Session 882

Chapter 1: Before the Beginning

Session 882

The universe will begin yesterday.  The universe began tomorrow.  Both of these statements are quite meaningless.  The tenses are wrong, and perhaps your time sense is completely outraged.  Yet the statement: The universe began in some distant past”, is, in basic terms, just as meaningless.

In fact, the first two statements, while making no logical sense, do indeed hint of phenomena that show time itself to be no more than a creative construct.  Time and space are in a fashion part of the furniture of your universe.

The very experience of passing moments belongs to your psychological rooms in the same way that clocks are attached to your walls.  Whenever science or religion seeks the origin of the universe, they search for it in the past.  The universe is being created now.  Creation occurs in each moment, in your terms.  The illusion of time itself is being created now.  It is therefore somewhat futile to look for the origins of the universe by using a time scheme that is in itself, at the very least, highly relative.

Your now, or present moment, is a psychological platform.  It seems that the universe began with an initial burst of energy of some kind.  Evolutionists cannot account for its cause.  Many religious people believe that a god exists in a larger dimension of reality, and that he created the universe while being himself outside of it.  He set it into motion.  Many individuals, following either persuasion, believe that regardless of its source, the [universe] must run out of energy.  Established science is quite certain that no energy can now be created or destroyed, but only transformed.  Science sees energy and matter as being basically the same thing, appearing differently under varying circumstances.

In certain terms, science and religion are both dealing with the idea of an objectively created universe.  Either God “made it”, or physical matter, in some unexplained manner, was formed after an initial explosion of energy, and consciousness emerged from that initially dead matter in a way yet to be explained.

Instead, consciousness formed matter.  As I have said before, each atom and molecule has its own consciousness.  Consciousness and matter and energy are one, but consciousness initiates the transformation of energy into matter.  In those terms, the “beginning” of your universe was a triumph in the expansion of consciousness, as it learned to translate itself into physical form.  The universe emerged into actuality in the same way, but to a different degree, that any idea emerges from what you think of as subjectivity into physical expression.

The consciousness of each reader of this book existed before the universe was formed (in your terms) but that consciousness was unmanifest.  Your closest approximation – and it is an approximation only – of the state of being that existed before the universe was formed is the dream state.  In that state before the beginning, your consciousness existed free of space and time, aware of immense probabilities.  This is extremely difficult to verbalize, yet it is very important that such an attempt be made.  Your consciousness is a part of an infinitely original creative process.

I will purposely avoid using the word “God” because of the connotations placed upon it by conventional religion.  I will make an attempt to explain the characteristics of this divine process throughout this book.  I call the process “All That Is”.  All That Is is so much a part of its creations that it is almost impossible to separate the “creator from the creations”, for each creation also carries indelibly within it the characteristics of its source.

If you have thought that the universe followed a mechanistic model, then you would have to say that each portion of this “cosmic machine” created itself, knowing its position in the entire “future construction”.  You would have to say further that each portion came gladly out of its own source individually, neatly tailored to its position, while at the same time that individual source was also as intimately the source of each other individual portion.

I am not saying that the universe is the result of some “psychological machine”, either, but that each portion of consciousness is a part of All That Is, and that the universe falls together in a spontaneous divine order – and that each portion of consciousness carries within it indelibly the knowledge of the whole.

The birth of the world represented a divine psychological awakening.  Each consciousness that takes a part in the physical universe dreamed of such a physical existence, in your terms, before the earth was formed.  In greater terms than yours, it is quite true to say that the universe is not formed yet, or that the universe has vanished.  In still vaster terms, however, the fact is that in one state or another the universe has always existed.

Your closest approximation of the purpose of the universe can be found in those loving emotions that you have toward the development of your children, in your intent to have them develop their fullest capacities.

Your finest aspirations can give you some dim clue as to the great creative thrust that is behind your own smallest act, for your own smallest act is possible only because your body has already been provided for in the physical world.  Your life is given.  In each moment, it is renewed.  So smoothly and effortlessly do you ride that thrust of life’s energy that you are sometimes scarcely aware of it.  You are not equipped with a certain amount of energy that then wears out and dies.  Instead you are, again, newly created in each moment.