HIM Blog #4: How Christianity unlocks the secrets to consciousness (Part 1): The Holy Infinite Memory

As my journey towards the truth of who God is turned onto the path of the Trinitarian Lord, it quickly became clear to me that the mysteries of consciousness, which has been the drive behind my writing, were to be found in in their fullness within Christianity. It was after reading the works of St Thomas Aquinas and various other academic papers by Christian scholars that I could see how Christianity provides solutions to the deepest questions we have in regard to the origin of consciousness as a fundamental attribute of God the Father and how He uses the awareness He has of Himself as the impetus for the act of creating. Before embarking on such enlightening information, I had already formulated a detailed and thoroughly researched cosmological model of consciousness, which I believe provides some useful insights in framing consciousness as the transformative reality-creating power belonging to and utilised by a transcendent eternal being, referred to as the Infinite Self, in order to create the universe, driven solely by the love of creating. At this stage, this model was called the Fractal of Self (FOS) model of consciousness and the central characteristic of the Infinite Self was one’s awareness of Self. Because the Infinite Self knew that nothing but oneself existed on the foundational ground of reality, the Infinite Self also had pure knowledge of one’s unlimited self-worth, meaning this divine individual was also the source of unconditional love. As well as articulating a philosophy in relation to the nature of consciousness, this model also demonstrates through connections to established scientific principles how these ‘background’ conditions of reality can give rise to a fractal creation based on a constant hierarchal nesting process of fields that represent unfolding memories for the Infinite Self, enfolding and integrating within each other.

This model clearly already had elements that were aligning with classical theism but my understanding of this ‘Infinite Self’, aka God, was limited to my experiences in meditation. However, these experiences initiated a beautiful relationship with God that has continually deepened, which is what encouraged me to begin writing and formulating a model of consciousness grounded in His existence. I can see now that this initial model was a ‘first draft’ that would orientate my direction of looking and learning about the truth of God in the right direction. I knew this ‘Infinite Self’ was the same God of the Bible, which then prompted me to further my research in the direction of Christianity. My mind had already been blown away with my already established relationship with God, but it turns out that He had so much more to show me. One of the most amazing things I’ve experienced with my connection to God is that He will often help me formulate the right questions as opposed to simply delivering the explicit answers I’m looking for. One of the many beautiful aspects of Christianity is that it is incredibly rich in its history, which is built on the work done by many Christians over two thousand years who have been guided by their relationship with the Holy Spirit.

When I asked the question to God, ‘how does Christianity give us insights to the nature of consciousness’ and prayed on this curiosity, I found myself researching the works of one of the most influential Saints of our Faith; the great St Thomas Aquinas. Eventually, this led to a new formulation of my old consciousness model based on Christianity and principles of Thomism called the ‘holy infinite memory (HIM) model of consciousness’. Similar to the FOS model, the HIM model emphasized that God’s identity can be understood as the infinite being who is conscious of only Himself, as His presence completely fills eternity with no possibility of another existing on this foundational level of reality. Although this sentiment towards God is an age-old perspective, especially within Christianity, I felt that there wasn’t much emphasis on God’s character, as an individual that is infinitely conscious of Himself, which points to the Father as the origin of consciousness. As I began reading Aquinas’ ‘Summa Theologica’ however, it became clear that Aquinas viewed God as being hierarchically and foremostly aware of only Himself, which was a fundamental attribute of His character.

These two following quotes demonstrate how Aquinas saw that God’s awareness of Himself is a very important aspect of understanding ‘who’ God is; “God primarily and essentially knows Himself alone.”[1] And, “If therefore anything else than God is the first object of His understanding, something else will be His perfection, and will be nobler than He, which is impossible.”[2] This fundamental characteristic of God is also understood in classical theism as the pure actuality (pure act) of God; that is God’s self-understanding is eternal and unchanging, as it has always and will remain forever complete without potentiality and void of any process of ‘becoming’. Therefore, God’s knowledge/consciousness of Himself is the most perfect knowledge possible and is the eternal act that He is always engaged in. Therefore, I argue that pure self-consciousness is the essence of God, as what He is (a being of self-consciousness) and what He does (being self-conscious) is the same.

Within the HIM model, the self-knowing essence of God is also framed as the ‘holy infinite memory’. I believe understanding God’s essence in these terms provides further insights into the nature of God the Father.

It is generally understood that God is the infinite immaterial mind of eternity, which encompasses the whole of uncreated and created reality. The way in which we understand our finite human memories is that they are immaterial snapshots of reality that make up the contents of our mind. If we try to comprehend the nature of God’s mind, it makes sense to perceive it as being wholly made up of the immutable memory of Himself, of which all other contents can only be understood through this hierarchal memory of one’s own existence. God’s essence, as the holy infinite memory of Himself, also makes sense because we often associate God as the omniscient being that can never forget anything, as He is the great ‘rememberer’ of all things possible within the divine possibility that is Himself, which includes all things that have passed and are yet to pass and is done through the singular eternal act of firstly remembering oneself. Finally, as Aquinas makes clear, God is the only being in existence who is of pure and complete actuality void of potentiality, which indeed articulates the nature of what a memory is. Our experience of creating memories, can be simply described as a snapshot of reality that is completely composed of fully actualised information, as a result of direct first-person experience of the present moment. The consciousness we possess literally transforms potential possibilities into actualised information as we experience the always occurring ‘now’ that becomes stored and organised within our mind amongst the vast sum of other memories. God the Father possesses infinite self-consciousness that never moves away from His own eternal presence. Therefore, He is in an unchanging posture of actualising the memory of Himself, which is to say that God, beyond creation, is in an immutable state of self-remembrance, as His identity is the self-referential infinite holy memory of Himself.

To understand the transcendent Father in this way also helps us comprehend why His nature is so merciful and loving also. God’s love, as an axiomatic attribute of His identity, only makes sense when we recognise Him as the trinitarian source of consciousness. When we frame the consciousness/memory of Himself as the unchanging essence that is shared amongst the three persons of the trinity, we are able to understand more deeply how this eternal structure is crucial for God to love Himself. Love reciprocates amongst all three persons equally, which is how God loves Himself beyond creation. So far, we have only begun to examine the nature of the Father, however, we must explicate further how the Trinity can be understood as the holy infinite memory structure of God and, thus, of consciousness, which we will examine in the next blog.

[1]St. Thomas Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures (Burns and Oates: London 1905), p. 44.

[2] Ibid.

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