Genesis – The Beginning of Things

Chris: How would you describe the origins of things?

Tony: The passions of my early life — I suppose that’s what they were — led me in the past to read an enormous amount of books. But gradually over the years certain things have happened to me that I have drawn a tremendous amount of information from. For instance I had an incredible experience during which I felt as if I had gone back to the beginning of things.
Nebula

Nebula

I had been wondering about difficulties in my life. I could see that they were causal. They had arisen from relationships with, for instance, my mother. But those events in themselves had been caused by things previous to them. So I was asking myself what was behind those events.

During the experience in question I felt I was at the very beginning of the universe. I knew and experienced that beginning of things as a huge awareness. There was no separation in it at all. I had the impression that prior to it a whole universe had existed that had gradually sunk back, melted, or synthesised into this single great ocean of substance and awareness. Although to be more precise I guess I should describe it as a whole condensed universe that was also consciousness.

So from a huge universe in which had existed all manner of life forms, what I met had gradually synthesised into an immense and unimaginable single awareness. I felt that this was what our present science has seen as existing prior to the Big Bang. But the description is mine not that of science. It must be remembered that present scientific theory sees that the condition prior to the Big Bang was beyond time and space. Time and space were created by the Big Bang.

This view of a consciousness, a type of being existing prior to the emergence of the universe is not of course a new thing. Hindu philosophy talks of the universe as expanding and contracting over immense periods of time. It also states that fundamental to all existence is a form of consciousness. They describe this expansion and contraction as the breathing in and out of Brahm. But I felt that what our own science has not stated, or perhaps has not yet found, is the awareness or consciousness underlying everything.

I saw, I experienced, I felt with great emotion, that this consciousness was alone. In human terms that is the only way I can describe it. It was one immense consciousness without division, without separation anywhere in it. Nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it imagined something other than itself, that would still be an undivided part of itself. But because of what I am calling aloneness, the being, the consciousness wanted to create otherness. It wanted other beings to share its existence, its wonder.

So the only thing it could do to enable the existence of others was to die, to destroy itself. Therefore, as far as I can put this into words, with the enormous skill, with great art, with an ability to plan and foresee the results beyond what we can understand, it set about its own death. It did this with enormous love. And that death and that love is what our present culture calls the Big Bang.

My experience was that the Big Bang was an act of enormously creative self giving. It did this so others might exist. It was the only way in which the possibility of other beings having an existence outside of itself could come about. It was almost like seeding itself.