The Living Universe (9 page)

The idea of a living universe is found explicitly and powerfully in the Eastern Orthodox Churches that comprise the world's third-largest Christian community after Catholicism and Protestantism. Eastern Orthodox Christianity holds the view that God's energies are vital for anything to exist at all and, for things to continue to
exist, God's active involvement is essential. God's active presence is required to sustain the universe at every scale, from the most minute to the most grand. Because everything is upheld equally and without favor, this means that the entirety of creation is equally valued and sacred. God's energies sustain even those beings who reject the idea of God. God will not abandon creation, as nothing is viewed as existing separately from God. Beings may not be conscious of their communion with God, but God is ever conscious of us.

The idea that God is not separate from this world but is present within it is found in other Christian sources. Perhaps the most exciting was the discovery in 1945 of a collection of fifty-two religious and philosophical texts, not far from the village of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Experts estimate that they had been hidden in an earthenware jar for roughly 1,600 years. This was an enormously important discovery as it includes texts that were thought to have been destroyed during the early Christian struggles to define orthodox Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts did not fit the accepted views of the times, so they were apparently sealed in a jar and hidden in a cave until they could be safely brought back to the public.

The most famous of these texts, The Gospel of Thomas, opens with these stunning words: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke,” and continues, “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.” What does Jesus have to say in this gospel that shifts our view of death from an ending to a transformation? In the Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus was asked, “When will the new world come?” He replied, “What you look forward to has already come but you do not recognize it.” Elsewhere Jesus says, “. . . the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.” Jesus is clearly saying that what we are looking for—the divine presence—is around us
and within us. Jesus says, “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

Moving forward in history, in 1215 the Catholic Church put forth the idea of
creatio ex nihilo
as official church doctrine, declaring God to be “Creator of all things, visible and invisible . . . out of nothing.” In the 1300s, the great Christian mystic and theologian, Meister Eckhart, expanded on this theme and wrote “God is creating the entire universe, fully and totally, in this present now. Everything God created . . . God creates now all at once.”
⁷
No declaration could be more specific or explicit concerning our universe as a continuously renewing system.

A number of Christian theologians now hold the view that God created our vast cosmos from nothing (ex
nihilo)
and that God upholds the universe through time
(creatio continua)
.
⁸
Continuous creation is the pouring forth of the universe in a continual flow, without ceasing, over billions of years.
⁹
The world around us is seen as an ever-emerging miracle of divine generosity, continually emerging from an invisible source. Creation is always new, always fresh, and always alive. The Catholic Church now teaches that creation is always journeying towards its ultimate perfection. Evolution, therefore, poses no obstacle to genuine faith, as Pope John Paul II said in 1985. Instead, he said, “Evolution presupposes creation . . . creation is an ever-lasting process—a
creatio continua.”

Although there are many differences within the Christian tradition, there exists a strong thread that sees our universe as a sacred body upheld by a divine presence in a process of continuous creation.
¹⁰

Islam has its roots in the same tradition of a single God as Christianity and Judaism. The word
Islam
means submission in Arabic, and Islam asks its followers to surrender their lives to Allah or God. This dynamic faith emerged in the seventh century with the prophet Muhammad (570–632), a native of Mecca in Arabia. Within a century of his death, an Islamic state stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to central Asia. Today, with nearly one and a half billion followers, Islam is the second-largest religion in the world.

Muslims believe Muhammad to be the final prophet of God. Over a period of twenty-three years, Muhammad received a series of revelations that were recorded by his followers. These revelations later became the Koran (Qur'an), the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be the word of God or Allah as revealed to Muhammad. Here the relationship of God to the universe is very explicit: “God is the Creator of everything; is the One, the Omnipotent.” Not only is God the source and originator of everything but also its sustainer: “God keeps a firm hold on the heavens and earth, preventing them from vanishing away. And if they vanished no one could then keep hold of them. Certainly He is Most Forbearing, Ever-Forgiving.” (Koran 35:41).

The Islamic view of God sustaining the universe is called
occasionalism
and describes the universe as being continuously reborn in a series of unique occasions or events.
¹¹
Al-Ghazali, who lived in the eleventh century, was a celebrated theologian and great synthesizer of Muslim thought. He advanced the Islamic view that our universe is not an ancient, static structure; instead, it is born anew at each moment—created out of nothing in a series of events by the will of Allah.
¹²
Nothing continues to exist unless God constantly
re-creates it. The book that you are holding now will be, in a moment, a new “occasion” of the book that went before it. Nothing endures in time; rather, everything comes into existence freshly in each moment, only to disappear and be replaced an instant later by another fresh expression or occasion.

Another major Islamic teacher is Ibn Arabi, who lived in the thirteenth century. Arabi wrote more than 300 works and had a powerful influence on Islamic spirituality. Even during his lifetime, he was considered one of the great spiritual teachers within Sufism, the esoteric tradition within Islam that focuses on direct experience of the divine. The central doctrine of Sufism is that all phenomena are manifestations of a single reality and arise out of a deep unity. According to Arabi, we do not notice the world is coming into existence and then passing away at every moment because, when one expression of existence passes away, it is immediately replaced by another nearly like it. He says that in thinking the world endures from past to present to future, we overlook the reality that, at every moment, the world presents a new creation of itself.

Rumi is an internationally famous, thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi.
¹³
His works have been translated into many languages, and his influence transcends ethnic and spiritual borders. Rumi wrote clearly about the continuous arising of existence: “You have a death and a return in every moment. . . . Every moment the world is renewed but we, in seeing its continuity of appearance, are unaware of its being renewed.” He also said that life is like a stream: “it arrives new and fresh at every moment while it appears constant in its material form.”

