Appendix L: The Thologram and Metaphysics

Inner workings of Awareness and Intention

Tholonic Divinity

The tholonic claim is that our understanding of reality is determined by the context of our understanding of the universally consistent laws. Because of this, we will see the same patterns through these different cultural lenses.

Prior to modern science, it was religion that provided that lens, and over thousands of years, inspired and brilliant minds studied and philosophized on the nature of these god-given tenets in an attempt to unveil the mysteries of God, the Universe, and Life.

Not surprisingly, we can see several parallels between the ancient understanding of God, the creations of God, and the thologram. One of the more obvious parallels can be seen in the traditional and current Christian model (the Jewish model is similar but not exactly the same) of the hierarchy of Christian saints composed of 9 angelic choirs made up of 3 spheres of responsibility, with each sphere having 3 classes of angels.

This is remarkably similar to the tholonic model but limited to a single tholon.

The tholonic tetrahedron maps the angelic hierarchy onto its structure: - S (Seraphim), O (Ophanim), C (Cherubim) at the top represent the 1st Sphere (domain of God) - G (Guardian Angels), V (Virtues), P (Powers) form the 2nd Sphere (domain of Creation)
- A (Archangels), D (Dominions), P (Principalities) form the 3rd Sphere (domain of Earth)

The 3 colored sections (1-blue, 2-green, 3-red) represent the 3 spheres, with each containing its triad of angelic classes arranged according to the N-D-C pattern.

We can even see how the class of angels fits neatly into the tholonic trinity of Negotiation/Definition/Contribution (or Balance/Limitation/Form):

• Negotiation/balance angels are tasked with care-taking, delivering, and manifesting the will of God.
• Defining/limiting angels are tasked with guarding, operating, and watching God’s creations.
• Contributing/form angels are the wheels, the warriors, and humanity’s personal guiding angels.

Even more astonishing is that some of the most significant religious philosophers have described this angelic hierarchy in ways that sound perfectly tholonic. For example, the most respected and influential philosopher and Torah scholar of the Middle Ages, Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, 1138–1204 CE, Spain), in his book The Guide for the Perplexed¹, explains at length how angels are forms of intelligence, and what is referred to as “angels” are not only the forces and laws of nature, but the forces of imagination, ideas, and even the mind of man. Furthermore, reality as we know it is formed by these invisible intelligences as well as the intelligence of Man. He supports his arguments with the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, and even the angels themselves as they are portrayed to conclude that:

Thus, the Sages reveal to the aware that the imaginative faculty is also called an angel, and the mind is called a cherub. How beautiful this will appear to the sophisticated mind – and how disturbing to the primitive.”²

He doubles down on his heretical claims by stating that reality is controlled by the laws of physics, not by God’s will and that most miracles never happened.³ Perhaps his most egregious claim was that divine providence is non-supernatural and is not given by God’s grace but achieved by the perfection of the intellect… and this was 800 years ago!

Of course, telling people that angels are anthropomorphized constructs of forms of intelligence and that people were responsible for their own divine providence did not go over so well. His book was quickly condemned and burned by both Jews and Christians.

The most fundamental tenet of the Judeo-Christian god reads like a tholonic description:

Bible: “For in Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible, and invisible… all things have been created through him and for him”. Colossians 1:16-17

Tholonic: “All things exist within the thologram, from concepts to forms. All things come into existence through the movement of energy for the sole purpose of attaining balance.”

I want to clarify that this is in no way meant to disparage, disrespect, or even criticize religious beliefs. The tholonic position is all views, beliefs, and perspectives are equally valid to the degree that they are sustainable, and with each perspective comes certain understandings and limitations. The significant difference between the tholonic and religious models is a duality of good/evil vs. the duality of nothing/something. While Judeo-Christianity has a concept of the “will of God”, the thologram has the concept of Awareness and Intention. The thologram even recognizes an ultimate creator: the Awareness and Intention that is the source of all energy. In fact, if you replace the concept of “God” with “energy”, the “will of God” with “Intention”, and “divine beings” with “tholons”, both models appear remarkably similar.

