In the beginning…

Never were more arresting words spoken than these.  We cannot help but wait for what comes next. We cannot help but want to solve the most ancient of all mysteries, the mystery of how it all began. This teeming and wonder-strewn world -– how did it come to be? And we who struggle upon it -– why are we here?

In the beginning, said the wisest of men, and the people listened well. To know what happened in the beginning was to know everything, the how, the why, and the reason for it all. Elders told stories of a dark void of nothingness, shattered by the light of creation. They told stories of passionate young gods, giving birth to the world and to us, their children. And it was on the foundation of these stories that the people built their lives.

Today, the past has lost its veil of mystery and the story of creation is no longer a story. It is a science.  Instead of passing on old poetic myths about the origin of the universe, we look through microscopes and telescopes. Yet the story of our creation is still a vital tale to tell because it reminds that we are all one people, united in a common history.

Even more important, our creation story informs us of our purpose in being alive. In the words of Thomas Aquinas, "As the end of a thing corresponds to its beginning, so it is not possible to be ignorant of the end of things if we know their beginning."

Bangs and ripples

Since somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, scientists have become fairly certain that the universe came into being through an enormous explosion of energy known as the Big Bang.  Before the Bang, it is theorized that the entire universe was squeezed into an unimaginably dense state, with the Bang releasing this material in a fantastic explosion and throwing it outward to create an expanding universe.

Everything that has happened since the Bang is pretty much an open book.  Scientists can describe the further unfolding of the universe in scrupulous detail. But describing the exact moment of the Bang is more a matter of scientific creativity than scientific certainty.

The physicist Alan Guth described the first expansion of the universe as a phase change -- like the change of hot water into steam -- in which energy transformed itself into matter. Still another physicist, David Bohm, suggested that creation was less a Big Bang and more of a little ripple on a vast sea of pre-existing energy.

As scientists like Guth and Bohm try to describe the Big Bang, they sound much like the storytellers of old, spinning myths of a primordial watery substance from which the gods emerged. But neither scientist nor mythmaker can totally satisfy our curiosity. Knowing everything that came after the Big Bang only intensifies the mystery of what came before.

Science, and the philosophy of materialism, sidesteps the issue when it asserts the birth of the universe was also the birth of time and declares it meaningless to ask what came before the beginning. If there was no time, then there was no before.

But idealism is not allowed such a pat solution. Idealism must question whether the birth of the universe in time was the birth of all being. Are there levels of existence outside of time and materiality?  After all, something must have triggered the Bang. And whether science is ever able to penetrate this mystery or not, idealism is full of wonder about what that something might be.

The first cause

It was Aristotle who first observed there are several ways of explaining the cause of an event. One he named the efficient cause, which describes the actual physical relationship between events.  This physical cause/effect relationship forms the causal chain on which science is built, and it works in an orderly, incremental fashion. 

In fact, it is so orderly that scientists have been able to follow it all the way back to the smallest fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the moment in which their extraordinary investigation ends.

But Aristotle also identified another type of cause. He called it the formal cause, which is the relationship between an event and its purpose, or telos. All things, said Aristotle, happen for the “sake” of something else. “The reason (telos) forms the starting point.” In a teleological (and idealistic) view of the universe, the beginning of things is inextricably tied to the end of things.

In both definitions of cause, all things happen for a reason. The important question is this: At what point does the reason exert its influence?  For example, did man learn to use tools because he developed opposable thumbs (efficient cause)?  Or did he develop opposable thumbs in order to better use his tools (formal cause)?

Anthropologists say tools and hands developed together.  This tells us that as life evolves, the reason and the result mutually create each other. Life is synonymous with purpose, or telos, and to know the end is to know the beginning.

Some might object that we can’t possibly know what the future end will be. But the end does not exist in the future. The end of things is always now. A future time, no matter how near or how distant, becomes real only when it becomes now. The future is an abstract idea that exists only in our minds; time, and its ends, exist nowhere but now. 

A teleological understanding of creation tells us that the first cause is inextricably connected to this very moment. Life has evolved, and continues to evolve, in order to bring about everything that is happening now. And now. And now.

Creative Evolution

According to Darwin, evolution is the systematic organization of life based on a chain of efficient causes. Although Darwin’s theory sent shock waves around the globe when first introduced, it is not an especially revealing myth. Even if it's fundamentally correct, the theory of evolution neglects to address formal causes and so doesn't answer the heart's question of why human beings exist. Nor does it give us any clue to our function other than survival.

To answer these questions, we need to look deeper into the myth and discover the telos secluded within.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is explained as the work of “natural selection.”  Life chooses to retain and refine those random mutations that best lead to the survival of the organism.  But just what, asks Ken Wilber, drives an organism toward “random” mutations?  The basic forms of life survive just fine without mutations. In fact, the simpler forms survive better than the more complex forms, so survival is clearly not the point of natural selection.

