It all beganed with a decided end,
It all is going on with love to end in love
Very well said! I dedicate this post to you.
A Story for Children. . .
for when they ask those cute, innocent questions like:
"Where did the world come from? Why did God make the world? Where was I before I was born? Where will I be after I die?" My son once asked: "How did we get to be alive in the first place?"
God does not play dice with the universe, but he does play hide and seek. And that's the title of the story:
Why God Plays Hide and Seek with the Universe
Parts of it are adapted from THE BOOK on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are by Alan Watts
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The world
didn't begin once and for all, but
many times; and each time it begins, it always comes to an
end. It's the
same world every time it comes back, just as you are the same person when you wake up in the morning as you were when you went to sleep the night before. Nevertheless, the world is just
a little bit different each time it returns, just as a child will learn and grow and change every day ~ and a wise adult will too.
Every time the world begins, it comes right out of
nothing. It's like a great big firecracker exploding in the night sky. It looks like there's nothing there, then all of a sudden:
BANG! ~ there's all this light and fire exploding as if out of nowhere. Our
ancestors knew this thousands and thousands of years ago ~ that
the world comes out of nothing, and that it
keeps doing it, over and over, forever. When the
scientists came along much later and thought they were so smart, they made fun of the people who still believed this. But when the scientists looked into it a little further, and got at least a little bit smarter, they discovered that sure enough,
the old ideas were right.
Now, why does the world ~ or the
Universe, to give it its big name ~ keep going
back and forth,
in and out of nothing, like
day and
night,
waking and
sleeping,
living and
dying? If the world were just a THING, made up of clumps of dead pieces, or a machine that moves by itself but isn't alive, then there could never be an answer to this question ~ which is why the scientists can't answer it, because they think the world is a thing or a machine, or maybe a giant computer. But wise people and children know that
the world is alive. The Universe is like an immensely gigantic
person, whom we call
God.
Now we can see why the world keeps going back and forth from nothing. If God just went on and on forever without rest, he would get very tired. So after more years than you could count in your whole life if you started right now at a million,
God goes to sleep. And when he does, the
whole Universe just
disappears.
God's night is
very long, and
very dark, because theres nothing at all but blackness stretching out in every direction. But at last
the morining comes, and God wakes up, and the darkness is filled with light. So because God refreshes himself by disappearing, he always comes back and the world begins again. It's like a game: he comes and he goes; now you see him, now you dont.
God's day lasts even longer than his night ~ millions and millions of years, as I said. So he has to think of something to do in all this time to keep himself busy and to have fun. One of the things he likes to do best is to
play hide-and-seek. But because there is nothing outside of God, he has no one to play with but himself. He gets over this difficulty in a very clever way: he
pretends that he is
not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is
you and I and
all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But then in the end he always remembers that he is really God, and that he was just imagining all this ~ and then all the scary things disappear.
Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it
takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it ~ just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That's why it's
so hard for you and me to find out that
we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. Sometimes we can start to
remember, at least a little bit, and then we can
play the game right along with God. And if two people, or lots of people, begin to remember that they are God at the same time, they can have the most fun and excitement of all, for they will know that everything they do together is God playing games with himself.
And I should mention that although I've been talking about God as "he" and not "she",
God isn't a man or a woman ~ except when he remembers himself in two or more people, and then he will be all the men and women in the group. . . and also all the children, of course.
God always remembers himself in
little children, but when they get older they begin to forget.
You may ask
why God sometimes hides in the form of
very bad people, or
pretends to be people who suffer great
disease and pain. And if everyone is God, you may wonder
why different groups of people sometimes
fight each other, and even
kill each other. But remember first that
God isn't really doing all this to anyone but himself. Remember too that in most of the
stories you enjoy there are usually
bad people as well as
good people ~ and they usually
disagree about something strongly enough to
fight about it. This is because the
thrill of a good story is to find out how the good people get the better of the bad, or how the people we like in the story will
win the battle against the people we don't like ~ or how the
misunderstanding will get
resolved, so that
everyone will live happily ever after. But even this best ending is possible
only because there was a
conflict to resolve. If there were no conflict in a story, you would get bored with it very quickly and toss it aside. And if there were no conflict in the Universe, God would get bored and go back to sleep, and everything would vanish once again.