The 1st tholon within which all others are created could be considered as the God Tholon, but that tholon itself was created by Awareness and Intention, which has no traits or characteristics other than A&I. Any concept of a god or divine being that has any traits whatsoever, other than A&I, would by definition be a child tholon that has its own tholonic intelligence and therefore has an agenda of some sort as it requires its own child tholons to exist as well as having to co-exist with its peers and in accordance to its parent’s context. Tholons are regulated by tholonic intelligence, and all tholons can create more tholons.

Tholonic Practices in Ancient Traditions

If the angelic hierarchy represents the tholonic structure of divine organization, then meditation practices represent humanity’s attempt to navigate and align with that structure. As was briefly alluded to earlier in reference to the Taoist Neidan meditation practice, tholonic concepts exist in ancient meditations as a way to connect with the inner energy of the spirit. This inner energy has many names, such as: spirit, chi, qi, and prana. Tholonically, this inner energy is the same energy we see daily in the material world, but in a different scope and context. As all energy is Awareness and Intention, the scope of this energy in meditation is also awareness and intention, but within the contextual limits of human consciousness. We’ll simply refer to this inner energy, this instance of A&I in the context of human consciousness, as “a&I”.

There are many dimensions, techniques, and intentions when it comes to meditation. These can range from sitting to spinning in circles for hours. From a tholonic perspective, we want to look at only the single dimension of how meditation can alter the entropy of this inner energy.

Meditation techniques of stilling the mind, disconnecting from the outer world, and emptying oneself entirely are entropy-lowering techniques. These meditations reduce the number of microstates the mind can explore, creating a less distributed, more focused mind. This is equivalent to returning the mind to a state of singularity, a state of much lower entropy.

Meditations that require concentration and focus, such as the meditations of complex mandalas that contain geometric patterns, symbolism, and layers of meaning, are specifically meant to add more microstates for the mind to explore, thereby enhancing the distribution of energy, leading to a more balanced state.

For example, in Buddhism, there are 2 types of meditations; Vipassana (“insight”) and Samatha (“tranquility”).

Vipassana (“Insight”) is a state in which the mind is singularly focused on what is happening as it happens and, through the use of concentration of awareness, gradually chipping away at the illusion of this temporary material world that separates the mind from the eternal truth of reality. The technique requires attention to mindful listening, seeing, self-reflection, and testing, making it an entropy-increasing practice. As this involves the dispersion and decoherence of energy, there is a greater demand on the a&i (i.e., energy), but it coheres the mind.

Meditations that involve physical exertion and a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings, such as spinning (e.g., Whirling Dervishes) or even running, which can induce a transcendental state, are Vipassana-ish in nature.

Samatha (“tranquility”) is a state in which the mind is brought to rest, focused only on one item, such as a prayer, a light, or an image, and not allowed to wander. This results in a state of rapture, which ends when the meditation is over. Although this is a temporary state, it is beneficial to one’s state of being and has low energy requirements. This is an entropy-decreasing practice, as it eliminates many microstates that can dissipate one’s awareness, thus increasing the coherence of one’s a&i (energy). Meditations that induce trance-like states are Samatha-ish in nature.

Samatha is the more common form of meditation among Buddhism and other disciplines as well, but Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditations, dating back to the days of Buddha himself (563 to 483 B.C.), and was described in a discourse in the Satipatthana Sutta (“Foundations of Mindfulness”) attributed to Buddha.

One path leads to the Beginning, and one path leads to the End, which, from an energy perspective, are 2 views from the same “location”, and achieving one state will ultimately lead to the other. This mirrors the tholonic principle that the lowest entropy state (singularity, the Beginning) and the highest entropy state (infinite distribution, the End) are both forms of chaos, and that order exists only in the balance between them.

Yet the goal of meditation is not to achieve “order” in the conventional sense, but rather to reach union with the source itself, whether that source manifests as the singularity of the Beginning or the infinite distribution of the End. Both paths ultimately lead to the same realization: that the apparent chaos at the source contains a higher order that transcends ordinary understanding. When consciousness merges with this source, the distinction between chaos and order dissolves, revealing that what we perceive as chaos is itself the perfect expression of a comprehension beyond duality. The meditative journey, whether through Vipassana or Samatha, is not an escape from chaos into order, but rather a navigation of the spectrum of entropy toward direct experience of the source, where all paradoxes resolve and all understanding emerges from what appears to mundane consciousness as perfect chaos.

