(bits in computer jargon), a computer that can think, i.e. has a 'personal consciousness' (Professor Michie, Edinburgh University). This consciousness is attached to milliards of circuits: it would be destroyed if the computer exploded. Our computer is highly intelligent and capable of, ultra-rapid combinations. There is nothing it does not know.

In spite of its consciousness and omniscience the thinking computer is not 'happy', for in spite of its tremendous performance there is something it cannot think out, reckon out or work out, namely experience. But it wants to amass experience. As it has no rival of anything like the same calibre to obtain experience from, it decides to send the hundred milliard bits off its central body out to get information by exploding itself knowing perfectly well that it would definitely lose its personal consciousness by so doing ... if it had not in its insuperable cleverness programmed the future after its self-destruction long beforehand.

Before the bits are catapulted on their long journey to gain experience, the clever computer has programmed magnetic impulses inside them with the order to reassemble at x place at y time. When this hour strikes, the milliards of bits obediently return to the complicated machinery with its 'personal consciousness' and bring home experiences, like bees bringing honey to the hive.

From the moment of the explosion to the moment of the return no bit 'knew' that it was and would now be again a minute part of a larger consciousness. If a single bit with its minimal capacity for thought could ask the question: 'What is the purpose of my breakneck journey?' or 'Who created me, where do I come from?', there would be no answer. Thus the tremendous journey was the beginning and end of an act, a kind of 'creation' of consciousness multiplied by the factor EXPERIENCE.

This bold comparison from the arsenal of science-fiction is meant as an aid in tracking down the phenomenon which existed before original matter. Terrible simplificateur! I beg your pardon, but it gets us a little further.

All human traditions assure us that 'spirit' (or the comprehensive synonym 'God') was 'there' before any beginning, i.e. before the origin of matter. The (original) spirit then decided to become matter, to transform itself. (... and the word was made flesh ...) 'Spirit' is not tangible or measurable with instruments. How are we to imagine it? In a gaseous state? This is scarcely possible, gas molecules are already matter. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that 'spirit', that mysterious unknown IT, transformed itself into a gaseous aggregation during the first stage of its materialization.

This assumption no longer smacks of science-fiction, for every astrophysical theory of the origin of the universe begins with the gaseous state of the original matter - with gas molecules, which slowly and steadily combine to form lumps of matter. But if a gaseous state was the proven original state [2] of all matter and the original spirit, that simply means that all existing matter was permeated by the original spirit, a claim that is manifest in all theosophical and esoteric religions. Then, to put it crudely, matter would be crystallized sublimated spirit.

It makes no difference which kind of matter one thinks of -lava, rock, plants, animals or men - they ultimately all come from the same original state. It even makes no difference whether we postulate matter from our planet, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri or the Andromeda Nebule. Matter is creation per se and itself the product of creation.

Matter has transversed a million fold paths of evolution. A stone, product of the same origin and the same original state, can ask itself no questions. But life clearly develops from 'dead' matter, there is no longer the slightest academic doubt about that. Living matter, say a cell, develops over millions of years into complicated organisms. Development and reactions by organisms are governed by brains with their grey mass of mil-hardfold cells: they produce 'personal consciousness' by chemical and electrical conversions of matter. Intelligence does not appear until after the existence of personal consciousness which can ask questions. (Descartes: 'Cogito, ergo sum' - I think, therefore I am.)

So according to the history of evolution, intelligence is superior to any matter below its state of consciousness. Matter is dominated by it. Intelligence is more closely related to the original spirit than dead matter - intelligence can communicate with one another, they can ask questions at a high level:

'Who created me? What is the purpose and meaning of existence?' Pursuing my explanatory image: with their brains bits seek contact with the original consciousness, without understanding that they themselves are components of the consciousness. They may seek for the 'spirit', for the IT, synonym for creator or god, but they do not 'realize' that what they seek is around them and in them.

A fanciful idea?

I leave it to the scientists to answer that question.

Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), English Astronomer and physicist, Director of the Cambridge Observatory, [3] discovered the pulsation theory of the Cephids. Eddington championed a 'selective subjectivism', of natural laws, in that he assumed that the basic physical laws are essentially determined by the structure of the process of knowledge and asserted that the matter of the world is the matter of the spirit.

The natural philosopher Bernhard Bavink (1879-1947), who strove to close the gap between natural science and religion, held the following view [4]: The material organization of the world appears to us today as perhaps the transient manifestation of an entirely spiritual concept.

Max Planck (1858-1947), who opened up new paths to physics with his quantum theory and won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918, admitted: As a physicist, i.e. as a man who has devoted his life to the most matter of fact branch of science, namely, the investigation of matter, I am surely free of any suspicion of fanaticism. And so after my research into the atom I say this to you: there is no such thing as matter per ser All matter originates from and consists of a force which sets the atomic particles in oscillation and concentrates them into the minute solar system of the atom. But as there is neither an intelligence nor an internal force in the whole universe, we must assume a conscious intelligent spirit behind this force. This spirit is the basic principle of all matter ....

Sir James Hopwood Jeans (1877-1946), English mathematician, physicist and astronomer, who was mainly a pioneer in the fields of thermodynamics, stellar dynamics and cosmogony, was especially famous for his theory of the origin of the planets.[5] Sir James wrote: Today scholars are fairly unanimous and physicists almost completely unanimous in saying that the whole current of knowledge is moving in the direction of a non-mechanical kind of reality. The Universe gradually looks more like a great thought than a great machine.

If matter is a product of 'spirit' and vice-versa spirit a product of matter, are spirit and matter of the same nature only in a different state of aggregation? Fifty years ago people used to ask if energy could be converted into matter. Einstein's formula E = mc<2> gave the world-shattering answer. The hydrogen bomb was a proof that could not be overlooked or unheard. Might we ask today if

'crystallized' spirit can be set free? The analogical conclusion is obvious. Matter is just as much a form of energy as 'crystallized' spirit. Consequently spirit is simultaneously energy and energy simultaneously spirit. Consciousness, defined as undoubtedly related to the 'spirit', must be another (if as yet unknown) form of energy.

The Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) is considered as the founder of the 'energy principle', according to which all the energy in the universe is constant and all forms of energy are convertible into each other.