180 - Creation

Raj at Kingston -- January 21, 1998

QUESTION:

Raj, I’ve been on a spiritual path for a long time. And I followed you for a long time, but I just recently started the Course of Miracles," and I’ve run into a little snag, which I was hoping perhaps that you could shed some light on. And I’m going to read to you what the paragraph in which it appears.

It says.... Well, for one thing it is the word "create" and "creation," which they use frequently. And in the preface it states: "Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite; no beginning and no end. It merely is."

Now I believe that God does not create, because if it did it would take that time and process that they talk about, and it would require a beginning. And I believe as it says there, it merely is. What is your viewpoint on that, and the use of the word "creation"?

ANSWER:

Then you have the wonderful opportunity to discover how creation occurs without time. Another word for God is "Being." And very often the word "being" relative to God is seen as a noun, but the word "being" relative to God is really a verb. God is a verb. That is why there is Life. God is the Movement of being, not the movement of a supreme being, but the movement of be-ing the verb.

Movement does not take time. Why? Because contrary to the way you are perceiving at the present time, it isn’t occurring in space. And space is the only place where time can exist. So where is life happening? It’s all happening in the conscious experience of its happening. In other words, it’s all in Mind, if you will. But Mind is God. God is Mind, God is Life, God is Truth. So the Movement of Being is the Movement of Mind. And the Movement of Mind is the experience of consciousness. And Mind does not occupy space, but it is inseparable from the experience of consciousness.

What is there for consciousness to be conscious of? Only itself, because it is the presence that is God, it is the Movement of Being.

The Movement is infinite, therefore there is no place for the Movement to go. And yet the experience of being occurs. Time has nothing to do with it, space has nothing to do with it. And truly the process of awakening involves making a shift from the perception of things—which are really ideas experienced in mind—it is the shifting from the perception of things in space to the experience of them being the inseparable presence of you. And to make that more meaningful, or shall I say more relevant, when you wake up, or as you become more and more clearly awake, you will begin to recognize yourself in everything. You will see it and you will say, "Ahh, it’s just like me." In other words, there is nothing about it that is foreign or at odds with you.

Right now you all have experiences of seeing something and recognizing its beauty immediately. There’s just no question about its being beautiful. This experience of beauty is an experience of recognizing yourself in that thing. In other words, there is nothing about the beauty of that thing which is at odds with your ability to recognize beauty.

Now that’s just an example of what I mean when I say you will say, "it’s just like me," except as you wake up it will be more than the recognition of beauty. It is as though every constituent part of that thing, whether it’s the view out the window, or an object that is smaller in your hand. It will be a recognition that every constituent part of what you are seeing, whether it’s water, whether it’s land, whether it’s trees that have pine needles and leaves and bark and ants crawling up, all the constituent parts of what you see are just like you. In other words, are not in any way unrecognizable to you as that which is completely in harmony with who and what you are at the very depth of your being. These are inadequate words that I am using to express the wholeness of the experience, but they express the feeling and convey the idea.

You will be aware not just at an overall whole view, but of every constituent part of what is there. And you will recognize yourself in it—it’s just like you, or you are just like it. There is nothing out of sync in any way.

Now this experience still leaves everything appearing to be in space with the mountains across the water, and trees on the mountains, and snow on the mountains, etc., with other things closer to you. But space does not remain a factor that is relevant to you. Because you know what? The apparent space between you and those things, and the apparent space between the ants and the needles on the trees and the bark, etc., the very space is just like you. It is a constituent part of the conscious experience you are having.

And so the experience of Life becomes integrated, unified, one and it’s just like you and you’re just like it. But everything’s sill apparently is not all jumbled together into an undistinguishable ball of infinite manifestation of God. You see. In this recognition of yourself, it becomes obvious that it’s all a conscious experience, which in itself involves no time, and involves no space.

But nevertheless, what is being experienced moves because Mind, you might say in the act of being conscious of itself moves and is experienced as something by itself. And that self is you and that self is the needle on the tree and it is the space in between, and yet none of it is segregate or separate from anything else. It takes infinity for that which is timeless and spaceless to be fully realized, or to be realizing itself forever.

So I encourage you to begin to consider creation as something that does occur, but something which does not bring into play time and space and does not take time and space in which to occur. And then as you look at everything, begin to let loose of the sense of time and space to what you are seeing and remember that it is a conscious experience that you are having.

And if it is a conscious experience that you are having it must necessarily be an experience of God, even if you have some misinterpretations involved. And then become curious to see God in the Movement that seems to be taking time and have the sense of time that’s involved disappear out of the picture.

There you go, that is something you can be curious about. That is something you can play with, as I said earlier, "what if, what if there is no space to this experience of a world I’m having? What if there is no time to the experience of this world I’m seeing?" Ah! Hey, play with that if you want to learn to teleport. Play with that so that you can play with teleportation. Does that answer your question?