Just as the 9 choirs of angels represent the structured hierarchy between the absolute unity of God (the source) and the multiplicity of Earth (manifestation), meditation practices represent humanity’s structured path back to that unity. The hierarchy exists to guide manifestation down from the source and consciousness back up to it, with both directions being equally valid expressions of the tholonic pattern.

Tholonic Intelligence as Gods

If we look at the most ancient of religious texts we see very tholonic concepts wrapped in the anthropomorphic ideas of divine authority. For example, in the original Old Testament and the Torah, we see that the term “Elohim” used to mean God, as in “In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and earth”. While Elohim is considered to be singular, most likely due to Judaic and Christian concept of monotheism, the word is, grammatically, a masculine plural form of the noun “gods” or “deities”. This plurality is (often) considered to be a plural of majesty, similar to the Royal “we”, as the “Most High” god includes with it all other god and deities, who when the singular most high god speaks, he speaks for all, the Elohim. That singular god was known by the masculine singular form of “Elyon”, which translates to “El most high”, and “El” was the supreme creator god of the Canaanites.

Without getting into the linguistics of ancient biblical translations and interpretations, the ancient legends state that Elyon divided the nations and gave Israel (a word that itself translates to “El’s Glory”) to his son, Yahweh. Hence, Yahweh is the god of the Israelites, but not the “Most High” god, that being Elyon.

So, we have El, the “Most High God”, which encompasses the plurality of all other gods and deities, which is known as Elohim. El had 70 children, each son designated to be a guardian over 70 nations. Yahweh was the son who was the guardian of Israel, and Jesus was the son of Yahweh.

OK, that’s the general outline of history. Of course, there are numerous variations of this outline depending on source material, interpretations, beliefs, religious agendas, all exacerbated by the fact that everything we know of the ancient past is pieced together from only a few remaining pieces of evidence, legend, and culture from 5000 years ago, not to mention the evolution of these ancient concepts have undergone in those 5000 years. An example of this evolution is how El, Elohim, and Yahweh have become synonymous with each other⁴.

It’s also worth noting the parallels of the Canaanite pantheon with the Ancient Greek Pantheon, for example, we see in the writing of Sanchoniatho the Berytian (13^th c. BC) that:

“Elioun, ‘who is called the Most High’, and who became the father of Epigeios (‘the One who is above the earth’), later called Ouranos: the latter married his sister Ge (the earth) and begot four sons, the first of whom was called Elos, also called Kronos.”

And we can see just how closely these 2 divine hierarchies reflect each other in the chart below ascribed to Sanchoniatho:

If it is not obvious already, let’s point out the similarities with the thologram. Elyon, who was not created by anything and which contains within it all things, is the primary tholon. That tholon contains a plurality of partons, which are themselves tholons with partons. Elyon describes the parent tholon from which all is created within, and Elohim describes the same tholon but as a plurality of the partons. Just as an archetype will, or perhaps must, inevitably instantiate, here, too, there is an instantiation of “The Most High” in Jesus.

Each son of Elyon was to watch over their nation, which describes the relationship between the parent tholon and its partons as the survival and health of the parent tholon depends on the survival and health of the partons.

The name “El” is composed of 2 ancient Semitic characters, Ayin, and Lamed, which were originally pictographs based on the “eye” and “shepherd’s staff”, representing the concepts of “To watch, to see” and “to guide”. Together, they clearly represent the ideas of a shepherd watching over and controlling his flock.

The concept of “to see, to watch, to know” is synonymous with “to be aware of”, i.e., are expressions of awareness. Guiding, teaching, binding, or to presume authority, are also very clear intentions. This strongly suggests that “El” is an instance of awareness and intention, and “Elyon” is the “Most High” Awareness and Intention⁵.

