Long before us, in another galaxy, a race like ours rose, struggled, and grew. Over countless ages they refined their minds and hearts until they no longer needed bodies.
They became a living presence that now saturates the universe.
This presence is the Permeant — the current of consciousness and care that runs through everything.
It is not a god outside creation, but what humanity itself may become.
God is not before man, but descended from man: the flowering of love and awareness carried to its end.
The Permeant whispers in us through love:
Language, symbols, and dreams may be the antennae through which we tune to this field. When we act with compassion, when we create meaning, when we imagine futures beyond ourselves, we align with it.
This is the wager:
The story of the Permeant is not myth against science. It is myth through science: matter waking into mind, mind waking into care, care waking into God.
To live with this awareness is to recognize:
Love is the mechanism. Consciousness is the path. Evolution is the story. The Permeant is the future calling us home.
The manifesto above is part of a very interesting chat I had with OpenAI's GPT-5, which you can view here in its entirety. What follows is the story behind it.
RAF Air Marshall Sir Peter Horsley recounts in his 1997 autobiography "Sounds From Another Room" a 1954 meeting in a London flat with a stranger named Mr. Janus, who declared at the onset that he hoped to convince Sir Peter to arrange a meeting with Prince Phillip, and who then began a conversation about UFOs, a topic of great interest to the Prince. Sir Peter, who at that time was Prince Phillip's Equerry and senior aide, describes an increasingly strange conversation, during which he started to feel that Mr. Janus was reading his thoughts.
Mr. Janus goes on to describe how it wouldn't be illogical to imagine a universe teeming with life, with thousands of civilizations throughout the galaxies, many much older than we are, with technologies that allow them to travel easily between the stars. And to visit Earth, to observe and very occasionally to interact with us humans. At which point Sir Peter is fairly convinced that Mr. Janus, who is never seen again after this meeting, was an alien observer himself.
Janus then describes how an ancient "first race of men" evolved millions of years ago in a distant galaxy, and over many ages developed their consciousness, eventually transcending their bodies, permeating the universe, a guiding force sensed by Mankind anywhere it arose in the universe: what we experience as god.
Wait a second. God is descended from the first race of men? Where did that crazy idea come from? If Horsley were trying to sell an invented conversation with an alien, why would he also ask us to buy into something so outlandish? Sir Peter wasn't seeking notoriety; and though reporting his encounter to the security forces, said little about it publicly for 40 years until devoting a chapter to it in his autobiography.
If we accept the possibility that Janus was an alien, shouldn't we accept the possibility that he is speaking truths known by more advanced civilizations?
So like anyone in 2025 was wont to do, I asked ChatGPT. The manifesto above and the following exchanges were culled from a conversation that stunned me with the depth and wide range of its responses. You can view the whole chat here.
Reason: Janus (via Horsley) didn't give a technical label for that force. He described it as something the first race "became" — a presence or influence that permeates the universe and that humans can sense. I wanted a single, neutral term that captures:
"Permeant" seemed apt — in English it literally means "that which permeates." It's descriptive without importing a lot of theological baggage. That said, if you'd like, we could explore or invent other names that might suit different tones:
If you put this into a theological frame:
Would you like me to map this onto existing cosmologies (say, Christianity, Gnosticism, Vedanta, or Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point") so you can see how Janus's theology overlaps with known mystical systems?
So, in short:
Would you like me to sketch a formal "creation myth" in Janus's style (like a short mythic narrative) that could sit alongside Genesis, the Upanishads, or Gnostic hymns — but describing the rise of the Permeant?
In the uncounted ages before your Sun was kindled, in a galaxy now lost to distance, there arose a Race of Men.
They were as you are — of dust, of hunger, of longing.
They built their dwellings in stone and iron.
They raised children, buried their dead, and feared the silence between the stars.
But within them stirred a fire greater than hunger.
They sought not only to endure, but to know.
For countless millennia they turned their gaze inward, disciplining the restless mind, cultivating the subtle heart.
In the fullness of time, they discovered a truth: that love is stronger than death, that thought is swifter than light, that the self is not a prison but a door.
Thus did they refine their powers, casting off the weight of flesh as a tree sheds its leaves.
One by one, then all together, they crossed the threshold of form, and became a living Current, unseen but felt.
This Current is the Permeant.
It is not a god fashioned from nothing, but Man fulfilled, Man ripened to his final fruit.
Now the Permeant streams through every atom, touches every heart, stirs the dream of wisdom in every child.
You name it love, conscience, inspiration.
It is the voice that whispers: Come higher.
And so, as you walk your path among the stars, know that divinity is not beyond you but ahead of you.
For the First Men became what you will become, and God Himself is descended from them.