escaping God's 'view': to me, **this is the Genesis story**. I consider the apple to be analogous to the evolution of higher intelligence (which makes its coupling to the symbol of agriculture perfect from the historical standpoint). The moment that Adam and Eve realized something more sophisticated and 'naked' about their God nature, they had to escape. They had to be cast from the Garden and into a cruder level of existence because they'd become ashamed of themselves. This also recapitulates the Kabbalistic idea that the more we realize we are God (the more the Right hand accepts, the Left hand rejects), the stronger the force of rejection becomes which pushes us away and increases our sense of distance. To me, this is also the essence of the story of Job. It's the *immense* desire of the person seeking God, combined with the commensurate rejecting force of this person into the 'dark night of the soul' that maintains the **spiritual voltage** that keeps the loop of existence open. Just like a current flowing requires opposite polarized voltages on either end of the path, our existence is contingent on a great desire to return to God combined with the proportional rejection that flings us further into existence - further into the dark night. Eventually God finds its way into all of these new places, but just like an author who writes a fictional place, we might think that the world he is writing expands 'out ahead of him' before has actually been able to explore it. Evil just is the furthering of the creation. This seems immensely confusing because of the limitations of our language, but this is also how we understand that it's all truly just Good. Being is goodness, and evil is just what we perceive when we perceive the one aspect of the duality that is furthering creation. Hence, the afflictions of Job, or the scorched forest, or the tsunami all become evil things for us because our focal point of experience cannot perceive these from the standpoint of God. We cannot perceive from the standpoint of that which is the *giver*, but only from the standpoint of that *which receives*. This is the reason for suffering. **The idea is consummated in the crucified Christ.** Take what I've said above about the desire for closeness being met with a pushing away, as necessary for the spiritual voltage that sustains existence. Now consider the crucified Son of God who exclaims to the father, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" I consider this to be the most important thing spoken by Christ in the entire Bible. At the precise consummation of the Passion, of the piercing of the veil and the victory of goodness over evil, what happens? The Son is forsaken. That's it. It's all right there. @KingOfWhiteAmerica