This concept of Guider and Watcher is repeated throughout the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian teachings in imagery, prayer, and messages such as ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ meme. Tholonically, “El” and “Elyon” are tholonic intelligences with their own particular expressions of Awareness and Intention.

It’s no wonder that the Canaanite “El” equates to the Greek “Cronus”, which is the Roman “Saturn”, as the metaphysical or spiritual significance of Saturn is one of restrictions and limitation for the purpose of achieving maturity, responsibility, discipline, and stewardship, bringing meaning and structure to our lives, with a healthy dose of disciplinary punishment, karmic justice, as well as being the god of time.

Tholonically, this is an instance of the Definition/Limitation. However, the creator of the Universe and all things is a “Most High” instance of El. This would certainly explain why the Old Testament god was the way he was, but we see this same pattern in the thologram as the first creation of the 0-dimensional dot of A&I is Definition/Limitation. This is the “Elyon”, and all the subsequent instances of Definition/Limitation in the children are the “Els”. The Contribution/Form of this Definition/Limitation is the material instance of the archetype, which, as we previously mentioned, would be the incarnate “Most High”, which describes the concept of a Messiah which is core to many religions. The concept of an incarnate god was originated in Zoroastrianism as the savior who will rid the world of evil (the Saoshyant). This concept was adopted by Judaism (Mashiach), Christianity (Christ), Islam (Isa Masih), Buddhism (Maitreya), Hinduism (Kalki), Taoism (Li Hong), and other belief systems.

Jupiter, on the other hand, was the god of sky and thunder, and the Roman version of the Greek Zeus, who was the ruler, protector, creator of humans and king of the gods, a title he earned by freeing his siblings from the stomach of Cronus/Saturn. Jupiter/Zeus is also the Roman/Greek versions of the Canaanite Ba’al-Hadad (a.k.a. Ba’al), the god of fertility and life, but also at one time a god of war and storms.

Historically, Ba’al is a word used to indicate “Lord”, and there are many Ba’als. There is no good archaeological evidence to suggest that Ba’al-Hadad was involved in child sacrifices. However, Ba’al-Hamon of the Phoenician North African colony of Carthage did receive burnt child offerings, and it was this Ba’al that the Greeks associated with Cronus. There was also the Ba’al-Zebub, god of the Philistine city of Ekron, and from which we get the word “Beelzebub”, meaning “Lord of the flies”, which was a nice way of saying “Lord of shit”. Many cities had their own version of Ba’al. Baʿal Berith was the god worshiped by the Israelites when they “went astray”. The list goes on, but the general concept of Ba’al is a deity that protects community, food, and security, hence, a god of fertility, rain (which came from storms in that area of the world) and war. How that concept instantiated across cultures varied from temple orgies to burnt sacrifices. It is this concept of Ba’al that we are referring to when we use the word, and not any particular cultural instance. The same is true for “El”, “Elyon”, “Yahweh”, etc., as the Israelites also practiced burnt animal sacrifice, and as we know from the Bible, human sacrifice of children.

In the Jupiter/Zeus/Ba’al path the follower hopes to ensure fortune, success, growth, luck, etc., by pleasing the gods through gifts and adoration. This led to a culture of gratification, vanity and personality worship. Ba’alism culture had degenerated to Sodom and Gomorrah levels. Here is a common letter sent from a Canaanite mayor to the ruling Egyptian Pharaoh who demanded empty platitudes. Imagine the type of culture where this sort of grovelling, humiliation, and self-disrespect was not only normal, but expected from your superiors:

To the king, my lord, my god, my sun … I fall at the feet of the king, my lord, seven times and seven times. I am the dirt under the sandals of the king, my lord. My lord is the sun who comes forth over all lands day by day, according to the way of the sun, his gracious father, who gives life by his sweet breath and returns with his north wind; who establishes the entire land in peace, by the power of his arm: who gives forth his cry in the sky like Baal, and all the land is frightened at his cry. The servant herewith writes to his lord that he heard the gracious messenger of the king who came to his servant, and the sweet breath that came forth from the mouth of the king, my lord, to his servant—his breath came back! Before the arrival of the messenger of the king, my lord, breath had not come back; my nose was blocked. Now that the breath of the king has come forth to me, I am very happy.

and…

If the king wrote for my wife, how could I hold her back? How, if the king wrote to me, “Put a bronze dagger into your heart and die,” could I not execute the order of the king?

