We Are Timeless Beings Cocreating the Universe With God
The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo
Part Three: Resurrecting God – A New Creation Story
Who are all those other people with God?
In Michelangelo’s painting, if Adam was the first person to be created, who are all those other people in the picture? The answer proposed by the English art critic Walter Pater and widely accepted by art historians is that the person protected by God’s left arm represents Eve. The eleven other figures symbolically represent the souls of Adam and Eve’s unborn progeny, the entire human race! This understanding does not fit well with most theologians since they regard teaching the preexistence of souls as heretical. Seen as symbolic iconography and subversive theology, this is the most magnificent artistic rendering of human beings existing with God before they were earthly born that any era has produced.
This three-part series on Resurrecting God
To introduce Part Three of this series, let’s review the first two parts. First, we explored why the traditional God is dead and that we are called to cocreate, along with God, stories that help us understand and know this emerging, new God.
My basic framework for understanding and experiencing God is the three primary perspectives of God that Ken Wilber calls The Big Three. They are third, second, and first-person viewpoints most easily seen in the three prepositions — about, to, and as. Jesus demonstrated this as he talked about God, to God, and as God. He said we could, also.
A reconstructed Christianity requires new stories and metaphors. A natural place to begin is with the biblical story of creation. I retell it from the three perspectives of God that Jesus offered. I suggested we let science tell us the creation story from the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us perspective.
Next, we let a reconstructed and reinterpreted story of our symbolic first humans, Adam and Eve, tell the creation story from the perspective of the Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us. Adam and Eve open their eyes to wisdom, and in their immaturity, believed that they were no longer “very good” and needed to hide from God because they now falsely believed they were separated from God. They were not, and we are not, and never have been separated from God. We also have believed that lie. God came looking for us, even after we believed the lie that we had to hide our nakedness before God. But we have been taught that we are separated from God and must do something to be connected to God again. But the only thing we need to do is become aware that we are not separated!
God “intends all human beings to be saved and to come to a full knowledge of truth” (1 Tim 2:4). That “knowledge” is that we are not separated from God and one another!
Now, we explore the creation story told from the perspective of the Inner Face of God-Being-Us.
Finding the creation story in the Inner Face of God-Being-Us in our timeless existence with Jesus
Follow me now, if you would, hopefully with childlike curiosity, into perhaps unfamiliar territory. If we are divine beings on a human journey, then God is inside us, being us. How long has this been going on? What if this began before we were born into this human life? Even before the creation of the universe.?! Even before time began!!
As usual, my readers are free to reject, cringe, or laugh out loud at my ideas. Or, join me in the possibilities of the transforming power they might have in our lives. This is parking with wild abandon!
Preexistence
Most theologians believe Jesus existed eternally with God. Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 5:58). The beginning of the Gospel of John points out that Jesus, the word of God, existed in the very beginning with God and as God.
Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus was personally identical with the eternally pre-existent Son of God or Logos. He came into existence as a new person around 5 BC when according to Thomas Aquinas, “the human nature of Christ was created and began in time.”
This is called “preexistence.” Preexistence is the belief that a human soul, Jesus in this case, came into existence at some time before conception.
Plato (429-347 B.C.E.) was an Athenian philosopher and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. Plato believed in the preexistence of the soul, saying, “The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.”
Philo, the Greek-Jewish philosopher, the Essenes, and, remarkably, the Pharisees of Jesus’ day also thought that each soul was eternal.
Origen, a prominent second and third-century church father, aware that the early church had no clear teaching on the origin of souls, offered the idea that God created each human soul at some time prior to conception. He quoted from Jeremiah 1:5 when God said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you.”
According to Origin, all rational creatures were created at once, at the beginning of creation, pure, equal, and alike. The soul of Jesus was among them in equal union with all of them. Origen was condemned for heresy by the Second Council of Constantinople (CE 553) for his “impious writings” on the preexistence of souls.
Luminaries from the early Augustine to the later philosophers, Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schelling, took up the idea of a preexistence of the soul as a possibility.
In the Bhagavad Gita, considered by Hindus to be holy scripture, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be.”
Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) was a famous American, prolific author, political activist, lecturer, and intensely spiritual Christian who lost her sight and hearing when she was nineteen months old. She wrote, “I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.”
