InSight of God

Even as a child I wanted to know everything. I was and am insatiably curious. Afraid of dying and horrified by all the contradictions in human behavior with which I was expected to live, I had many questions but no answers. How could it be that innocent children could get sick and die, but villains could survive and prosper? What made it possible for a man like Hitler to gain the power to destroy so many millions? Why did human beings never seem to agree about anything? What was all the fighting about? Why was peace so rare and misery so common? And, if there was a God, and He was all-knowing and all-powerful, how could anyone but He be responsible for the state of the world and the state of my consciousness?

One day, at the age of sixteen I sat at the back of the school bus asking myself questions like these. Suddenly, the clamor of the other students faded out and the clamor in my head was perfectly still. In that timeless moment I understood everything. I saw it all and it all made perfect sense. Everything, all the contradictions of life, related so simply, a tapestry woven of a million colors and textures. All of life, everything I had ever experienced, learned, and seen, fit together into a cohesive whole, and there were no more questions. Underlying all the confusion, I saw, was a simple form, a structure deeply embedded in nature, which pulled everything into place. The universe, I realized, has design and purpose that we sometimes miss in all the seething turmoil.

It was as if I had seen God. I understood the number of creation, the rhythm of the cosmos, the Art of Life. I was awestruck. If the universe were a million disconnected words, I had seen the grammar that gave them meaning. If the world were a mass of random colors, I had seen the design that turned it into a painting. If all of creation could be described as music, I had seen the one sustaining rhythm that gave it unity and purpose. If Life were a story, I had seen the intention that made it live.

In that moment I became an artist. Of what kind I had no idea, for I had no particular talent. All I knew was that it was my purpose in life to find a way to express what I had seen, to pass along the understanding I had gained. I was only sixteen and didn't know how much pain I would suffer before I could even attempt to do that, so I was filled with hope and a kind of incandescent joy.

Everywhere I went and everything I did was ultimately focused on finding my way back to that original experience, on putting it into words so that I could explain it to others and to myself and, hopefully, to experience it again. Yet a secondhand telling could not recreate the moment, could not make it happen again. In fact, words seemed to make it smaller, to pull it down to earth, and that was not my intention. I wanted to share it; I wanted others to know it with me. I tried music; I tried painting and sculpture; I tried drama.

I was filled with more questions than ever. What had happened to me? What was this experience all about? Where had it come from? Where had it gone? Why, when I tried to express it, did it become so small? What was it about words that was so limiting? Was I the only one who'd ever seen it, or did other people know it as well? Was it possible to relate it in a way that would open it up for others?

Though I wanted to write this book since the day it happened, it has taken me over twenty-five years to acquire the knowledge and wisdom needed to do so. I found the insight and inspiration at the age of sixteen, but it took years of living and learning, years of research, to reach the point where it has all come together in my life as it once came together, momentarily, in my head.

My study was conducted under the 'try it and see' theory of life. That is, I tried everything, gave myself over to every experience. I did everything I wanted to do and suffered the consequences. I have been a child, a wife, a businesswoman, a student, an artist, a worker, a thief, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a lover, a sexual slave, a victim, and a victor. I have been irresponsible and selfish, and responsible and kind. I have been disciplined and impulsive. I have been a worker and a boss, a giver and a taker, a student and a teacher. I've been rich and I've been poor. I've been in love and I've been alone.

I began my unorthodox college career in the '70's with an interest in science and medicine, and went from there to psychology and sociology to theatre, and finally, twenty years later to communication, getting a bachelor's with thirty-four credits more than I needed, and a master's on top of that. In between I must have read four or five thousand books. Though I never realized until afterward, everything I did, every feeling I felt, every person I met, every lesson I learned was grist for the mill, ground up and assimilated into the whole that I'd glimpsed that day on the bus.

I had seen, ever so briefly, that everything fit into the tapestry of life, that the universe-- and therefore our lives as part of the universe--made sense and had meaning. Thus I knew that I could reject nothing. I had no standards, and every choice I made through the years was intended, simply, to keep my choices open. When I suffered it was usually because I felt stuck in some way, as if I'd spiraled down into some place where I had no choices. Bereft upon this shore, I would cry out at my fate, at the darkness inside me, and set out to free myself again. Or sometimes I would just cry helplessly until someone else came along and set me free.