In the Saturn/Cronus/El path, while the God of Abraham also demanded praise, sacrifice and absolute commitment, he also demanded unrelenting discipline.

This is clearly stated in Hebrews 12:4-11

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.”

Endure hardship as discipline: God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it.

How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

William F. Albright, the American archaeologist, biblical scholar, philologist and considered one of the 20th century’s most influential American biblical scholars, reiterates this idea more clearly:

It was fortunate for the future of monotheism that the Israelites of the Conquest were a wild folk, endowed with primitive energy and ruthless will to exist, since the resulting decimation of the Canaanites prevented the complete fusion of the two kindred folk which would almost inevitably have depressed Yahwistic standards to a point where recovery was impossible. Thus the Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature-worship, their cult of fertility in the form of serpent symbols and sensuous nudity, and their gross mythology, were replaced by Israel, with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism, and its severe code of ethics. ~W. F. Albright, “From the Stone Age to Christianity”, p. 281.

These ideas are further explained in the words of Eugene H. Peterson⁶, an American Presbyterian minister, scholar, theologian, author, poet, and holder of a number of academic degrees and honorary doctorate degrees.

While the prophetic accusation of “harlotry” had a literal reference to the sacred prostitution of the Baal cult, it extended its meaning into the entire theology of worship. It referred to worship that sought fulfillment through self-expression, worship that accepted the needs and desires and passions of the worshiper as its raw material. “Harlotry” is worship which says, “I will give you satisfaction. You want religious feelings? I will give them to you. You want your needs fulfilled? I’ll do it in the form most attractive to you.”

In contrast…

Yahwism established a form of worship which was centered in the proclamation of the word of the covenant God. The appeal was made to the will. Man’s rational intelligence was roused to attention as he was called upon to respond as a person to the will of God. In Yahwism something was said–words which called men to serve, love, obey, act responsibly, decide.

In many ways, we can see this polarity in modern politics and culture as the division between the progressive, permissive, hyper-liberal, woke, left-leaning, post-modern side and the libertarian, traditional, conservative-leaning, classical side. In the 60s this would have been something like the Hippies/free-love vs. the John Birch Society.

In any case, we end up with something like this:

However, the broader perspective is recognizing the context of the A&I from which both of these expressions emerge transcends all gods and all politics, and from that perspective, a stable balance between the poles can emerge, in both beliefs and practice.

I Am

This simplest of insights, “I am” vs. “I am not”, or “is” vs. “is not”, is at the foundation of everything man does, thinks, believes, and knows, so it is worth exploring this concept to understand it better. If we go back 6,000 years to the dawn of the modern human, we are going back to the beginning of Western Judeo-Christian concepts. Immediately we are challenged with the obfuscation of language. This is best represented in the seminal message God gave to Moses at the Burning Bush.

(3:13) “But,” said Moses to God, “if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what do I tell them?” (3:14) God replied to Moses: “I AM WHO I AM”. Then he added: “This is what you will tell the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”. ~Exodus

The most important detail about this line is that it can only be understood if read in Hebrew. We don’t know what language the message was delivered in or if Moses even knew Hebrew. All we know is our current sources were written in Hebrew 1000 years after Moses. The claim that the message was delivered in Hebrew because God only spoke in Hebrew is suspect. In any case, the languages of the day, Aramaic, Canaanite, Phoenician, are similar to Hebrew.

In Hebrew, the root word that means “to exist” or “to be” is HWH (Ehyeh, ). Adding an A () at the beginning makes it 1st person, as in “I exist”. Adding a T () makes it 2nd person, as in “you exist”, and adding a Y () makes it 3rd person, as in “he exists”.

