I think by this time, we could all agree that nothing is permanent.
Everything would have to end.
And all that means that everything had to have had a beginning, right?
Let’s take a look at an old friend:
The ones in Yellow don’t really exist in the way we’ve come to be aware of existence, and only vary in scale. The soul, in this instance would be similar to the Divine, but only smaller, or maybe existing as a fraction of it. Our Definition of God would imply that he is infinite too. If that’s the case, then he would be filling up the entire space in the universe the same way an obese man would fill up the entire waistline of his jeans. And, like the fat guy, if he wants to make room for anything else, he would have to first literally “suck it in”.
Yeap, you heard it, we are in the cosmic version of a bodily cavity. Eww…
But on a more serious note, that would explain the distance between us and the Divine. He had no choice but to, for our sake. Being infinite and eternal means he could make room enough for entire realities to exist. With this unfathomable void available, he now has enough elbow room to actually make stuff. What would he make the universe from? Why, parts of himself, of course! (ouch). Remember how we kept on saying that the Big Guy doesn’t really exist the way we do? He would quite literally be creating something from nothing. He would have to fold, concentrate and shape that pure “Nothingness” until something concrete is formed. First order of business would be the loftiest of abstract concepts that humanity has no words for, the Ideal forms we haven’t had the capacity to form an opinion of, and raw, unstable Astral substance (Aether/Mind-substance). Next would be mental objects and constructs created out of the interaction between the unstable Astral matter and the First Forms, and grosser forms of Aether. This process would then go on and on, things would get more compound, concentrated and less “mental”, until we end up with actual physical stuff. Nothing much, but it’s matter as we are accustomed to, made of particles, which themselves are made of nothing more than just vibrations, things going “off” and “on” really fast. Or is it better to say “Astral” and “Physical”?
That last part was pure conjecture, but going back. At the momentum things would be going and the force needed to convert aether into matter, coming from all directions, all at once, it would lead to the formation of a center, a single point increasingly filled with the potential to create universes.
And on and on it went until:
So there, we have the universe as we know it, formed out of the flesh of God himself, within God himself. Light, energy, Aether, turning into Matter within the Cosmic Athanor (Alchemist’s Oven).
How about us? Humans and other sentient beings? We could say that sentient beings would’ve been created along with the rest of the universe, because based on the previous chapter, any sufficiently complex integrated system that can accept input and release output, is capable of sentience once reaching a critical mass. It would all start with the raw Aethers interacting and forming instances out of the First Forms, gaining a certain amount of complexity, the different instances merging, and then BAM!!! Sentience. These would mostly be purely Astral Beings, their internal organs and their minds being the same things.
How about physical life? If we take this to its next logical extreme (by correspondence), then we could say that the basic astral creatures born out of the primal aethers followed the same level of progression of the world around it; they continued forming, merging, folding and creating complex patterns and systems, becoming less and less aetheric at each pass, until we have life as we are aware of it. This would support the theory that we are inherently composite creatures, each and every cell in our body runs with its own little “mind”, just enough for them to complete the tasks that they were assigned to, but complex enough that when partnered with the more complex cell-structures in our nervous system and the rest of our body, coherently creates a (mostly) cohesive and powerful colony of entities called our mind.
We are made of both Aether and of Earth.
What about our souls?
Well, like we said before, it doesn’t really exist, like its source. We might never come to grips with the true nature of the soul and God himself as long as we are bound to the delusion that we are single, indivisible entities.
“If we are made of the stuff God is made of, and God is Eternal, unchanging and above cause and effect, then why are we the exact opposite?”
Because we are derived from him, we are not him. In order for anything else but him to exist, he had to give way, and in doing so, created something that was not him, the infinite nothingness. Anything that would be created within this space would be derived from him, but at each pass would slowly become less and less similar to its origin. Yes, we would end up in sorrow, we would end up suffering because of our ignorance of how the world works, but that is what gives us meaning. That is the only way for Free Will to exist. For me, this is empowering because it’s His way of saying “I trust you, so it’s your turn.”. There is no original sin. There is only the price of “illusory” existence.
Yes, there is suffering, yes, we might be alone in a world that doesn’t care, but that only serves to make Happiness and Love all the more meaningful, however fleeting. Once we get tired after several aeons, at least we always have the option to “go back home”.
Within The Cypress Forest 