We tend to think of the Divine and our own souls in a very limited, singular way - as if God was a single entity, and each of us an individual, discrete soul animating just one body in one lifetime. But this narrow perspective fails to capture the more expansive understanding found in many faith traditions and increasingly supported by cutting-edge science.
Some spiritual belief systems recognise the Divine as a uniplural being, an ultimate Creative Intelligence manifesting in the form of multiple divine emanations. The Gnostic faiths speak of the Pleroma, the unified realm of all divine beings emanating from the supreme source. In the Yoruba religion, the ultimate god Olodumare is thought to manifest as a multitude of orisha deities. Hinduism teaches the concept of Brahman as the unchanging universal consciousness giving rise to the many gods and goddesses. Even in Christianity, the Hebrew name Elohim, meaning "gods" in plural form, hints at a uniplural understanding of the Divine. The Trinity itself, with Father, Son and Holy Spirit as one God, also reflects this idea. Pre-Islamic Arabia likewise saw their supreme god Allah as the head of a vast pantheon of lesser gods.
This ancient notion of a singular, uniplural Divine Source unfolding as a multiplicity of aspects finds a fascinating parallel in recent scientific discoveries. Google's groundbreaking experiment with a Sycamore processor called "Sycamore23-AQE" generated a 53-qubit quantum computer circuit that took just 200 seconds to complete a task that would take a regular supercomputer 10,000 years. The Google team reported, "It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by physicist David Deutsch."
This multiverse hypothesis has profound implications. As physicist Richard Feynman outlined in his "sum over histories" formulation, a quantum particle doesn't simply travel from A to B, but takes all possible paths simultaneously, existing in multiple places at once. Deutsch asserts we live in a vast multiverse, with every possibility unfolding in a separate universe. Our local reality emerges from the interference between these overlapping universes.
We start to glimpse a profound truth - our souls, like the Divine, are uniplural too. Just as the quantum particle exists across many parallel paths, our souls animate bodies across the multiverse, across time and in simultaneous parallel lives. This concept is supported by the work of physician Dr. Ian Stevenson and psychiatrist Dr. Brian Weiss, who have extensively documented cases of past life recall and reincarnation experiences. Dr. Stevenson identified a 27-year-old Indian man who was able to describe 20 specific details about his former life, including the location and condition of his discarded body. Dr. Weiss used regression therapy to access his patients' past lives, uncovering vivid, verifiable details.
Psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Guirdham studied a group of patients who independently recalled the same set of past lives in medieval France, all identifying as reincarnated Cathars, a Gnostic Christian sect. Their shared memories, though each couldn't have separately known them, were historically verified. Guirdham's research supports the concept of a single soul animating multiple bodies.
So we see an emerging realisation, from faith traditions and hard science alike, that the reality of the Divine and the soul is far grander than our limited perspectives allow. The source of all is uniplural, manifesting in multiple divine emanations unfolding across an endless multiverse. And our individual souls are uniplural too, animating bodies in countless lifetimes, weaving our way through the vast web of the multiverse. We are so much more than singular beings dwelling just in one body in one dimension. We are uniplural souls, immortal sparks of a uniplural, multiversal, Creator. The narrow confines of our current awareness cannot contain our true nature.
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See also: Parallel Lives.