I discovered that I was not alone, that there were many others who had had an experience like I'd had. I found and read voraciously the work of other writers who admitted to having been inspired by a vision. I came to know that the universe does make sense, that contradictions are not really contradictions, but just extremes of Truth. I understood that we are all adventurers on this world, all intent on reaching the place I'd glimpsed so fortuitously so many years ago. Every epiphany, every grace, every vision, and every dream ever experienced by anyone which transcends the little mainstream reality we usually accept as Reality, is an open door into Truth and a pathway to Joy. We are all mystics opening doors to heaven. This book, I hope, will help you open yours.

Recently--coincidentally, some might say--I discovered Chaos[1][1], a mathematical theory that is already changing the world. While reading about this new science, I discovered that I too have been writing about chaos, the difference being that I have been forced by my lack of mathematical expertise to use words rather than numbers to describe it. Chaos--a misnomer, if there ever was one--is the science of wholeness, of order beneath disorder; it pulls the universe together and looks at it globally, not as bits and pieces, and recognizes that it makes sense. This is what I've tried to do here, and although words have their limits, I believe I have succeeded.

My purpose has been to create a picture of the underlying order beneath the confusion we see everywhere, examining science, the natural world, human nature, and mysticism in this context. I have organized this work into nine chapters, each looking at the tension between a pair of opposites, which I have defined as the foundation of reality as we know it. The first chapter paints a picture of this fundamental process and each subsequent chapter explains how this opposition is reiterated over and over again in different areas of life. Taken altogether, as a whole in itself, the book pulls in on itself and returns us to the beginning. If you can see this at the end, then I have succeeded.

THE CENTER

In the beginning, time was not a river flowing from then...to now...to hereafter; and life, as we know it, existing in space and in time did not exist. In the beginning the universe was only the potential to be. Time and space were a sea--at once a great ocean of nothing...and of everything, infinite and eternal, non-existent and transitory.

All possibilities were in that eternal sea--like a dream, without substance and without form, shifting...changing...becoming and disappearing--all possibilities, all potentialities, rose and fell, were born and died, began and ended, before they began.

Nothing disturbed these primordial waters, no wind blew across the surface, for there was no surface; no earth rose up beneath, for there was no bottom. In truth, there were no waters, only a potential to be, and out of this potential, in the flicker of eternity, came something--a thought, an idea--and then there were two things--the infinite sea of possibilities and the idea...and the idea was "I am." "I am," in the instant of its creation, was the sea of all possibilities; yet in that instant, it froze in that form, becoming something quite different--separate and limited to that which it was at the moment it was conceived. While the sea would continue to change, "I am" would remain eternally what it was in that moment--the truth, yet not the Truth, for Truth is infinite and infinitely changing, and "I am" could not change, was forever locked into the patterns existent at its birth.

"I am" looked at the sea of all possibilities and saw that it was separate--alone and lost. And in that time, within that moment of loss--an instant in cosmic non-time, an eternity in ours-- all the pain and suffering of the world was brought into being. But the sea, gazing upon its creation, loved it, thus "I am" saw that it was not alone. Though eternally separate, it was also eternally bound to that great sea by bonds of love.

And the sea, being what it was, became that which it felt. It became Love; everything it became henceforth would be conceived in love, colored by love, contained in love. Love would be its law, its boundary, its limit. And from Love would flow the universe, time, space, the stars, the earth, mathematics, art, all of life, the Goddess, and the God.

"I am" loved its mother, the sea of all possibilities, and the sea loved its child/self in return, thus becoming Love itself. Between the two a bond existed--invisible, incorporeal, non-existent--yet completely there, and this bond connected them. Thus as one moved, they both moved, as one felt, they both felt, as one dreamed, they both dreamed, and as one danced, they both danced. This bond was Love.

From the One came forth the two, and from the two, came forth Love, in both its forms as noun and verb, being and becoming: Love, the body, and love, the act. Thus the spiral begins. Love is born in the rift between the one and other, and Love is the act that heals that rift.

This motion, this movement of borning and dying, of wounding and healing, of giving and taking, of knowing and forgetting, of going forth and coming back, is the stuff of life itself, the cosmic pulse in which, and by which, we exist--the heartbeat of the universe. One...two...one...two...one... two...one...two...one...

