Return of the Goddess: God's Self-Creation

[sealchan]

I'm going to try and share my thoughts on how to reintroduce the feminine goddess into the Biblical story. My goal is to try and preserve, as much as possible, the wisdom and truth in the Biblical stories while reintroducing a more feminine style of consciousness to balance out the overtly masculine character of God.

To do this I wanted to start at the beginning, in Genesis. I have for many years had a sort of backstory for God's origins that came about through my first interaction with God. Its a story that attempts to get at the origin of being through the description of the initial state of being of God as an It and an unexpressed potential. Prior to the start of Genesis 1, I want to introduce the He/She split of this initial pre-God and to set the stage for such additional figures as Jesus, Lucifer and the angels.

This story does not claim to answer questions so much as raise them. My solution to the origin of being is at best a clever word-play and at worst (I hope) a further elaboration of the mystery of the source of being and of God. My goals are a more comprehensive picture of human experience (psychological) that is as traditionally Biblical as possible in its character but without sacrificing the goals I've stated. I will also seek to make changes that fit better to science where needed.

Here is my back-story of Before the Beginning meant to be understood as preceding Genesis 1. Any and all sincere comments welcome. Please also understand that although I feel "inspired" in this, this is a literary work. Put on your English Literature caps and think along the lines of characterization, analogy to psychological experience as well as motifs of the Bible regarding the nature of the creation and of God and being...


Before the Beginning

Before the beginning there was the Nothing-Yet of Infinite Potential. It was "nothing yet" because nothing-yet had been created. It was potential because it could become something. And It was infinite because there was nothing yet to stop it.

The first thing that the Nothing-Yet felt like doing was to prove to itself that it was there. The Nothing-Yet thought, "If I create something then I will know that I am what I think I am."

So the Nothing-Yet created something; it does not matter what it was. It was happy at first. But after contemplating its creation it thought, "What if this is a hallucination?" There was nothing other than the Nothing-Yet and its creation that could tell the Nothing-Yet whether its creation was real or not. For a long, long time the Nothing-Yet thought about how it could prove to itself that it existed.

One day the Nothing-Yet of Infinite Potential had given up trying to solve its dilemma and decided to play around with creating some more things. First, It created a basketball. Then It created a mouse. The Nothing-Yet soon discovered that some of the things it created would destroy what it had already created, but some would exist along with what was created. It decided It would try and see how many different things It could create that would coexist. The Universe began to take shape.

The Nothing-Yet of Infinite Potential then realized, "I am. I do exist. What I am and what I am creating is not an illusion because some things can coexist and some cannot. Since I am all there is, I can decide what is real and what is not."

Then there was a loud crack as of some unbreakable substance fracturing into pieces.

Then God heard a voice that came not from anything that He had created. "I AM, I am here."

I AM spoke and said, "Who are you?"

Arwe spoke and said,

“I am your chaos
and your depths
When you took action
I became your stage
When you achieved,
I became your audience
My being is your un-being
You broke it when you made yourself
Like an egg cracking
you were born from my womb
Now there are pieces
and I am one
What shall we do
with the orphaned children?
Are we one
or many?”

And I AM said, “That was a hallucination. That does not exist.” And there was silence.

 

[JoshuaTree]

Kinda like "Horton Hears a Who" in a way.

Let me read that one more time...

 

[sealchan]

Kinda like "Horton Hears a Who" in a way.

Let me read that one more time...

Just read the Wikipedia summary of the plot...intense! Yes, there are some similarities. I've had no conscious influence from this story, but it is likely I read this story when I was a child. Intriguing!

 

[JoshuaTree]

Dude, you gotta see Horton Hears a Who... preferably the original animated version.

Have you by chance read the Gospel of Thomas?

 

[JoshuaTree]

Your writing has kinda a gnostic flame to it... I like that ...but I don't think most people would which is why the gospel of Thomas didn't make it.

 

[sealchan]

Dude, you gotta see Horton Hears a Who... preferably the original animated version.

Have you by chance read the Gospel of Thomas?

I've added both versions of Horton Hears a Who to my movie watching list. Thanks!

I read the Gospel of Thomas a few years ago as translated by Willis Barnstone.

When I originally came up with this story I had some recent exposure to Hinduism. It may be that such concepts as lila and maybe Prajapati.

 

[Sanzbir]

Reads like Morrowind lore.

 

[sealchan]

Reads like Morrowind lore.

Care to elaborate? I've no acquaintance with Morrowwind. I guess that is a region in the game Eldar Scrolls?

 

[Sanzbir]

Care to elaborate? I've no acquaintance with Morrowwind. I guess that is a region in the game Eldar Scrolls?

Third game in the elder scrolls series with a bunch of books in-game that all read like this.