Mahmud Shabistari is another celebrated Persian poet. He wrote the following in 1317
C.E
.:

The world is this whole, and in every twinkling of an eye,
it becomes non-existent and endures not two moments.
There over again another world is produced,
every moment a new heaven and a new earth.
Things remain not in two moments,
the same moment they perish, they are born again.

Finally, A. H. Almaas, a modern-day teacher with roots in the Sufi tradition, has written powerfully about all of existence continually coming into being: “The universe is never old; it is always new, for it includes both animate and inanimate objects, the Earth and the sky, the planets, the Sun and the stars, the galaxies and the space that contains them; it also includes all the thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, and all phenomena at all levels of being.”
¹⁴
All of this, says Almaas—the one totality that continuously comes into being—is something that we can experience directly.

Hinduism dates back at least thirty-five hundred years and is the oldest and perhaps most complex of the world's living religions. It has no identified founder, but is known by its Vedas, or scriptures. Hinduism is the third-largest religion in the world with roughly 14 percent of the world's population, the majority of whom live in India. Although the term
Hinduism
encompasses many diverse sects and philosophies, all Hindus believe in a supreme cosmic spirit called
Brahman
. Brahman is the sustaining life force that is ultimately beyond description and the reach of human language. Brahman is the foundation of existence, and the source of all things as all things participate in the being of Brahman. By practicing different forms of meditation, Hindus believe that we can directly experience our sacred nature as Brahman. Atman, our individual essence or soulful nature,
is
Brahman—the
sustaining cosmic spirit whose nature is often described as infinite being, infinite consciousness, and infinite bliss.

At the heart of the Hindu view of reality is the belief that our universe is continuously upheld by a divine life force. Huston Smith, scholar of the world's religions, writes, “All Hindu religious thought denies that the world of nature stands on its own feet. It is grounded in God; if he were removed it would collapse into nothingness.”
¹⁵
In the words of a revered Hindu teacher, Sri Nisargadatta Majaraj, “The entire universe contributes incessantly to your existence. Hence the entire universe is your body.”
¹⁶

We are continually created from Brahman, and therefore at the most fundamental level, all things are one, unified, whole. The Bhagavad-Gita, written roughly 2,500 years ago, is one of the main holy texts of India. There, Brahman is described as the “king of all knowledge.” The Gita states: “This entire universe is pervaded by Me, the unmanifest Brahman. All beings depend on Me. I do not depend on them.” “I am the origin or seed of all beings. There is nothing, animate or inanimate, that can exist without Me. . . . the creator exists in the creation by pervading everything. . . He is inside as well as outside of all beings, animate and inanimate. He is incomprehensible because of His subtlety. He is very near as well as far away.”

Turning to even older sources of wisdom in the Hindu tradition, the texts of the Upanishads, we find this declaration:

Out of himself he brought forth the cosmos
And entered into everything in it.
There is nothing that does not come from him.
Of everything he is the inmost Self.
He is the truth; he is the Self supreme.
You are that . . . you are that.
                                    —C
HANDOGYA
U
PANISHAD

Hindu mythology portrays the cosmos being born anew at each moment through the cosmic dance of Shiva. “Nature and all its creatures are the effects of his eternal dance.”
¹⁷
All expressions and aspects of the living world are but momentary flashes from the limbs of the Lord of the dance.
¹⁸
In the Hindu view of the universe, there is nothing permanent; rather, the cosmos is seen as one body being continuously danced into creation by the divine life force.

For a more contemporary Hindu perspective, the writing of the revered sage and philosopher Sri Aurobindo is insightful. He wrote: “. . . there is but one Force in the world, a single unique current which passes through us and all things . . . it is this force which links up everything, animates everything; this is the fundamental substance of the Universe.”
¹⁹
Finally, when Mahatma Gandhi, the great spiritual and political leader of India, was asked what he considered to be the essence of Hinduism, he quoted the first verse of the Isha Upanishad, which begins with these lines:

Filled with Brahman are the things we see,
Filled with Brahman are the things we see not,
From out of Brahman floweth all that is:
From Brahman all—yet is he still the same.
²⁰

Again and again, in Hinduism, we find the theme of a life force continuously regenerating the universe in a dance of cosmic-scale creation. Heinrich Zimmer, the respected scholar of Indian art and civilization, summarizes Hindu cosmology by saying: “There is nothing static, nothing abiding, but only the flow of a relentless process, with everything originating, growing, decaying, vanishing.”
²¹

Buddhism is a family of wisdom traditions and its followers comprise about 6 percent of the world's population. These traditions have their origins in the historical person of Siddhartha Gautama, who was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in India in the sixth century
B.C.E.
Siddhartha was an Indian prince who eventually renounced his power and wealth to meditate on the nature of reality. After his “enlightening experience” other monks saw his newly discovered radiance and knowing, and asked him, “Are you a God?” He replied no. They then asked if he were an angel? Again he answered no. “Then what are you?” they asked. He replied simply: “I am awake.”
²²
He became known as the Buddha, which means “the one who is awake.” After his awakening, he taught for the remaining forty-five years of his life, traveling through northeastern India, teaching and mentoring a diverse community of people. Primarily, he taught that, through meditation and spiritual inquiry, anyone could awaken from the sleep of ignorance and directly realize the nature of the universe and their own nature.