Did God Create the Universe or Become It? (With Nayaswami Parvati)
Sunday Service with Nayaswami Parvati and Nayaswami Pranaba at Ananda Village, recorded January 9th 2022.
This week's reading from Swami Kriyananda's book "Rays of the One Light" is:
Did God Create the Universe – or Become It?
Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.
The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.
The Gospel of St. John, Chapter 1, contains a passage that explains the essential truth that creation is a process of becoming. The universe is not separate from God the Creator, but a part of Him even as our own dream-creations, during sleep, are figments of our consciousness. God’s is the life; God’s, the reality. Not a melody could be composed, not a poem written, were the melody and the poem not already there, simply waiting to be expressed.
In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
Ego-directed desire is like static; it distorts the radioed messages of Infinity. But the pristine impulse from the divine, undistorted by limitation and delusion, is the life that gives rise to all that is. As the seventh Chapter of the Bhagavad Gita states:
I am the fluidity of water. I am the silver light of the moon and the golden light of the sun. I am the AUM chanted in all the Vedas: the Cosmic Sound moving as if soundlessly through the ether. I am the manliness of men. I am the good sweet smell of the moist earth. I am the luminescence of fire; the sustaining life of all living creatures. I am self-offering in those who would expand their little lives into cosmic life. O Arjuna, know Me as the eternal seed of all creatures. In the perceptive, I am their perception. In the great, I am their greatness. In the glorious, it is I who am their glory.
Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.