Of all the English Romantics, William Blake was the most unabashedly mystical and unapologetic in his embrace of Platonic preexistence. However, the Church has continued to reject this idea. Why?
Why do most theologians reject the preexistence of souls?
Traditional Christianity wants to keep a clear and vast separation between God and us. Claiming that we have existed eternally like Jesus, beyond time, reduces the metaphysical difference between God and us. Why is keeping that distance held with such tenacity in classical Christianity? Behind all the assumed theological reasons, there may be a more mundane reason. To say that we are not separated from God and are like Jesus is to remove the Church’s reason for its existence in the traditional worldview. Conventional Christianity says, “You need us to be forgiven of your terrible sins to get into heaven. And we are the only who can do that.” Religious institutions, like all institutions, once they are established, are very dedicated to staying that way.
The clear and comprehensive divide between Creator and creature has been fundamental to the cosmology of the majority of theologians and church doctrine. It is the unchristian task of putting the Temple curtain back up that kept God separated from the people. It’s dangerous when people get too close to God. They may not need the institutional church!
Christian thinkers oppose preexistence not because they have biblical evidence against it, but because it does not square with creedal orthodoxy concerning what is seen as God’s unique eternality and omnipotence.
However, it is difficult for the institutional church to keep people from being close to Jesus since he clearly wants to relate to us in his incarnation. So the religious institution settles for making Jesus a totally different kind of human being than us. They say that since he was God’s only begotten son, he was unique because he was directly born of God. We, on the other hand, are only adopted children of God (Eph 3:20). Therefore, traditional Christianity says that Jesus is the only divine human being. And he is the only human who was with God from the beginning.
Pulling back time and space to reveal Infinite Consciousness
How could we have always existed?
If we pull back time and space, there is only God —the Infinite Face of God as Infinite Being and Consciousness, symbolically represented as endless outer space. When we are born into this life, God breathes the eternal divine mystic consciousness that is the breath of life into every living physical body as God did with symbolic Adam.
However, before that physical birth, we existed, like Jesus, as unique beings in God’s infinite beingness. I unapologetically believe that all human beings are God’s sons and daughters, divine like Jesus, and with God from the beginning. Yes, Jesus is different from us, but not in his preexistence. The one way Jesus is profoundly different is that he expressed his divine humanity more deeply and thoroughly than the rest of us. That’s why we follow him and want to be like him.
I believe God has invited us to participate in God’s divinity beyond time itself because God is fanatically and fantastically in love with us. Perhaps this is why we have a longing, a homesickness, a yearning for a home we sense that we have known long before entering time and space. As the Psalmist says,
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written
all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.
Psalm 139:15
How do we cocreate with God?
Once we accept our eternal preexistence with Jesus, we can now describe how cocreation works with God, Jesus, and us. The father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, said, “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” This “mind” is what Christians call God — the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us.
We have all originally come from this divine ocean of consciousness that is God. We were each unique “drops” in the ocean of divine consciousness before we were born into human form. We continue now to be drops in the ocean that is God — and also the divine ocean in a drop! As Richard Rohr says, “God loves things [including us] by becoming them.”
We all have worked together with God, Jesus, and one another to create the cosmos. Now we all move together to continue building that cosmos as evolving human beings by creation becoming lovingly conscious of itself. God’s plan is for the material cosmos that we created to become conscious of itself and its loving union with God. And that is exactly what those on the mystical spiritual journey are doing now!
I invite you to become more aware of your true, timeless, bright existence in the following practice. The more we do so, the more we are the cosmos becoming lovingly conscious of itself. Jesus pointed to this when he said we are the light of the world.
“Don't you know yet? it's your light that lights the world.” ̴ Rumi
Practice: Waking Up to your eternal, timeless, divine identity
Without shifting our identity, there can be no profound change with us, only minor alterations. We can experience our divine identity sourced in our gut by sinking down into that which is already there.
The magical, mystical reality of being one with Eternal God is already present in our spiritual womb. You don’t need to think about it or believe it. Instead, sink down into the union with God that is already there. Try it right now in the Whole -Body Mystical Awakening practice link below.