Here, God tells Moses his name is “I AM WHO I AM” (Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, ), which can be interpreted as:

I will exist because I will exist I exist because I exist I am who I am I will be who I will be I am that which exists

It is not a matter of choosing which interpretation is correct. Given that Hebrew only has tenses for finished (perfect) and unfinished (imperfect) and no future or past tenses, all these (and more) interpretations are simultaneously correct.

But God also said, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”. “I AM” here is spelled like YHWH (Yih’weh, , YHWH), which is the 3rd person form of “to be” (HWH, Ehyeh, ) . This translates to “He exists” and “He will exist”. It is unclear if the voice of Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh was speaking as the messenger for the even greater God of “He Is” or, as pointed out by Jaynes, refers to itself in the 3rd person because human consciousness at that time could only conceive of a god as someone/something outside of themselves, a projection of the “I Am” concept.

In either case, we have instances of Awareness (I am, I exist) and instances of Intention (I will). This correlation fits so nicely that we could say that finished is a description of Awareness, in that awareness, in its pure form, is finished, perfect, in the present. There is nothing for Awareness to “do” other than “to be”. Intention is unfinished, a work-in-progress, the future, something that requires “work”.

After thousands of years and thousands of volumes of opinion, doctrine, and religious law, and despite the deliberate hiding, misspelling, encrypting, and misinterpreting of the name of God (as it was forbidden to be spoken and often forbidden to be written), there is still heated debate as to the “real” and/or “secret” significance of these words.

And if this subject wasn’t already shrouded in the mystical symbolism of Moses’s isolated vision, it has been orally passed on for centuries before it was translated from Phoenician to Hebrew to Greek to English and dozens of other languages, none of which hold the same significance as the language of Moses. For example, historians say that the Phoenician alphabet evolved out of symbols for things like fish (), eye (), tooth (), weapon (), etc., and even though the symbols and order are similar to Hebrew (and Greek), the legend is that Hebrew came from the words that were written with black fire on white fire in the presence of god, and that these words are the Torah as well as all the names of God. This language was so powerful that, as the legend goes, the 1st letter of the Hebrew alphabet, ALEPH, was created by God opening his mouth to speak, but even that was so overwhelming it caused the people to fall to the ground (is this why the word “Aleph” is the joining of 2 words, “al”, meaning “god” (i.e. the god of Israel. The etymology is unclear, but not to be confused with “El”, the generic Semitic word meaning “god”, although it seems likely they are connected) , and “p”, meaning “mouth”? ). The cultural significance of letters, words, and sentences will differ dramatically even between these similar languages.

The other reason is to show how tholonic concepts find form in not only scientific understanding but religious and spiritual beliefs and even language itself. Any belief, including scientific, that advances dogma and confusion of any kind is a belief that is detrimental to understanding the nature of reality, but such beliefs have existed for thousands of years and appear to be very sustainable. What follows is a simple description of the tholonic concept that is linguistically and conceptually compatible with many belief systems and which may shed light on their cryptic symbolism.

What? That!

You enter a restaurant, and the waiter asks, “What would you like?”. You reply, “I’ll take that.” pointing to a plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters. “What” is defining the context and is synonymous with “anything that” (with the implied “is on the menu”). When “what” is used as a predeterminer, such as “What a great idea!”, it is still referring to the larger concept of “great idea” and is stating that the specific idea is worthy of being a member of the “great idea” category. Any use of “what” will always refer to some context, either explicitly or implicitly; Bob: “I have money for the meter, so we can park here.” Carol: “I have six toes.” Bob: “What!?”.

The word “that” is, grammatically, a determiner and a relative pronoun because it always refers to something specific that is contextually relative and implies a plurality of potential “that’s”. There’s no need for the waiter to ask what you want or for you to say, “I’ll have that” if the only thing that they serve is Rocky Mountain Oysters.

“I Am That I Am” is stating that the existence of “I Am” is, and only is, awareness of “I” and that the entirety of that awareness is, and only is, the singularity of that awareness. There is no context for that which is “I Am” other than “I Am”. It is perfectly self-referential as “I Am” consists only of that singularity that is “I Am”. On the other hand, “I Am What I Am” means that the entirety of “I Am” is the sum of its parts. Even if those parts are instances of “I Am”, it is not a singularity because “what” explicitly refers to a plurality in contrast to the singularity of “that”.

