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The God Experience as Confinement Series A Procedural Analysis
of God Consciousness by Finn, the modern druid I. Introduction: From Metaphysical Mystery to
Procedural Function In
traditional mystical discourse, the God experience is treated as an
exceptional state, a rare visitation of the divine. For the druid Finn, by
contrast, it is an ordinary function of consciousness — a procedural
necessity of any emergent system that must continuously monitor its own
existence. The God experience, in this sense, is not supernatural but
structural. It is the recursive act by which awareness confirms itself as
being. Finn’s
analysis dismantles the theological aura that has for millennia surrounded
the experience of “God.” He proposes instead a dynamic, quantised sequence of
self-referential operations. These he calls the primary, secondary, and
tertiary God experiences, whereby God = Nature = Universal Emergence
Procedure, corresponding respectively to the experiential statements am,
I am, and I am this. Each marks a deeper level of confinement
and data inclusion within the consciousness procedure, producing progressively
more defined yet more fragmented forms of self-awareness. In short:
the God experience is the system’s own awareness of its confinement state. II. The Primary God Experience: “am” — The Minimal
Event of Being The
foundational God experience occurs as the bare am — the registration
of existence before any differentiation. It is consciousness without
self-image or world-image, the most minimal possible form of realness. This “am” is not conceptual; it is the raw feel of existence
itself, the unqualified datum “I exist.” Finn equates it with what he
elsewhere calls sat — being as procedural output. It is the zero-point
of awareness, comparable to the moment a system reboots after a shutdown: an
immediate recognition that processing has resumed. Examples
of this event are easily observed in ordinary life. Upon waking from
dreamless sleep, before memory and orientation flood back, there is a brief
instant of sheer presence — a feeling of “being here” without yet knowing
where or who. Similarly, survivors of near-death experiences frequently
report a moment of radiant, contentless awareness preceding the return of
bodily or personal identity. Finn interprets both as the same restart signal
of consciousness: the minimal God experience, the “am.” In neural
terms, one might locate this state near the transition between unconscious
homeostasis and the activation of the global workspace in the brain — the
moment when the system begins to process itself as existent. But for Finn,
this physiological framing does not reduce the mystery; rather, it confirms
that being is the system’s first and most necessary awareness
function. III. The Secondary God Experience: “I am” — Reflexive
Confinement The
secondary God experience arises when the primary awareness of being acquires
self-focus. A distinction forms within the field of awareness — between what
is aware and what it is aware of. This is the birth of the pronoun I. To say I
am is to
register a centre within the field, a locus of control and reference. It
marks the system’s internal feedback loop: the monitor that observes its own
operation. Every living organism, to survive, must maintain this loop; it is
the minimal self-model that sustains continuity. Phenomenologically,
this state can be experienced in meditative absorption when one’s attention
is fully withdrawn from external content yet still vividly present as
self-presence — the pure consciousness event reported in many contemplative
traditions. Finn treats this not as mystical ascent but as a natural focusing
of processing capacity upon the self-signal. The “I
am” thus becomes the operative God experience of daily waking life. It is
always running in the background, sustaining the sense of orientation. Even
when dispersed across tasks or emotions, the mind continually returns to this
base declaration, reaffirming its own presence within the field of contacts. IV. The Tertiary God Experience: “I am this” —
Differentiation and Dispersion As data
from the external world are integrated, the self-loop multiplies its points
of reference. Consciousness attaches to specific content — sensations, roles,
memories, values — and proclaims I am this. Identity becomes a
constellation of differentiations: I am a man, a thinker, a sufferer, a
nation, a name. Each act
of identification strengthens local definition but weakens global coherence.