In his masterpiece, Creative Evolution, the French Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson insisted that evolution is not compelled through outer conditions, but grows into being from an inner intelligence and purposeful design.  Life, he said, reflects an elan vital, the vital urge of purpose which gropes gradually toward knowledge and consciousness and “more light."

When we look back at the sweep of evolution, we see that life has indeed become ever more conscious of itself. The higher and more complex the form, the greater its level of consciousness. As life forms evolve, Wilber adds, they transcend themselves in creative leaps in order to develop new capacities toward consciousness. And it is this end that leads us back to the first cause.

If the universe is developing toward consciousness of itself, then its purpose must be self-consciousness. And a universe that is conscious of itself must, of course, be a “self.” Aristotle envisioned a Prime Mover, a first cause which he described as “pure thought, thinking about itself.” 

This mysterious Prime Mover, this conscious universe-self, is called many things –- Mind, Consciousness, Intelligence, Spirit.  It is also called the Tao, Brahman, Allah, Jehovah and God.

A new myth

In the beginning, there was the void.  Empty, timeless nothingness, this void nonetheless held the potential for Being. This potential rippled and contracted, yearning for reality, gathering its will… 

Thus, Being -- desiring to experience itself, become more conscious of itself -- exploded from the void, flinging its energy into physical being. 

In Eastern Orthodoxy, creation is called God’s kenosis, or God’s self-emptying. In creating the physical universe, God created the physical dimension of himself in order to encounter himself.

“Evolution,” Wilber writes, “is best thought of as Spirit-in-action, or God in-the-making, where Spirit unfolds itself… manifesting more of itself at every unfolding… an infinite process that is completely present at every finite stage.” 

And why did God use his own essence instead of creating something “new?”  If God’s purpose is to experience himself, then creating something other than himself would not allow him that experience.  He would be able to observe the universe, but not be able to see it, hear it, touch it, taste it.  The only way for God to experience life is to be inside life. 

God therefore unfolds into space-time, dividing his essence into fragments which are then able to serve as mirrors for each other.  All parts of the universe reflect God back to God in a never-ending process of separation and reunion. 

What if God was one of us?

Many object to the idealistic story of creation on the grounds that God is too good, too pure to wallow in the muck of ordinary life with us. But the New Age asks, why shouldn’t God want to experience the world he created? 

Why shouldn’t God want to feel the pleasure of holding a newborn baby after the pain of giving him birth?  Why shouldn’t he want to know the satisfaction of hard work and the disappointment of dreams lost?  Why shouldn’t she want to laugh and cry and scream along with us?  Most of us eagerly pass the gift of life on to our children, which means we think that life is worth living in spite of its moments of ugliness.  So why shouldn’t God find life worth living also?

And what better way for God to experience himself that to unfold into space-time, dividing his essence into fragments which are then able to serve as mirrors for each other? In this never-ending process of separation and reunion, all parts of the universe are able to reflect God back to God.

This New Age story of creation is a myth, one part educated guess, two parts intuition.  But like all creation myths, its value does not rest in its degree of conformity to actual events, but in the degree that it illuminates for us the deeper meaning of our existence.  And as tiny humans floating along in an inconceivably vast universe, we very much need to knew why we are here. 

The Telos of Being

From the smallest atom to the largest galaxies, all parts of the universe have conspired together for the purpose of creating self-conscious life. Yet this purposeful universe is also inconceivably vast, and we who inhabit this small corner of it can feel lost and insignificant. Many times I have wondered how I, one person out of billions, living on one planet out of billions, can be important.

But I have also read the words of the wisest of men, and I have listened well. In the beginning, God stretched himself across fiery new space so that I might have life.  How do I know this to be true? Because I am here. The telos of being is always here in this moment, and all that exists in this moment is the purpose of all that has ever existed. Each of us is backed by all of creation.

My life, your life, all life was brought forth from within God for the purpose of his own self-discovery. I live to learn who I am so that God may know who he is. I live to experience the infinite possibilities of existence so that God may experience his own existence. I am here to learn, to experience being, and everything I think and feel and do adds another brushstroke of color to God’s self-portrait.

And because I am a one-of-a-kind instrument of God’s self-awareness, my one small life is immeasurably significant.

“Even if this were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea,” wrote Carl Jung, “that sea would not exist but for the multitude of drops.”

Yet the wisest of men will also ask of this myth, who can tell for sure? Even if the myth came straight from the mouths of the gods themselves, perhaps the gods have lived so long that they themselves have forgotten where they come from. 

Or perhaps, as the wise man named Buddha said, it doesn’t matter what happened in the beginning, for life always begins anew, right here, and right now. If we look away toward the past for too long, we might miss it.

Go to God: The One That Is Many.