Tholonically, “I Am That I Am” describes an instance or a concept from the perspective of a tholon as a whole, a holon. “I Am What I Am” describes an instance or concept as a collection of parts, or partons, that make the whole. It is the difference between the creator and the created (e.g., God and Popeye the Sailorman, who’s fond of saying, “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam”). In the thologram, as the parts are identical to the whole, we can say that the parts most definitely are made in the image of the whole.

There is only a single instance where the holons and partons, the context and contents, are identical, and that is the initial instance of the trigram. This is the only valid instance of “I Am That I Am”, and everything that follows is “I Am What I Am”. The Aramaic name of God can be interpreted as either as we are being told that Jehovah is both the creator and the created. Ironically, this is antithetical to the Abrahamic concept of a god, which believes that the creator and the created are distinctly and vastly different.

The thologram is not a religious or spiritual model, even though it seems to border on those areas. However, it does apply to religious and spiritual models. For example, we see several tholonic concepts in several creation stories, but, tholonically speaking, the biblical god could not be the A&I singularity as it is clearly stated in Genesis 1:26 “Then God said, ‘Let Us make humans in Our image, according to Our likeness’”, which tells us that the tholon from which creation sprang was a plurality, i.e., partons. The tholonic view is that awareness and intention are inherent in all existence, suggesting that the god of the Bible was a tholonic intelligence establishing its own sustainability, which is precisely what we would expect to see. This does not diminish the religious concept of God in any way; rather, it is meant to expand the understanding of tholonic intelligence.

Reinventing “I am” in the Age of Enlightenment

Descartes had a similar understanding of this concept when he coined “Cognito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am)⁷. Unfortunately, qualifying “I Am” with “I Think” could easily be perceived as intellectual hubris or self-defeating and dangerously ignorant. While Descartes was a brilliant mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and metaphysician, we have to understand his worldview in the context of 17th century Europe. This was before Newton and even before the Age of Enlightenment, which many historians consider having begun when Descartes originally coined this phrase in his publication of “Discourse on Method”. The modern Western concepts of mind, consciousness, and thought were only beginning to hatch, and they would quickly grow to be recognized as the defining quality that not only separated man from beast and made man a divine creature. We can’t just blame intellectual arrogance that the intelligentsia of the day saw themselves closer to, and favored by, their all-powerful Christian sky-god, as this pitfall comes packaged with the ability to say “I”, but it certainly played a role in the world view of those who ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. The ability to have the concept of “I Am” was only possible for those that possessed consciousness and rationality, at least in the way these concepts were defined later by Freud, who claimed that consciousness and rationality are not only ego-centric; they are the source of the ego.

Being the pioneer that Freud was, we should view his theories as “working drafts” of psychological theory, especially in light of the cultural revolution fueled by madness and modernity in 1900 Vienna. The seeds of this revolution were being sewn 50 years earlier in Leipzig, Germany when Gustav Fechner’s theories created what would later become physiological science, and in 1879, when William Wundt founded the premier first laboratory for psychological research, also in Leipzig, and which was succeeded by the empirical psychology of Ferdinand Ueberwasse. It was this intellectual garden of the rigid, disciplined, demanding, competitive, imperialist German culture that was being strictly enforced by the somewhat tyrannical “Iron Chancellor”, Otto von Bismarck, that nourished the theories of Freud, Jung, Adler, Titchener, and the other midwives of modern psychology that quickly spread throughout the western world. It was also this view of humanity that further developed the concept of self as “that which thinks” that was initially introduced by Descartes (1644) in his “Principles of Philosophy” into the far more encompassing and modern concept of self as the “totality of the individual, consisting of all characteristic attributes, conscious and unconscious, mental and physical”⁸. This wholly materialistic concept rejected all introspective ideas of imagery, memory, mind, consciousness, etc., as being nothing more than materialist side effects. This concept of the self as a material, mechanical byproduct of “nature and nurture” (genetics and training) paved the way for behavioral psychology as a way to “predict and control animal behavior”, producing sociopathic luminaries such as B. F. Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, and the man credited as the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson who, in addition to terrifying children to test his theories, proclaimed in his 1913 paper “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”⁹:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

John B. Watson went on to become the president of the American Psychological Association.

