In The Beginning...There Wasn't One
January Theme: Creation
From darkness came light.
From silence came word.
From formless came form.
From primordial non-differentiation came distinction.
From chaos came order.
These are all ways that Creation is described in various traditions. Some THING arises from No THING. Sound comes from silence, light from dark, being from non-being.
As we slowly emerge from the darkness of winter this month in the northern hemisphere, shaking off the deep, rest, quiet and receptivity and beginning to feel the stirrings of ideas, plans, energy, life, it’s an appropriate time to consider beginnings - how they happen and what is/was happening (or not) before. This is our theme this month.
While not all traditions speak of a creator deity, many do. In these creation stories, that deity, through some unexplainable (or explainable) force or desire, brings all of creation into being. It is a one-and-done thing. Voila! Creation! Other non-theistic/non-dual traditions consider creation as the continual arising of form from the formless, or the movement from chaos into order.
The process by which creation occurs or arises is interesting to explore, but let’s start with what precedes creation. Darkness, silence, void, non-differentiated wholeness. Potentiality in its resting state, pregnant with possibility.
In many creation myths, the origin of creation - that pregnant space - is womb-like. In fact, in many languages, the words used to describe it are related to the feminine, to the womb, or to the process of birth itself. In the Bible, the first word used to describe God is Rakhum, which is related to the word, Rakhem, for “womb.”
Let’s do a thought-experiment. Before you were born, where/what were you? This question is a bit like the Zen koan, “What was your original face before your grandparents were born?” Depending upon your religious or faith tradition, you might have an answer to this question. It might be something like, “I was waiting in the lobby, looking at pictures of potential parents, trying to decide who I wanted to be born to.” Or, it might be, “I was living my past life as a monk in India.” Or, “God and the angels and I were having a tea party.” Or, “I was the thought of a sperm and an egg.”
But let’s go with the koan and drop all the stories. Truly consider where or what you were? For myself, I can only go so far as to say to that I don’t know if there was a “me” or a consciousness that was separate/distinct from anything else. It feels formless, dark, silent, full, without borders or boundaries. But something happened and I became a single cell, splitting into other cells, becoming a human baby. I have no recollection of life in utero or any awareness that I was growing, where I was, or what was happening. Perhaps my ears heard sound, my body felt movement, my closed eyes sensed light. Perhaps, while my DNA was doing its thing, some vibration signaled my nascent brain that something was coming. A stirring of change. But it was all happening without my conscious awareness or intention.
And then bang! I was thrust out into the light and into LIFE!
Like a little, mini Big Bang, we are birthed from the black hole of the void into being. That’s incredible. (Which of course, suggests the question of what happens when we die…but that’s for another post).
We aren’t the only ones who experience this. What about the acorn, lying in the dark on the forest floor, a hard, silent seed? What does it experience? Does it have stirrings? Does it know it will become an oak tree? What about a galaxy? In the darkness of space do those collapsing clouds of gas and dust have any inkling that they will form stars? One could say that the genetic code of all beings carries its becoming. Evolutionary biologists would argue that on some level, even before we become, we “know” we have that potential.
And think about ideas. Do they just pop, fully formed, out of our heads like Athena from Zeus’ skull? Or a lotus from Vishnu’s bellybutton? What precedes them? Is there not a gestation period? Is there not something happening below the surface in the mulling and pulling together of different thoughts or experiences over time?
But what gives the acorn or us our DNA? What tells the clouds of gasses to come together by way of the gravity of Dark Matter? Where do ideas come from? In other words, in the darkness, silence, formless, non-differentiation, something is happening. Something is moving, changing, arising. It might be on an energetic or a sub-atomic level, but there is happening. We can’t really explain it, no matter how hard we try. It’s THE MYSTERY.
Some might say God does all that: God makes things happen. Some will try to break it down into quarks and quabits. My son, the astrophysicist who studies the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the first light from the Big Bang, once told me there was a smaller bang that preceded the big one. “Cool!” I said. “What caused the little bang?”
“Mom, that’s a ‘So-What Question.”
“What do you mean, ‘So What?’ That’s super interesting!”
“It’s ‘So-What’ because we can’t know. We don’t have the instrumentation to find out.”
Ah, The Mystery. Something is happening. Something causes things to arise, but we humans just don’t have the instrumentation to know for sure. But we sure do like trying.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro calls God “The Happening that is Happening in all Happenings.” I can go with that. I like that there is no active subject making it happen. It’s just happening. There seems to a mysterious, constant process - a never-ending reservoir of potentiality and possibility, raring to become. Like a woman in her ninth-plus month of pregnancy just aching to let that baby out, the cosmos is bursting with creation.
Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic, said this: “What does God do all day long? He gives birth. From the beginning of eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to all. God is creating this whole universe full and entire in this present moment.”
As a non-theist who doesn’t believe in anthropomorphized God or Gods (let alone a “He” on a maternity bed), I prefer to think of that Mystery that causes form to arise from the formless, or “the ten thousand things” to arise from the interplay of Yin and Yang, as a process, not the product of a maker/subject/producer. It’s a verb, not a noun. The process of all processes that allows everything. The darkness and the light, the silence and the sound, the non-differentiated from the distinct, The Mystery governs, causes and is both formless and form.
If one wants to translate this into a Creator God, one could say that God didn’t just separate the dark from the light, the silence from the word, but is the means by which they both came into being. God also had to create the dark and the silence. After all, they had to come from somewhere, too! And what was before the dark and the silence? Did God create that, too? What was your face before your grandparents were born?
God/Source/Mystery, then, is the process by which both dark and light come into being, inseparable from creation itself. It’s all one continuous whole, without beginning or end; eternal, the mind-blowing process of creation creating itself. Arising from the formless, returning to the formless, it’s all just perpetually popping up into existence and back out again, as the quantum physicists will tell you.
This is how the Buddhists, Daoists, Vedantic Hindus, and mystics of all faiths understand creation: without beginning, without end, just a constant process of becoming (which includes becoming something else, or unbecoming). Perhaps the little bang that preceded the Big Bang was just one in a series of bangs, going backwards and forwards into infinity, without beginning, without end, the constant happening that is happening in all happenings.
In other words, there is no “In the Beginning.” It’s always beginning and ending, beginning and ending. Ad Infinitum. Or it’s all just creating.
And were right back to the “So-What” question. Or are we?
So, this month, as we sit on the cusp between dark and light, in that subtle movement between rest and action, non-being to being, waiting for spring to come, for something to happen, let’s consider that there is no beginning to anything. Everything is just happening. There is always something happening in this moment, and there was something happening before, something will happen after, and happenings are happening all the time, every moment created anew from the moment preceding, creating the moment following.
Every moment there is creation, every moment destruction. There is no absolute creation, no absolute destruction. Both are movement, and that is eternal. - Ramana Maharshi