“There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, at peace.”

“Lord, I don’t understand what existed at the Beginning.  It sounds as if you are describing Your own birth as well as the birth of the universe.  What were You before the explosion of Creation?  A pregnant nothingness?”

A passable description.  There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, still and at peace, like calm waters, lucid, not nothing, but not something either.  The universe contains many things, not just somethings and nothings.

What kind of Nothingness can explode into Being?  Ah, I thought, maybe a Nothingness that is not just nothing, but is the Plenum of Potentiality for All Things.  Perhaps the possibility of all things cannot fail to spill over into some actuality.

I could not settle any of these questions in my own mind.  All I could do was to continue to ask questions.  “Lord, what was there before?  What motivates the act of creation?”

I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.

“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person.  Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces.  ‘Who am I?  What am I?  Am I an I?  What is an I?’  A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”

“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way?  Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”

I received the sense:  “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete.  The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”

And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.

 

“Early people saw my presence everywhere…”

As early peoples caught glimpses of the divine in art or in nature, it must have been natural to think there were gods in things.  In fact, I had been told.

Some elements of polytheism are merely superstitious, but other aspects are genuinely responsive to the many ways in which I present myself.  It may seem odd to your modern mind to think of fire as a god, but why do you think I made fire mysterious and fascinating?  It is a physical metaphor in itself—it is created out of nothing and disappears into nothing, grows and dies, gives life and warmth as well as pain and destruction, and it looks both hypnotically attractive and frightening.

As you know, I am very powerful.  I do manifest Myself in storms and thunder, in the ocean and great waves—in the power that drives the universe and that manifests itself in each particular event.  The large cosmic forces are divine and so are their concrete manifestations in specific incidents.  That does not mean that every rainstorm is a specific communication or is there to advance or retard some particular action, but it does mean that every rainstorm expresses an aspect of Me.

Early peoples saw My presence everywhere, saw the spiritual indwelling of things, their powers and potencies and the divine element in all that.  But there was always an awareness, however dim, that there was a single spiritual reality behind them all.

I was taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning

“I was taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning …”  

One day, in quiet reflection, I was taken deep into the Self, taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning.  Here is how I described it right afterwards:

“There was a sense of things shattering, like crockery breaking, or like the shell of an egg breaking.  (I think of Kabbalah and its image of Creation as divine vessels breaking.)  Then there is a river, or milk, flowing out from amidst the shards.  The river is clouded in mist and flows a long way down canyons of shards or rocks.  Until it settles in a pool below.  Tranquil waters.  This is when Life begins.  Cool, calm but rippling waters.”