 

[sealchan]

The first paragraph of this story attempts to use word play to define what nothing is. Presumably God arose from nothing OR He just always was. I straddle the line somewhat by describing a Nothing-Yet. Who is to say that nothing has no potential. From a scientific point of view (probably impossible under the circumstances) there is no way to measure the difference in a nothing between a potential-less nothing and a nothing with the potential to become something.

The thing that leads to the imbalance of a Creator God in this Nothing-Yet involves the problem of self-awareness. In this case the Nothing-Yet had a potential to wonder about whether it existed or not. Again, this is unmeasurable in an objective fashion but subjectively the Nothing-Yet wanted to prove to itself that it actually existed and had the potential to create something.

There are two ways in which the Nothing-Yet attempted to prove its own existence. Both involve the unhindered ability to create. The first method involved attempting to create single objects and to see if they proved Its own existence. But no single object created could do this and the Nothing-Yet was left wanting.

What did seem to work was a slightly different method and this method involved the idea of play. The Nothing-Yet would create without any strong specific goal in mind and in that process the Nothing-Yet realized that there is a distinction between a constructive and destructive relationship between created objects. Three important principles are to be noted here and both are based on the human experience of creation:

• You gain nothing from a circular argument
• You gain a sense of objectivity when you learn something new that you didn't expect
• Whenever a potter creates something there is always clay

The reason the Nothing-Yet gained some satisfaction from Its creation was because It was working with a principled reality that It did not fully comprehend. As such this, of necessity, implies that the Nothing-Yet was not fully aware of all the possibilities implicit in its own nature. This is actually a very common fact of almost any complex, natural or human-made system. When the Nothing-Yet opened itself to new knowledge it achieved new knowledge. The Nothing-Yet, being the sum of its own systemic possibilities, could not possibly be aware of all its possible potentialities. This is true even if we grant omnipotence. Now it may not fully follow logically from the example of this story but it does from certain newer understandings in theoretical mathematics and systems theory.

Then the Nothing-Yet, not speaking, but still merely thinking, declares Its own success. It does so by using the discovery of its play as a basis for that confidence and then immediately over-extends that confidence in further pronouncing Itself as a final authority after having just given that authority up (in play) to a greater, but unknown reality.

This results in an unexpected event, a pair of "sounds" in which something seems to break and a voice, not belonging to the Nothing-Yet, is heard. And based on the above this is where the Nothing-Yet having declared in a biased fashion "I AM" gives rise to His complement, another fragment of the Nothing-Yet.

More to come...

 

[sealchan]

My claim here is that in the psyche our ability to know something comes about in the context of a balance of opposites. I think of the yin-yang symbol as a sort of principle of neural architecture both within the individual neuron and in the behavior of neurons as a whole. This energic system, the psyche, is the link between matter and the mind. It is really nothing other than matter which responds to other matter using a system of energy storage and transfer. Connected to the body it re-routes perception and action through memory and intention embedded in a model of the world that extends into the past and the future.

Whatsoever conception we make of God we must utilize this energic, psychic system. There is no escape from this.

If God is a He then the material He worked with is a She. There cannot be one (He/creator) without the other (She/created) if either is invoked in the mind. The brain demands the other to arise in compensation for the applicability of the first.

So the stories in the Bible miss out on half of the reality of God by making Him only a He. My work has been to look for how the story in Genesis was made to exclude the She, to understand that story as it was written and to return the She while preserving as much as possible the original He meaning. This requires adding a whole new dimension, a whole new perspective on the text that can allow for the preservation of the original if one chooses to close "one eye" when reading the text so to speak.

So in this story we have the Nothing-Yet declaring its own existence as I AM and this causes the emergence of the complimentary ARE WE in response. She is the Goddess, the body that the God shapes in his divine initiative. She is the canvas whose surface guides the artist's pen even as the artist guides it. Whatsoever is known to God is unknown to the Goddess and vice versa. Lest we allow God to steal the show I will need to give the Goddess equal time. Here I see the Nothing-Yet as before God and Goddess so I hope to have started off on the right foot. Although there is a continuous sense of perspective from the Nothing-Yet to I AM, I have given ARE WE the balance of a small poetic speech which introduces her resulting nature and the consequences of His action of which He was not aware.

If you were to object and say that God now is nothing close to omniscient, I would say that for the Nothing-Yet all is known but in this one act of self-creation, the highest divinity is divided into two complimentary beings whose combined knowledge approximates omniscience. This is all just fancy use of language to try and describe the shape of the mystery of the coming into being of God and His/Her/It's creation.

 

[sealchan]

This surprise monologue of this unknown other being presents a deep challenge to I AM given that He had just decided He was alone and was the sole author of reality. Having been wrong about that might He be also wrong about the basis of his own confidence in His existence? On the other hand, if He had not sought to prove His own existence this other presence never would have manifested.

