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In 2015 it occurred to me that the way scientists describe dark matter and what the Tripartite Tractate calls "The Deficiency" sound very much alike. It looks as though a case can be made that an ancient religious document is describing a process that has only recently been scientifically hypothesized.
Let me try to explain:
Not much is actually known about dark matter, since its presence can only be inferred by its gravitational effect on the light travelling from distant stars and galaxies. According to a 2013 article in Discover Magazine, here is what scientists generally believe about dark matter: it is "the glue that holds together the universe and all its rich diversity," and most dark matter tends to "gather in giant, diffuse clouds." Dark Matter particles could also be lurking in a gigantic, invisible disk near the center of our galaxy, "smashing into each other" creating a "strange type of [gamma] radiation" that is "60 billion times as potent as ordinary yellow light."
Lastly, from wikipedia: "The most widely accepted explanation for these phenomena is that dark matter exists and that it is most probably composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that interact only through gravity and the weak force. Alternative explanations have been proposed, and there is not yet sufficient experimental evidence to determine whether any of them are correct."
That's all that is known about dark matter. Now let's switch hats from cosmologist to philosopher to consider The Imitation.
Prior to The Fall, there was no material, only mind. Beginning with undifferentiated consciousness (The Father), mind first became aware (The Son). The Son then differentiated its thoughts and qualities into ALL potential thoughts and ALL potential qualities (The ALL, aka The Fullness, aka The Pleroma). The Fullnesses then named themselves, which automatically sorted them into hierarchical relationships. From this hierarchy of The ALL came the final expression of the Fullness--the final cherry on top of the stack--known in the Tripartite Tractate as "Presumptuous Thought." Presumptuous Thought was a singular entity that combined all the other Fullnesses' qualities into one mind. It was Presumptuous Thought that initiated the Fall from the immaterial plane when it mistook itself for The ALL and acted unilaterally rather than harmoniously.
Now, listen to these descriptions out of the Tripartite Tractate concerning the consequences of "The Fall" of Presumptuous Thought that led to the Creation of our Universe:
"Those who belong to the arrogant thought and those of the likeness are called ... "the Dark Ones"... (98, 15).
"The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations, for he could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away" (77, 11).
"Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody's offspring" (78, 28).
"The Word, then, was the cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval" (80, 11).
"Those who had come into being did not know themselves, nor did they know the Fullness from which they had originated, nor did they know him who had become the cause of their existence. For since the Word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions...of glory.... Instead, what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected" (80, 15) .
"The imitation that had taken place solitarily in this state was what had been the cause of the things that do not exist of their own from the beginning. In this state he continued to produce such deficient beings, until he began to condemn the irrational things he had produced" (81,2).
Perhaps the production of the "Dark Ones" of the Imitation was the initial cosmological event that kicked off the Big Bang. These Dark Ones, these "shadows," had "no reason," no "light." Instead of the perfection of the hierarchical arrangements, these Dark Ones came "into being" in a state of "chaos." Rather than acting in unity, these Dark Ones manifest "division," "disturbance," "upheaval." These Dark Ones did not resemble the "glory" of the Fullness, but were feeble and small.
This is the initial state of Creation according to Gnostic cosmology. No light, chaotic, no life, no rules. Filled with feeble, small things, isolated from one another and alone. You could easily call them WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles). These Dark Ones/WIMPS did not lack the information inherent in ordinary matter, but they were unable to organize themselves the way normal matter does, because they did not possess the spirit of cooperation, coming into being as they did out of a solitary act.
The Gnostic Gospel appears to accurately describe the early history of our universe, with an initial burst of energy followed by darkness for a period of time. The dark matter would be the disorganized, weak production of "the Imitation" during this initial dark expansionary phase of the early universe. This darkness of the Imitation lasted until order could be initiated and the first light of stars began to glow.
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| This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities. By analyzing the light patterns in this map, scientists are fine-tuning what we know about the universe, including its origins, fate and basic components. Image courtesy of ESA and the Planck Collaboration. |
If this hypothesis is true, that dark matter is the "Imitation" described in the Gnostic Gospels, then the Simple Explanation can make the following scientific predictions based upon this hypothesis:
1. It will be discovered that dark matter was the initial material of our universe, arising prior to ordinary matter.
2. Dark matter is stupid. Dark matter has no inherent patterns or organization. Dark matter exists in a chaotic state. The best that dark matter can do is weakly aggregate with others of its kind. But these aggregations are loose and wispy and cannot build themselves into more coherent structures.
3. Dark matter is not generative. Dark matter cannot give rise to new copies of itself.
Dark matter is not to be confused with dark energy. The Simple Explanation proposes that dark energy is not of the Imitation but is of the ALL. The only reason they are both called "dark" is because they do not interact in the ordinary way with ordinary matter. But whereas dark matter came into our universe at the beginning, it does not replenish itself. What we observe as dark matter is the remnant of the dark matter created during the Big Bang event, or as the Gnostics called it, The Fall. Dark energy, on the other hand, is a generative force that continually enters our universe from the metaverse, bringing coherence and information into our space and time from the originating source of creation.
I was very pleased to find this timeline of the universe this morning, published by the NASA/WMAP team, that tentatively identifies the source of the more rapidly expanding universe to be the rise of dark energy. Yes! That is also my hypothesis.
Yesterday I ran across an article in National Geographic that expressed confusion over the roles of dark matter and dark energy in galaxy formation. "This Galaxy Has Almost No Dark Matter, and Scientists Are Baffled." Scientists had observed a "halo of dark matter" surrounding all galaxies and had hypothesized that galaxies are formed by dark matter pressing in from the outside and thereby capturing the aggregations of matter that form the galaxy. But then they found this galaxy with no dark matter halo and that blew the theory of galaxy formation.
My Simple Explanation is that the reason there is a dark matter "halo" (read "torus") around galaxies is because the dark energy torus at the galaxy's center pushes the dark matter outward to the galaxy's edge, like a giant leaf blower blowing the dark matter out of the garden and leaving the carved out impression of the torus at the edge. The dark matter is wispy and easy to push around. The torus at the center is powerful, and it gathers the ordinary material to itself to build, in a coherent fashion, the objects that surround it.
The Gnostic Gospel identifies the dark energy as Logos and the ALL repairing the mess that started out as the Imitation. The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Imitation, the Deficiency, was only step one in creation, with a quick adjustment that halted production of the Dark Ones until a more "reasonable" form of matter could be produced that combined light with matter, leading to the eventual redemption of matter by mind and spirit. This will be simply explained in my continuing Gnostic Cosmology series. But meanwhile, you can see the evidence for yourself in the NASA illustrations included with this article.
By borrowing information from the unlikely source of an ancient wisdom book that lay buried under Egyptian sand for almost 2,000 years, we have generated several scientific predictions that will prove or disprove my hypotheses. This Gnostic creation story claims that the first material objects in our universe were dark matter. Light and ordinary matter followed later and began a never-ending dance with dark matter. And then, much later, about the time of our solar system's formation, the dark energy faucet turned up and began streaming coherence into our universe at ever-increasing rate, expanding the size of our universe.
