The Spirit was invisible, existing alone in the home of all space. He piped to Himself the ever‐new, ever‐entertaining song of perfect, beatific bliss. As He sang through His voice of eternity, He wondered if aught but Himself was listening to His song. To His astonishment, He felt that He was the cosmic song itself, and also the singing. Even as He thought thus, lo! He became two: Spirit and Nature, positive and negative, man and woman, the peacock and the peahen, the stamen and the pistil of the flower—yes, even the male and the female gem.
All these He first became in thought alone. He dreamt duality, at first, only within Himself. As His joy in dreaming deepened, however, He thought, My dream is Reality! My imagination is Truth!
His vast cosmic dream thus became the cosmic soul of Nature!
The Creator then clothed His subtle dream with grosser dream decorations, a condensed dream. He made it come outwardly to life and shine with the piercing light of cosmic vitality which illumined the dark skies of pure thought. He said: “My shadows of imagination shall live! They are a part of Me. Let them glisten with life, even as I am all Life Itself.”
So His dream‐thoughts took on luminous form. Soon all things manifested light and energy. Stars, angels and lower astral beings, herbs, flowers, and bees—all shone as living lights in the limitless firmament of His dream. Endowed with motion, all things danced in His shimmering light. Behold, the Supreme Spirit had become God: the Father‐Protector of Creation.
God saw many colored, shining things and beings in this new universe surrounding Him, beamed out from His cosmic heart. He saw also, however, that they suffered somewhat from sameness: Everything, everywhere, was composed of the same light. He dimmed His power, therefore, and focused a portion of His light rays into condensed forms.
Lo! a great change occurred in those vibrations. Light assumed dimmer colors, lost its brilliancy, and took on solid form and density. Part of the astral energy became frozen, and matter appeared as brown, dull, solid objects. Impure astral beings were given fleshly forms to become de nite, condensed dreams. Astral nightingales dreamed substance‐bound, feathery plumes. Newly manifested trees sported springtime blossoms. God caused all things to dream with a greater, absorbed intensity—to dream de nitely and continuously; He made them dream grosser, and no longer astral, dreams—even as He had dreamt His astral universe into being. Thus, the gross cosmos came into existence.
The idea cosmos was born out of the Creator’s desire to be twain. That cosmos then froze to become the astral universe. And last of all, the astral energy froze and became matter.
As, in a dream, one may create ideas and imagine them to be shining with light—may then dream that he can touch and hear things tangible to his senses—so God created other dreams in His one, all‐inclusive dream: the almost‐dimensionless idea cosmos; the astral universe of light and subtle energies; and the grossest manifestation of them all: energies in the smallest—but still inconceivably vast—illusion, through the infinite variety of energy vibrations in the material universe. As, in a dream, one can think and feel, see lights, or—if one is scientifically inclined—experiment with vary
ing atomic combinations; see, taste, or touch a piece of ice and find it cold; move across hot desert sands; or imagine people born or not yet born: so God, in manifesting the material universe, dreamed nebulae, stars, galaxies, planets; then dreamed mineral, insect, animal, and people populations for these planets. He created thermal laws, and the law of gravitation. In living beings He manifested— increasingly so with evolution—clarity of thought, feeling, and the power of will.
The cosmic dream resembles in many ways our human dreams. Ours are diminutive and relatively changing, but they take after the relatively changeless cosmic dreams (relative still, for their changes occur in great cycles of time). While a human being may dream that his life is threatened by an accident, it is hard for him to realize, while he’s asleep, that it is all a dream. Only on waking does he find it easy to forget the pain and mental suffering he experienced in that dream. Then indeed he may laugh as he realizes the unreality of his imagined pain.
If one holds a mental picture of a car accident, condenses and clearly focuses that image, then his imagination may become objective reality. The accident in a mere dream is already more real, and relatively more painful, than any vague mental image. If a little imagination can cause so much real‐seeming pain, think how real God’s condensed imagination must appear in His cosmic dream, with its trials, challenges, and temptations. And yet, what seem to be actual pain and suffering are really nothing but dreams. It is not in ordinary human consciousness, but only when we awake in cosmic consciousness with God‐realization, that we see clearly all our trials and difficulties—not only in our own lives, but in those of others— as belonging only to God’s colossal dream of Creation. Then indeed we laugh at the trials, sufferings, and pleasures we experienced on earth. We laugh equally at our many dreams of birth and death.
Is what I’ve written literally true? Reflect: In a dream one may see a dream wall, and knock his head against it. Isn’t it quite likely, then, that his dream head will hurt? But will that hurt remain with him when he awakes? Only if his imagination is pathological! As even dreams have power to hurt, so does this “waking dream” of earth life have the same, and indeed much greater, power. Waking life is part of God’s much larger dream of all Creation.
Pleasure and pain, heat and cold—all dualities—are but dreams that accompany the consciousness of having a body.
The Invisible One, transcendent above all dimensions, became visible when He took on dimension. Never, of course, did God assume dimensions in reality. All outward manifestation is His cosmic dream. According to the laws of cause and effect, based on the deeper law of duality, every effect must equal, in essence, its cause. Even thus, the body of this universe, made up of forms that appear (but are not in reality) separate, divided, and muddled with contradictions, at constant war even within themselves (with the seeming disparity existing between solids, liquids, gases, and energy)—that body is, in essence, invisible and without dimension. The universe and every atom in its vast being—these are but frozen thoughts of God’s. Science has proved all matter, indeed, to be but condensed energy—which, in its subtle form, is light. And light is the condensed dream of God’s consciousness. The universe is merely an effect; it could not be essentially different from its supreme Cause: the vibrationless Spirit.
When the Invisible, the One, became many, it gave its creatures some of its own freedom of choice. In all life some innate power exists, which can evolve constantly toward greater clarity. Everything has, to some extent, God’s power of free will. Even the worm moves not only by the mechanisms of karmic law, but by some minuscule impulse of its own free will. All things cooperate consciously, at first, with the cosmic urge toward further and ever-further manifestation. They believe in the cosmic delusion, and cooperate with its perpetuation. Yet all beings, by using their own self‐evolving reason rightly, are also able to move in the opposite direction, toward Him. At the end of each entity’s manifestation, it will merge back again and become “one with the One.”
Conscious cosmic Creation, however, being conscious, and having received its initial impulse to move toward outward manifestation, actually tries to keep moving ever outward, farther from its center in God. Hence the power of what is known as Satan. Human suffering, which grows out of the conflict between that outward and that inward pull, is born of behavior consciously influenced by Satan, or evil.
Man stands in a position of relative independence. He can reinforce his misguided, or self‐mistaken, powers of reasoning and move outward with the Satanic urge—away from God—or he can reinforce the divine impulse within him, and follow God’s emancipating wisdom by cooperating with His magnetic love. The latter course brings man back to divine Oneness, which is inherent in all things. God is powerless to help human beings, however, unless they accept voluntarily His ever‐willing assistance. He can only help those who will to help themselves. Having once given man unlimited personal freedom, God cannot arbitrarily change His Law and prevent man from committing wrong deeds. Should He thus interfere with man’s freedom, having once bestowed it on him, He would be contradicting Himself.