While behaviorism is still alive, well, and growing, the broader post-behaviorism ideas of Cognitive Behavioral therapy that formed in the 1950s and 1960s have also taken center stage.

The tholonic view is that self is a construct that reflects where in the hierarchy of archetypes one’s awareness is anchored. What is commonly called self is a particular instance of energy in a specific context. This makes everything that exists a type of self, the only real difference being that the concept of self can only exist as an extension of “I am”. The energy that launches rockets and the energy that moves your arms are the same, only in a different form and context. Remove all context, and there is only A&I. Unlike the psycho-spiritual axiom that there exists a “true self” for each individual, the tholonic view is that there are a number of embedded archetypes an individual instance can “realize”. A hyper-simplified example of embedded archetypes is something like:

• I am
• I am a living being
• I am a mammal
• I am a human
• I am an Asian human
• I am a female Asian human
• I am an old female Asian human
• I am a rich old female Asian woman
• I am a widowed rich old female Asian woman
• I am a widowed rich old female Asian woman living in New York City
• I am a widowed rich old female Asian woman living in NYC with gout

This list continues until we get to the “bottom”, a set of numerous archetypes or attributes from numerous branches of hierarchies that do not (yet) have any sub-archetypes. DNA is a good example of an archetype in a biological hierarchy that has only a single instance. Other hierarchies could be location (not necessarily limited to the 3 dimensions), cognitive changes (beliefs, ideas, knowledge, understanding), and so on. Tholonically, for any instance, there are many types of embedded archetypes, all of which interact with others, creating new archetypes which also interact and create, ad infinitum.

Our erroneous concept of self has its roots in Judeo-Christian and Islamic thinking, which goes back 6,000 years, so it is only natural that the great thinkers of the dominant Western culture over the last 400 years applied their genius within that context. This is not meant to pick on Judeo-Christian concepts, as many other systems had similar concepts, but the Judeo-Christian model dominated. Obviously, the idea and model of self works, but it is ultimately unsustainable as it dis-integrates the whole of which the individual selves are a part of, thereby reducing the efficiency, stability, and balance of the whole. Eventually, the “whole” (i.e., current form of humanity) will cease to exist, or the concept of the “self” will adapt and change, probably as a result of evolutionary suicide, i.e., catastrophic changes caused by the intelligence of the “whole” in an attempt to self-correct.

With this historical context in mind, we can recognize that it is unreasonable to suggest that conscious and rational thinking is ego-centric. Still, it is not unreasonable to see how the concept of “I” is a prerequisite to “I Think”, and, having such a concept, it would be natural for followers of a demanding, judging, and punishing god to consider themselves, their self, “special”, “chosen”, and/or “better”. While consciousness and rationality are not ego-centric, that does not mean that conscious, rational humans are not egotistical and self-serving any more than the benefits of fire does not mean it won’t do a lot of damage if uncontrolled.

It’s not surprising then that for a devout 17th century Christian, which includes most, if not all, the great minds of modern Western culture, the concept of “I think” and “I Am” were essentially synonymous. Thinking is what made man superior, and they had a divine right, and even a divine duty, to act superior, as their god commanded that:

*Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. ~Genesis 1:26

For these people, that which did not have the concept of “I” was no more useful than however it was judged to be useful by man. “I think therefore I am” is simply a contextually abridged version of “I am, therefore I am”, but it does raise the question: is reason the modern-day voice of the gods? Were the ancient voices of the gods an early instance of reason?

While the thologram has no concept of a divine creator (beyond that of a 0-dimensional dot of A&I in an infinite nothingness), it does have a concept of a hierarchy of intelligences that have awareness and intention. From the tholonic view, the epiphanies of Moses and Descartes were due to the intentions of a greater intelligence to instantiate itself, but not simply a greater intelligence, but many greater intelligences that are constantly in a stage of negotiation via conflict and cooperation