Theos-Talk Archives (November 2002 Message tt00767)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Stubbs [mailto:stevestubbs@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2002 12:31 PM
> To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Theos-World Re: God as "A Being" versus God as "No-being"
> 
> Basilides solved the problem by positing that being could be preceded
> either by Being or by Non-Being. He therefore does not dispute the
> argument that the Creation implies a Creator, and he allows that the
> Creator had a Creator, and so forth, but that ultimately one of these
> series of Creators was preceded by Non-Being and there the regress
> ends. The solution is ingenious, but if you look at it carefuilly,
> it does away with the need for a Creator, since the Creation could
> have proceeded directly from Non-Being.

Steve:

Your comments provide me the stimulus to enter into the deist/not-deist
discussion.

I find there two types of "infinity," relating to this idea that you
mention. First is the looking bigger and bigger for a top-most creator
of all. I'd say there is no top. One can keep looking bigger and bigger
(or higher and higher) and always find something more. Second is the
looking "sideways," for a creator of everything, everywhere. This is not
a being or creator in the ordinary sense, but something else, a mystery
behind the whole pattern and scale of being. It creates continuously,
instant by instant, rather than in discrete manvantaric periods of
evolution.

There might be three golden chains of creation. First is the bigger
being to smaller being chain, reaching upwards into infinity in the
ordinary sense of creators. Second is the instantaneous creation of the
whole game, not by any player or being, but arising spontaneously,
although the term "arising" is misleading because that's an ordinary
process that would relate to the first type of creation. The third type
of creation is self-made. We have our own golden chain of selves
reaching backward into the beginnings of time and forwards without end. 

If we consider a particular universe or scheme of existence, it
represents the coming into existence of a particular being, a being that
hosts innumerable smaller lives, not creating them but simply bringing
together a world or place where they too can come into existence.
Considering this particular creation, its occupants are guests, immortal
monads of equal value and status to their "god," and would only look up
to that being with gratitude in the same sense as a child might
appreciate his or her parents providing a home to grow up in. 

The universe is not created out of nothing, but rather fashioned out of
the primordial materials of yet a bigger scheme, in which the universe
represents but a single being. There is never an actual creation out of
nothing. Beings are given an opportunity to come into existence. The
worlds themselves are fashioned out of preexisting primordial materials.
The informing life acting as a "god" only provides the organizing effect
of a life coming into birth on some great scale, just as a human life
coming into birth provides the organizing energy that allows the
fashioning of a human being that plays host to myriads of smaller living
things.

When we consider one such particular universe, world scheme, or
incarnate being, its indwelling beings, the "creations," see its limits
of existence, its parameters. Outside these parameters are things that
are too high or low to exist or before the beginning of time or after
the end of time. There are finite, actual limits to any scheme of
existence. Transcending them, one experiences the "in-finite" or
trans-finite.

Apart from one's ordinary existence in such a world within a world
within yet bigger world, each with its own scale, scope of existence,
its own sense of time and time track, there is what might be considered
the universal pattern, the pattern of existence that applies everywhere,
everywhen, without change or exception. It is the second type of
"in-finite," the type that deals with continuous creation.

The first type of infinite is realized by evolution over time leading to
perfection and the moving on to exist in bigger schemes of existence.
The second type of infinite is equally realizable at any moment of time
and any place on the evolutionary ladder. It is no more closer at the
end of the Maha-Manvartara than it is now nor when the universe as we
know it was just starting. It is realized as a mystery that words cannot
be used to describe, that cannot be described with attributes like
"father," "creator," or anything that describes any process we know of.

A deist is looking at the first type of creator, the "father in heaven,"
the transcendent being that brought about existence as we know it, the
being whose actual life informs all and makes life possible. The
non-deist may sometimes be attempting to think of the other, more
immediate, more intimate "creator," about which no words can possibly
describe.

-- Eldon