One of my favorite books is a tiny volume entitled Mister God, This Is Anna. It was written by a man who identifies himself only as Fynn. This wonderful little book tells the story of Anna who, it seems, is an angel in the body of a five-year-old girl. She is in love with God, and her insights, her spiritual wisdom, and her eagerness to be faithful to "Mr. God" become a blessing to all who read her story.

Anna has an incredibly inventive mind, and her imagination helps us make sense of the most complicated and involved concepts. One of them involves points. Follow her thinking here.

Human beings are three-dimensional. You can walk around them, see them from every angle, and feel the mass of their bodies. Now, take a photograph of a person. When you look at the print, you realize that the three-dimensional person has been reduced to two dimensions, height and width. Next, cut the image of that person out of the print. When you turn that piece of paper sideways, you have reduced the original person to a straight line, to one dimension, length. Finally, take that line and turn it on end, and you have a point. The three dimensions of the original have been reduced to a dot. But everything that was in that original living, breathing individual is represented within that dot, within that zero-dimensional point.

Stay with us here. This means that everything in the world can be reduced to a point, a single dot which represents its completeness. And all the dots look the same, so at that level you can't tell an elephant from a gnat. Crazy, you say? But what about a newly fertilized egg? All eggs are points that look alike at the moment of conception. Yet, they have within them all the various life forms which nature can produce. Those dots flower into an incredible variety of three-dimensional things.

When we move in the other direction, we see that a two-dimensional photograph is a step down from the three-dimensional original. But how do we know that that original is not a step down from some larger four-dimensional hyper-original of which we can't even conceive? And that that is not a reduction of a five-dimensional reality, and so on? Anna states that a dot is the irreducible level, the point below which there can no longer be a step down. And God is the opposite end of that scale, a point where there can no longer be a step up.

It's amazing how many realities in science support this way of thinking. Cloning demonstrates that the simplest cell in your body has the potential to reproduce the entire organism, which is you. Every cell in your body carries a tiny image of you, as though it was stepped down and down again from the three dimensional you until it became nothing more than a dot.

The Big Bang theory says that the universe began in an infinitesimally small point of matter, perfectly dense and perfectly complete, so that when it exploded it created everything that is the universe. Yet in reverse, the universe was stepped down again and again until the entire cosmos was contained in a dot of matter.

If the Big Bang theory is a description of the physical side of our world, then there also has to be a spiritual Big Bang. And that must be another way to describe God. The souls, the consciousness, the spiritual life force which animate the physical universe were created when God "exploded," when God said, "Let there be." You and I, our awareness, our history and future, were all within God at that moment, and so we are in fact scattered particles of the divine.

Thus, when you step history down, again and again, it arrives at a single point, and that point is God. God is the reality at both ends of the scale, the tiniest atom at the beginning, and the grandest expanse at the end. And in that reality is everything else. So, finally, we are all one thing. And that one thing is God. And if we are dots created by God stepping down through many stages, doesn't that mean that within our dot is the potential to become like God?

Posted 3-15-04

Copyright: John W. Sloat 2004