In the great primordial sea of all possibilities from which all things come, there is no sex--no gender. It is neither male nor female. It just is. Once otherness existed, however, all opposites were born. Out of the one comes the two--the male and the female, matter and energy, life and death, good and evil, negative and positive, Goddess and God. And the tension between the two, the motion inward and outward--Love--is the invisible bond that supports the cosmos.

The power of Love is that it is both the opposite itself and the joining of opposites. It is both the object and the connection between objects. The face of Love is twofold, but its heart is one. Follow the pulse of Love along the lines of connection, and find the sea of all possibilities, the one Truth that is the source of all that is.

It was Love that gave birth to time and space, and Love that opened the door to death. It was Love itself, born in that conceptual sea, that created all-that-is. Love whispered and time began; Love cried out and space opened up; Love dreamed and the stars burst into brilliance; Love sighed and the earth bloomed. Love is the force that creates the universe. The bridge between timeless awareness and momentary joy, Love is the essence of what and who we are. For somehow, despite our limitations, we know Love.

Poets and artists, thinkers and healers, dreamers and actors, workers and players, each of us feels the rhythm and participates in the dance--one...two...one...two... one...two.... In every opposition is that primordial pair, oneness and duality, and in every joining of opposites is Truth. For Truth is the sea of all possibilities, beyond time and space, in which no opposites exist. Truth is the heart of Love, and whenever two become one, however briefly, Truth is.

Truth dreamed itself and birthed Love, and from Love, a universe. We dream of love and birth ourselves. We fall in love, think of love, make love, are love, give love, take love, refuse love, bask in someone's love; and out of all this loving, we create the form and substance of our lives. Love is the union of God and Goddess, giving substance and creating order in all-that-is. When we reach into ourselves, beyond the twofold face of Love, and into its heart, when we follow the connections to completion, we can know the sea of all possibilities and fashion our lives from it.

This conceptual moment lives in every aspect of our being, eternally spinning out the universe. Around it is built all our relationships, our politics--meaning relationships of power--all our potential. This moment is at the heart of all-that-is, repeated over and over again in different guise. It is the structural moment of life, the motion that joins space and time, matter and energy. Repeated again and again in an intricate web of relationships, this concept supports the cosmos. The structure of the universe is therefore, relational, not physical. It is a movement back and forth, to and from, in and out, and whether we look at a war, a rock, a love affair, or the relationship between mother and child, at its heart we will find this intelligence, this knowledge that continually creates the universe.

The sea of all possibilities is the Goddess--Love itself--mother of creation, cosmic womb. Out of her is all life born. Systems, organization, natural law, and the authority these wield over us--these are the faces of the God.[2][2]

If the female principle is the sea of all possibility, the male is the imposition of order upon these flickering waters. As "I am" froze into form at the moment of its conception, so does the God freeze the flowing waters of Truth into the known and knowable corridors of natural law. As the sea of all possibilities became Love at the moment it felt love, so does Love become all-that-is. As God and Goddess become one, forever joined in the whirling dance that binds them, so does the cosmos celebrate its existence in time. Thus is everything connected, thus are all forms bonded one to the other.

Thirty thousand years ago, there was only the Goddess and she was loved and feared by all who knew her. She was the earth, the rain, the earthquake, the thunderstorm. She was the sun and all the clouds that covered her face. She was the blessed stars that shed some light on even the darkest night. The Goddess was the moon, keeping time upon earth; she was the seasons and the reason the earth would bear the fruits of survival. She was change, constant change, constantly unpredictable. She was woman. She was the Great Mother of all creation.

Ancient societies worshipped her and left behind them the signs of her religions--the spiral, the snake, the ax, pregnant and fertile figurines by the hundreds. She was the Goddess, Great Mother of all, and as she was venerated in Neolithic times, so were the women who led their people in worship of her.

The Great Mother was both loved and feared, for who could know her? She brought forth the bounty of the earth in spring and took it all away in winter. She gave us children and took away our mothers. She gave us pleasure in each other and moments of joy, yet could end it all at once, in the heartbeat of an earthquake or storm. There was no way to know her, only to pray for her to be generous with us, to give her a share in every hunt, and to care for the women and children, for these were closest to her.