The name of the Goddess ARE WE is obviously a reflection on I AM. I AM makes a firm statement, ARE WE asks a question. I AM focuses attention on the speaker. ARE WE focuses attention on the speaker and those being spoken to. I AM is the potter who claims superiority to the clay. ARE WE dismisses the significance of the potter for the clay that could take the form the potter gave it.

Very often in dreams where we see both men and women dream characters the dream will start of showing these two different modes of ego development: the separative and the cooperative. The separative (I AM) mode tries to build an ego that is the center of attention, that leads the group, that makes the decisions for others. The cooperative (ARE WE) maintains herself as part of a group. She distributes power and attention and works as part of a decision making collaboration with the group.

So my claim is that this division of the divinity is in line with our inner psychic function which has mapped sex onto these two modes of ego or personality formation.

 

[Native]

So the stories in the Bible miss out on half of the reality of God by making Him only a He. My work has been to look for how the story in Genesis was made to exclude the She, to understand that story as it was written and to return the She while preserving as much as possible the original He meaning. This requires adding a whole new dimension, a whole new perspective on the text that can allow for the preservation of the original if one chooses to close "one eye" when reading the text so to speak.

I agree in this. And there isn´t much help in this matter if reading about the Jewish Mythology:

Jewish mythology is a major literary element of the body of folklore found in the sacred texts and in traditional narratives that help explain and symbolize Jewish culture[1] and Judaism. Elements of Jewish mythology have had a profound influence on Christian mythology and on Islamic mythology, as well as on world culture in general. Christian mythology directly inherited many of the narratives from the Jewish people, sharing in common the narratives from the Old Testament. Islamic mythology also shares many of the same stories; for instance, a creation-account spaced out over six periods, the legend of Abraham, the stories of Moses and the Israelites, and many more.
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This patriarchal reduction of the creation story has caused a huge mental impact for the bad on the Western cultures and it´s world view, especially on the view of the nature and all life.

In the Jewish esoteric mythology, the female divine aspect, Shekinah, is of course mentioned:

"Kabbalah associates the Shekhinah with the female.[8]:128, n.51 According to Gershom Scholem, "The introduction of this idea was one of the most important and lasting innovations of Kabbalism. ...no other element of Kabbalism won such a degree of popular approval."[15] The "feminine Jewish divine presence, the Shekhinah, distinguishes Kabbalistic literature from earlier Jewish literature."[16]
"In the imagery of the Kabbalah the shekhinah is the most overtly female sefirah, the last of the ten sefirot, referred to imaginatively as 'the daughter of God'. ... The harmonious relationship between the female shekhinah and the six sefirot which precede her causes the world itself to be sustained by the flow of divine energy. She is like the moon reflecting the divine light into the world."[17]

 

[sealchan]

I agree in this. And there isn´t much help in this matter if reading about the Jewish Mythology:

Jewish mythology is a major literary element of the body of folklore found in the sacred texts and in traditional narratives that help explain and symbolize Jewish culture[1] and Judaism. Elements of Jewish mythology have had a profound influence on Christian mythology and on Islamic mythology, as well as on world culture in general. Christian mythology directly inherited many of the narratives from the Jewish people, sharing in common the narratives from the Old Testament. Islamic mythology also shares many of the same stories; for instance, a creation-account spaced out over six periods, the legend of Abraham, the stories of Moses and the Israelites, and many more.
-------------------
This patriarchal reduction of the creation story has caused a huge mental impact for the bad on the Western cultures and it´s world view, especially on the view of the nature and all life.

In the Jewish esoteric mythology, the female divine aspect, Shekinah, is of course mentioned:

"Kabbalah associates the Shekhinah with the female.[8]:128, n.51 According to Gershom Scholem, "The introduction of this idea was one of the most important and lasting innovations of Kabbalism. ...no other element of Kabbalism won such a degree of popular approval."[15] The "feminine Jewish divine presence, the Shekhinah, distinguishes Kabbalistic literature from earlier Jewish literature."[16]
"In the imagery of the Kabbalah the shekhinah is the most overtly female sefirah, the last of the ten sefirot, referred to imaginatively as 'the daughter of God'. ... The harmonious relationship between the female shekhinah and the six sefirot which precede her causes the world itself to be sustained by the flow of divine energy. She is like the moon reflecting the divine light into the world."[17]

Yes, and I seem to be moving into a focus now where in my study of Genesis I am wanting to dig up the bones of the buried Goddess. Fortunately, or unfortunately, those bones show as the authors of Genesis sometimes "giggled" as they did their sometimes surgical removal. I can almost see where the shadow of the Goddess still rests. My guiding principles are to try and preserve the text as much as possible but add back in the other half. This, of course, will look like nothing less than a total intrusion to the "infallibles".