There has been something I have been meaning to talk about for a long time. I am going to go through the early chapters of the Book of Genesis and show how they are expressions nonduality. So I will jump right into the watery chaos right now.
The Bible opens with these famous words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” There is a lot there in these opening two verses of the Book of Genesis.
It depicts the beginning of the universe as a watery chaos “without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” This is the cosmic ocean, a watery abyss, which symbolizes the undefined and undifferentiated oneness before the universe was formed and out of which the universe was formed. Genesis is saying that in the beginning everything was undifferentiated oneness. There was no distinction or separation between parts of the whole.
Distinction and separation come in the next verse when God says, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”
This is the beginning of duality. God creates light, which means there is also darkness. So God separates the two – the light from the darkness. Then God distinguishes between good and bad, by calling the light good, which means there is bad. Then God gives light a name, calling it “light.” Naming is a dualistic activity.
All the rest of the first chapter is a series of creations and separations and judging good or bad and naming things. The light and darkness of day one ends, and day two begins. That is the birth of time. God separates the firmament – which is a type of barrier – which separates the waters above from the waters below, making a space where living things could live. That is the birth of space. Then day after day, life forms emerging in the process of duality.
It is not too much to say that creation is a dualistic activity. Dualistic activity is tiring, which is why the creator God had to rest on the seventh day. And it is exhausting for us to keep up this facade of separation and duality. That is what our egos do. They sustain his duality, which is hard work. Which is why we seek a release from it. It is why we seek liberation.
The creation of the universe by a theistic creator God produces a separation between that deity and what that deity is creating. This is theological dualism. That is why theistic religions – including Judaism and Christianity and Islam – are intrinsically dualistic. They are founded on a separation between God and the universe, which God created as separate from God’s self.
What is important to note is that before creation there was no separation between God and universe. That is the meaning of that verse that says, “and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” The word for Spirit can also be translated wind or breath. So this is a picture of a primordial watery chaos, and God is described as movement on the face of the waters. The image is the ripple effect of wind blowing on the surface of a body of water.
I picture it as like the surface of our lake in the early morning. Often during the warmer months here in NH I sometimes get up early and drive the two miles to Squam Lake, which by the way is where the film “On Golden Pond” was filmed. I bring my hot tea and sit by the lakeside as the sun rises and the day wakes up. It is a perfect setting for meditation. You don’t have to do any special spiritual exercise; all you have to do is be there and the lake has its effect on you.
So I sit on the rocks by the shore and listen to the birds waking up. I watch the first breeze of the day begin to gently blow across the surface of the lake. That is what is being depicted in this first chapter of Genesis. I like to think that this creation account was inspired by dawn on the Sea of Galilee. Although it probably wasn’t it. Scholars think this chapter was written during the Babylonian exiles in the 6th century BC, so it was probably inspired by some Babylonian or Persian lake.
In any case, in the beginning God is one with the undifferentiated watery chaos. There is just the hint of a differentiation as God is pictured as movement on the face of this primordial oneness. This was the beginning of God being seen as separate from and different from the primordial oneness.
One could even call this the birth of God. By that I mean of course the theistic God, the concept of God as a being separate from and over and above creation. This stirring on the face of the waters is the emergence of God from the Oneness. There is a place in the Tao Te Ching that distinguishes God from the Oneness, which is called the Tao.
Stephen Mitchell’s translation of chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching reads:
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
I love that line: It is older than God. That is what is being presented in the opening verses of the Bible. It is showing Oneness that is older than God and which gave birth to God. Traditional Christians will cringe at those words; they will insist that there is nothing older than God, that God is eternal. It is true that the True God is eternal. But the theistic God was born in time. There was a time before theism.
Historians of religion can tract the emergence of the theistic concept of God. He – the male Sky creator God - came into existence at a certain point in history. He is a product of time and space. The concept of the theistic God is the natural result of humans becoming aware of time and space, when they fell from the Edenic oneness of the childhood of our race into duality. But that is for another episode. Today we are dealing with chapter one of Genesis, which is the first creation story.
The theistic creator God, conceived by humans in the Middle East, gave birth to the concept of sin, which is an expression of difference and separation between God and humans. That necessitates the development of same way to breach that gap, which gave birth to the concept of prayer and sacrifices and rituals everything else about organized religion.
But in the beginning there was only One. That One is what I call God. This is True God, not the theistic dualistic God. This is the Eternal God. The God beyond God. The Ground of Being or Being Itself. The Tao. Here is chapter 42 of Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.
That is what is happening in the first two verses of Genesis. The formless void represented by the waters is the Tao. It is the uncarved block, as the Taoists say. That is nonduality, not-two, which is more basic than one. From that is born oneness. From Oneness is born two, which is duality. From duality comes what the Chinese call the Ten Thousand Things. The first chapter of Genesis describes Nondual Tao that is the essence and heart of Reality and how this dualistic world emerged from it.
A number of years ago I authored a Christian version of the Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching. I entitled it The Tao of Christ. In this translation I tried to connect Christian spirituality and Taoist spirituality. So I often made references to the creation story of Genesis in my translation. I am going to close this episode by reading the first chapter of my translation of the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching:
The God who can be described is not the true God. The Name that can be spoken is not the Name of God. God is unnamable. Naming God is the beginning of religion. Let go, and you find God. Hold on, and you get theology. Knowing God and not knowing God are ultimately the same. Their source is Unknowing. In the beginning darkness was on the face of the Deep. Know this and you know all.
I will leave us with that unknowing. Grace and peace to you.