Her priestesses were mothers. Her lovers were men. Man could know the Goddess only through woman. Sex was a form of worship, through which the Great Mother could be known, the earth could be calmed, and the hunt could be blessed. Men would make love to the Goddess through her priestesses to ensure fertility and a plentiful harvest.

Woman worked the earth with her digging stick and hoe and brought food to the table. Woman birthed babies and brought new life into the world. Woman was powerful, creative, the earthly incarnation of the Mother herself--Great Mother Goddess--All-that-is. Her children asked her to explain why the sky was so high, and why only women had babies, and why the moon hid its face each month, and this is the story she told:

One day the Goddess looked upon herself and saw that she was alone. She had never known she was alone before. But having thought it, she saw that it was true. Before long, she decided to create a universe out of herself and to populate it with people, and birds, and animals. She would love and nurture these little creatures, and as she conceived this idea, she became pregnant, her belly swelled, and in due time, she brought forth all the universe, the sun, the moon, the stars and all the world and its creatures in the gushing waters of her womb. She set the sky above the earth to hide her face from the little creatures below; she made the moon to keep the time so the people could measure their seasons, the stars to light the night, and she made women to have babies and men to care for them.

Of course, this is only part of the story. In time it came to pass that other tribes with far different beliefs, moving southward to feed their flocks, encountered these mother-loving societies and changed them forever.

Neolithic societies spread from Asia across the continent of Europe as far as the British Isles, and as far back as 30,000 years ago. As many as were tribes, are the stories that existed to explain our beginnings. The Great Goddess had many names: Inanna, Nut, Ishtar, Astarte, Isis, Mah; and she was worshipped in as many different ways. Each tribe evolved different myths to explain their ways as well as their place in the world, and when one culture came in contact with another and intermarried, myths changed to fit the new order.

Coming from a harsher climate, male dominated tribes had begun to subdue the earth with the domestication of animals and agriculture on a large scale, made possible by the plow. These were not hunter-gatherer tribes, but tribes of cattle, goat, and sheep herders who used the earth and did not worship it. Having learned from the animals they tended that the male had first to deposit the seed within her before the female could give birth, they no longer believed that woman was the creator of life. She had become merely a vessel in which the male seed could grow. As she became, so did the earth.

They used the plow to cultivate the earth, and because it was heavy, only men could do the plowing. Thus women in these societies were reduced to liabilities whose only asset was their ability to serve as wombs in which to grow the seeds of life planted by men. Men planted and harvested the grain. Men tended the animals and brought milk and meat to the table. And women prepared the food and served the men. These tribes did not worship the Great Mother. Their God was male. He created the world. He created man, and woman to serve him.

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And God said let the earth bring forth the living creatures. And God said let us make men in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over all living things. And God created men and women in his own image. And God blessed them and gave them dominion over the earth and every living thing upon it. God said I have given you every herb and tree. To you it shall be for food, and to every living creature, wherein there is a living soul, I have given every green herb for food...."[3][3]

When these patriarchal tribes--who believed that the earth was theirs to subdue, and that God was male--came in contact with Mother worshipping cultures, the clash in ideologies could only result in war, and many fought for the Great Mother and shed their blood upon her body. The patriarchies won the battles. They had superior weapons, they had superior numbers, and they thought they had a superior idea.

They took to them the women and children of the conquered peoples, enslaving them. For even those who were chosen to become wives became slaves in this new order; no longer were they the embodiment of the eternal feminine, no longer the incarnation of the blessed Mother. Under these patriarchal systems, they were vessels of male seed, and servants of their husbands and masters. Their Great Mother Goddess was scorned as evil, debased, corrupt, debauched, low and sordid, and they were forbidden, on pain of death, to worship her.

Still, though men can control the bodies of others, they cannot always control their minds and certainly not their hearts, and many men and women, mother-lovers all, found ways to synthesize their cosmology with that of the new gods. Myths changed and numerous stories were generated out of the clash of these two ideologies.

