The Life Plan

The Beginning of a Series

Tony Crisp

Considering that we are a very young culture, and that in recent years our science has been seen to have been preceded in its understanding by ancient cultures, we can learn a lot from them. So what follows is a synthesis of the beliefs of the mystery religions of ancient Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India, Greece, Native Americans and vastly older peoples such as the Australian Aborigines.

I present this philosophy because I honestly believe that we all need an acquaintance with an understanding of such ancient truths. I also see from the dreams sent to me that many of you have no plan of life, no sense of grounding that gives security. Many of you cannot reconcile what you have learned from material science with what you feel within.

If we are to know who we are we need to know our beginnings. Many of us look back to our forebears for this view of who we are, or even to our belief that we began with our conception or genetic heritage. But that is not our beginning. If we recognise that without the existence of the Universe and all the wonders of its laws and actions we would not exist, then we have to acknowledge that our beginning was the emergence of the Universe. And that is worth understanding – especially from the viewpoint of the mystery religions.

The Beginning of it All

But before we look back to the ancient mysteries, let us consider our present understanding given us from our own culture. This has been called The Big Bang, and it has so far been seen as having some remarkable features that are worth remembering when compared with the ancients view.

If you look at this wonderful image you will see that time began at the very start of our universe, before that time did not exist. Literally our own scientific understanding says that time and space was created by the Big Bang.

If you click on the image you will see an enlargement of it.

Then if you read through the different stages of the formation of the universe and you get to number four, you see that there was no light in the universe. Then suddenly at stage five light fills the universe.

Without going into great details the universe was formed in seven great cycles of activity.

Where have we heard that information before – of course in Genesis. See Genesis

I am not trying to press home to any sort of conclusion about the Biblical wisdom. All I want to do is to show how much ancient thought got knowledge from sources other than scientific inquiry.

 

It was all mentioned in Hindu scriptures

The Hindu writings suggested for millennia that the cosmos expanded and then contracted, to start anew. But the question of the beginning if time is fascinating. Because obviously there was a condition before what we call the Big Bang, and that was without time or space; in fact a different dimension. The ancient Australian Aborigines called this different dimension the “all at once time.” This was compared with the “one thing after another time.”

Now timelessness and spacelessness are difficult things to consider because all our concepts are built around space and time. In fact I hear scientists saying they cannot conceive of nothing. Yet they never mention that timelessness and spacelessness was there at the beginning of the material universe. They never seem to see that behind the flow of sensory impressions, thoughts and emotions is emptiness. Almost anybody who practices the mental discipline of meditation at some time experiences this wonderful nothingness. In fact this ‘void’, this ‘nothingness’ is the very fountain of phenomena.

At  the end of 1984 I experience such an amazing revelation about the beginning of things and our formation. I can only claim it as a subjective experience, but listening to scientists today arguing about it I feel there is something to add from my vision.

None of us look into space and feel the depth.  That’s what it is like to look at the face of god – not threatening, just so huge. When I looked into that depth it was like bursting out of me. I had to grow beyond  myself to be able to even get a glimpse of it. I groaned with the inner agony of that growth.

Then I felt supported by a great intelligence. It stood before me. Not as it were in a body, but I was overwhelmed by the presence of a great being which appeared to be a part of all things and all time. It lifted up my consciousness, causing me to feel as if my awareness also spread over the immensity of time, and from this condition I was shown the beginning of things.

I cannot say I saw this, more that I experienced the condition of the beginning. And this condition was the gathering together of what I understood to be a whole universe that had previously existed. All that had existed had come to such unity that although this was physical, it was also, in its unity, a being.

As I experienced this I felt at last as if a resolution between science and religion had taken place in me. For here was something like the cosmic egg science suggests preceded the ‘big bang’. But what had been left out, I realised, was this consciousness, this immense being. In retrospect, it also suggests to me the difficult question of Elohim* being many beings and yet one. For all life had here found a unity in one immense being beyond my comprehension. It was, in fact, difficult to grasp because I was overcome by emotion as I witnessed this. (* The word Elohim has usually been translated as God, but its actual meaning is ‘the gods’. For its says, “Let us create them in our own image.” The real God is said to be unknown and unknowable – certainly not a male or female figure – but all potential.)

As I opened to this enormous perception, there was a deepening of understanding, in which the Being aided my comprehension. For I realised that the oneness or unity of this being was unbroken. It was everything. Nothing could exist outside of it. Even if it were to create something, that thing would not have existence outside of the one.

This condition of ‘all-one’ had led to a form of al-one-ness. This was as near as my human understanding could grasp. The Being in fact said to me – “You must understand, this is your perception of it.”

Out of this aloneness, this great being had longed that other beings might exist. But in its present form this was impossible. Then I understood something that tore my heart to pieces, as it still does today when I dwell on the memory of the experience. This Being purposefully went about destroying itself so that our present universe – we – might have existence. It was such a wondrous action, for it was done in such a way, with such skill, with such love and self sacrifice, that its very death was a magnificent creative act. In other words its death struck into action forces and effects that created the universe in all its variety. This death is what we know as the ‘Big Bang’.

As I experienced this, I realised that everything that exists is a part of that wondrous being. There is nothing that is not of its love. So that whatever arises in the universe arises out of, and as, THAT. The human sense of God is a realisation of the very substance of our own being. The awe we might feel is from an intuition of what has been given us as our own existence.

And as that being died, its very last impulse was for those new beings that might arise from its death. That impulse we call love. It flashed through the universe and still permeates every particle in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.

We are the seeds of that love. We are God. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things. For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed. If we discover the secret of that, we discover our creator and eternal nature.

See Philosophy From The Edgar Cayce Readings – Meeting yourself