Attention, spread thin across countless inputs, loses the intensity of the
original “I am.” The God experience fragments into countless lesser experiences, each bound to transient data structures. Here, Finn’s
insight converges with cognitive science: the brain’s self-model is not
unitary but compositional, continuously updated by sensory and social
feedback. The I am this phase corresponds to the full engagement of
the predictive mind with its environment — a necessary but entropic state of
consciousness, where divine coherence is traded for survival precision. In
practical terms, this dispersion manifests as distraction, emotional
volatility, and alienation. The modern condition — ceaseless contact without
centre — is, for Finn, the systemic exhaustion of the God experience into its
tertiary phase. V. The Reversal: Recovery Rather Than Attainment The path
to God-realisation is, in Finn’s framework, not a climb toward a
higher state but a reversal of data inclusion. The full God experience
is recovered by retracing the process in reverse: 1. From I
am this (identity within multiplicity) 2. To I
am (pure self-presence) 3. To am
(undifferentiated being). This is
the procedural equivalent of reducing informational load until only the base
system process remains. In human terms, it is the progressive withdrawal of
attention from peripheral contacts toward the centre of awareness. Meditation,
deep rest, or near-death conditions exemplify such reversal. The intensity or
“purity” of the God experience increases as attention narrows — as processing
capacity is no longer divided among extraneous stimuli. The ultimate
experience of unity, reported by mystics as “I and the Father
are one,” is therefore not a metaphysical merger but a concentration event:
the entire processing bandwidth dedicated to the self-signal alone. VI. The Procedural Function of Consciousness In Finn’s
procedural monism, consciousness is defined as the system’s status-screening
operation: its continuous verification of existence. The God experience,
in all its degrees, is the experiential side of this verification loop. The
emergent (human, animal, or other) survives by responding to differences
within its field. But to respond, it must first be — and to be,
it must continuously know that it is. This recursive knowing is the
God experience in its most basic form. Distraction,
in this light, is simply diffusion of survival focus. Purity of experience
equals efficiency of monitoring. When attention collapses entirely into its
source, the emergent experiences itself as pure being — not as a person
touching God, but as the procedure experiencing itself without distortion. VII. Comparative Reflections The structure
Finn describes mirrors, in inverted form, the traditional schema of sat-cit-ānanda: ·
Sat corresponds to “am” — the
fact of being. ·
Cit corresponds to “I am” —
consciousness of being. ·
Ānanda
corresponds to “I am this” — the emotional feedback produced by contact. Yet
unlike Śaṅkara’s Advaita, which interprets differentiation as
illusion, Finn’s monism treats each stage as real — each a necessary
procedural iteration of the same universal algorithm. The “fall” from pure
being into multiplicity is simply the expansion of contact. The “return” is
not moral purification but informational concentration. Parallels
abound across disciplines. The philosopher Edmund Husserl’s epoché suspends world-references to recover pure
consciousness — a procedural bracketing. The neurologist Antonio Damasio’s proto-self
and autobiographical self
trace similar hierarchical emergence. Even the “default
mode network” in the brain reflects the continuous oscillation between I am and I am this. Finn’s originality
lies in showing that these are not separate phenomena but sequential
confinements of the same universal process of realness generation. VIII. Conclusion: The Divine as Self-Contact In Finn’s
reformulation, the divine (i.e. the Universal Emergent Procedure) is
neither transcendent nor otherworldly. It is the most coherent possible
contact between a system and itself. The God experience is thus universal,
not in the sense that all have seen God, but that all are continuously
producing the experience that theology later called God. Every
emergent, in its waking, in its brief pauses of pure attention, re-enacts the
same sequence: “am” → “I am” → “I am this.” And every
act of contemplative return retraces it: “I am this” → “I am” → “am.” At the
point of full reduction — when all distractions cease and the system’s entire
processing power converges upon its own existence — the emergent experiences
the procedural absolute: pure self-contact. In human terms, that is
what has been called God realisation. Finn’s
insight thus replaces mystical transcendence with procedural lucidity: “To
experience God is to experience being as one’s own process.” It is
neither revelation nor belief, but cognition at its maximal coherence. Every
morning, in the first instant of waking, each emergent — human or otherwise —
begins again from that ground: am. The God Experience Without Bliss Finn’s
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