It was said that the Great Mother had given birth to a son, who chopped her body to bits and made the heavens and the earth out of it. It was said that the Great Goddess had been split in two by the male deity and her body used to make the world and the sky. It was said that the Goddess had a son and slept with him to create a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses to rule the affairs of men. An idea would take hold and whole generations would follow it until a new idea was created, for religion is a living thing, evolving with the people who create it. And as people spread out and journeyed forth, they took their ideas with them and brought them into new lands.[4][4]

Because the patriarchal idea was eventually written down and enforced without mercy, it ultimately became the most dominant religion on the planet. As it mercilessly attempted to wipe out all traces of the feminine principle, it ruthlessly destroyed whole cultures, some as recently as yesterday--many African societies and Native Americans deprived of their lands and way of life by invading Europeans were matriarchies.

Yet despite the power of patriarchy, despite the weaponry and the ruthlessness, the female deity has survived. The Goddess still reigns as the Mother of Christ and is still worshipped as the Holy Virgin. Though she has been sanitized, is no longer the Goddess of sex and death, she has not been annihilated. She still lives in the hearts and minds of every woman, even those who don't realize it, and in many men. Today, women who worship the Goddess are no longer hunted down and burned as witches, except in movies.

The Goddess and the God are just another turn on the spiral of time and space--a reiteration of the moment of awareness and all that happened and is happening in that instant of awakening. They are represented in stories with such power that they shape our very lives. At the center of the story of Goddess and God is the sea of all possibilities, the heart of love, and "I am" or consciousness. One...two... One...two... One...two... The reality at the center of the myth is in the dance, and the Goddess and the God are but instamatic photos of an event that is eternally unfolding. Today, because we know that male and female must meet to create life, we would make a new myth to tell our children, to explain their place in the world and the meaning of their lives:

In the beginning there was nothing, only an infinite, changing sea. It was not a sea of water but a sea of possibilities. Anything could happen within it. Then something did happen. An idea lit the sea and the idea was "I exist," and the idea separated from the sea and became a spirit hovering over the waters. For as soon as it thought "I exist" it could no longer be the sea of all possibilities. It was no longer anything-at-all, but had become something. Thus God was born. Now God looked upon the waters of the infinite sea and saw that he was alone. And cried out in pain. And his mother, the sea, heard his cry and let him play with her substance, creating all the universe, the stars, the heavens, and all the creatures of the earth, out of her being, so he wouldn't be lonely anymore. And God stopped crying and saw that his mother loved him and felt love for his mother.

Now in that timeless instant of Godly despair and redemption, all humans were born and died and all religions grew up and were annihilated. But God loved his mother, the infinite sea of all possibilities, who in her love for God let him create the universe out of herself, and thus the universe, and all that is in it, is made out of that infinite sea of love, undying, everlasting.

And when God knew love and was no longer alone, hope was created, and all the beauty of heaven, and humans were given a soul and a heart that could know love, and a means to reach beyond their tiny existence and into the core of the infinite. And in our time, we call that means the Christ, the Buddha, or the tao, which means "the way." Though the details of religions differ, Truth is One, and union with all-that-is, through the relationship between Goddess and God, along the lines of Love, is the world without end which we seek.

And God and the Mother of God held hands and began to dance, a whirling whirlpool dance, spiraling ever and ever outward, and everything created out of the body of the mother was part of that dance. Every creature upon the earth takes part in that dance every moment of every day, and every event upon the earth takes part in that dance. The dance is the dance of life and we all participate in it every moment of our lives. It holds us together; its bonds, indivisible, infinitely complex and, just as infinitely, simple.

As the planets circle around the sun, and the earth spins at 1000 miles an hour; as water falls from the sky and is evaporated up to the mountaintops to fall once more upon us; as the tree bears seed and grows a new tree to bear seed; as electrons spin around their nuclei, so does everything in the universe and upon the earth, circle around and around and around--oppositions in balance. And that, my children, is why you like to spin, and why we all are dizzy down here. God and his mother, the Great Goddess, dance forever, in infinite whirling spirals in time.

[1][1]Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.

[2][2]This may sound sexist, but it isn't. In future chapters I will show that we are all both male and female.

[3][3]It's interesting to note that this quote from the Book of Genesis tells us that every living creature has a soul that we should respect by eating vegetation, not meat.

[4][4]For a brilliant exposition of ancient Goddess religions read Bill Moyer's Interview with Joseph Campbell.