THE BLOSSOM AT THE ROOT OF LIFE
Exploring Cosmic Creation

by Susan Bayliss

The Theosophical Society in England
Insight magazine Summer 2008 vol. 49 # 2

People of all times have wondered about the nature of the cosmos, developing theories and myths about the origins and evolution of the universe. Systems of creation have been expounded by great religions, philosophers, mystics, sages and spiritual explorers in every age. But the question ever remains - what is it that we are part of? Is there an Absolute unknowable cause, a Creative Intelligence? Is this what some call God or the Divine?

Susan Bayliss has been a member of the Theosophical Society for 25 years, is National Secretary for the TS in England, and has been a Director of the Foundation for Theosophical Studies for over a decade.
This piece is an extract from her presentation for the Foundation for Theosophical Studies at 50 Gloucester Place in May 2008.

Geoffrey Hodson speaks about what the term God means for him:

"God" implies all nature, physical and super-physical, the evolutionary impulse imparted to it and the irresistible creative force which bestows the attribute of self-reproduction and the capacity to express itself indefinitely ... from its beginning to its end and the "sound" of the Creative "voice" by which that Ideation is impressed upon the matter of Cosmos. All these together with all seeds and all beings, forces and laws, including the one parent law of harmony, constitute that totality of existence to which is given the title "God".

God is variously portrayed as Dramatist, whose stage upon which the drama of life is played, is the Solar System; as Weaver, whose many coloured tapestry, Nature and all her sons, is woven in the loom of time and space; as Gardener, with the Angelic Hosts as husbandmen, the universe as garden sown with every kind of seed His own creating, and every one destined to produce its own facsimile of Himself [I].

The magnificence of this world flowering into the play of life is beyond the grasp of our ordinary mind. Yet we may be able to have a very fragmentary and partial vision of what this means, through the wonders of our own gardens, a plant, a flower, our beloved - the Divine in manifestation. Each point of creation is a living reality which has the potential to reveal the secrets of nature from within itself - from the dynamic potential within little seeds all things grow and have life. There is encyclopaedic information about our physical world, but the impulse which gives birth to seed, and seed to form and growth, still cloaks its mystery.

Many will be familiar with St John: "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God." In Sanskrit the 'Sound' of the Creative 'Voice', is called Nada Brahma. The outpouring of Creative Sound vibrating to bring into being a new-born universe - the celestial composer outpouring the creative symphony which is the world. According to the Isha Upanishad nature is a movement of the consciousness of the Absolute:

"Swifter than the Mind". The world is cyclic movement (samsara) of the Divine Consciousness in Space and Time. Its law ... exists by movement and would be dissolved by cessation of movement. But at the basis of this movement is not material, it is the energy of active consciousness . . . creates oppositions of unity and multiplicity; divisions of time and space, relations and groupings of circumstances and causality . . . But mental consciousness is not the Power that creates the universe. That is something infinitely more puissant, swift and unfettered than the mind. It is pure omnipotent Self-awareness of the Absolute unbound by any of the relativity . . . They are laws regularising motion and change not laws binding the Lord of the movement. God is the one Stable and eternal Reality. He is One because there is nothing else, since all existence and non-existence are He ... He possesses eternally Himself all that is, has been or ever can be, and He therefore does not increase or diminish. [2]

Spiritual Truths have been handed down orally through the centuries and over the millennia. In ancient times they were given by the initiate teachers and recorded in the Vedas and Upanishads (the roots of Hinduism). Many traditions describe a "great egg" - a cosmic circle in space, without beginning or end - the Great Deep of primordial boundless chaos, containing nothing actually and everything potentially. In Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda, the one creative radiance, came forth from the boundless circle of Unknown time as the first creative germ. From an invisible pure spirit of eternal all-pervading reality, the spiritual sun sent forth light or radiant energy. Taking form as the sky of the universe, the light of the world, and cosmic atoms consolidate into the evolution of life on earth. The Sufis speak of it in this way:

Thou art Absolute Being; all else is but phantasm
For in thy universe all beings are one
Thy world-captivating beauty, in order to display its perfections;
Appears in thousands of tiny mirrors, but it is one
Although their beauty accompanies the beautiful
In truth the unique and incompatible heart-enslaver is one. [3]

Oh Thou has no place in any place - art appearing ...
In every place within this wheeling world,
Yet cannot be encompassed in my eyes. [4]

Similar phrases are found in Taoist, Hebrew, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Islamic scriptures - to name but a few. Notions of this eternal truth are expressed throughout history, but from where did this information come?

Astronauts have spoken about their spiritual experience when seeing our world from space. A beautiful jewel-like globe in vast oceans of deep space - our home, planet earth, a tiny sphere in the solar system, a minute fragment of our galaxy the Milky Way - itself a speck of dust in the universe. Seemingly commonplace information - profound in its depth. There are billions of suns ¬the stars, in billions of galaxies. Our minds cannot grasp the vastness of the universe sitting in immeasurable light years of space. The Universe contains everything there is, all of existence, including space, time and matter.

The Hubble telescope is exploring the visible universe and is showing us distant planets and galaxies - the macrocosm. At the other extreme quantum physics reveals something of the 'stuff of the universe' within microscopic space. Yet the secrets of the material universe and those boundaries are ever deeper and more mysterious, we are perhaps light years away from understanding how or why it came into being. Scientist George Leonard:

For quantum theory to really work ... each electron has to "know" what all the other electrons in the universe are doing in order to "know" what it's to do. It's as if at every point in the electro magnetic field there were a tiny supercomputer that was constantly figuring out everything that's going on in the universe ... In such a universe, information about the whole is available at every point. These implications of quantum theory resonate with the deepest intuition of the ages, the direct experience of the most revered spiritual masters, and the thought of such philosophers as Leibnitz, Spinoza and Whitehead.

The electron microscope allows us these perceptions of the body, a beautiful and terrible place, seemingly as spacious as the sea . . . As magnification increases, the flesh does begin to dissolve ... and we see that it is made of long spiral molecules in orderly array. And all the molecules are swaying like wheat in the wind, connected to one another and held in place by invisible waves that pulse many trillions of times a second . . . Atoms shadowy dancing balls around their fixed location ... its interior is lighted by a veiled cloud of electrons. We come closer increasing the magnification. The shell dissolves and we find nothing. Somewhere within the emptiness we know there is a nucleus and there it is a tiny dot ... but no, as we move closer to the nucleus it too begins to dissolve. It too is nothing more than an oscillating field, waves of rhythm ... Of what is the body made? It is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the ultimate heart of the world, there is no solidarity. Once again there is only the dance. [5]

Previously astronomers and particle physicists referred to 'empty space' and we then learnt there is no such thing as emptiness, it is filled with impulses, with light, with rhythm and mystery. We are now told that only 4% of the mass of the universe is visible matter (stars, planets and everything they contain), 22% of the universe is 'dark matter' and 74% is 'dark energy'. This is inferred from gravitational effects and is yet to be verified. Discovering the nature of this missing mass is one of science's most testing problems.

Mahayana Buddhism speaks of the 'emptiness' or 'void' - 'the fullness of the seeming void'. The esoteric term 'emptiness' or 'void' is speaking of cosmic spirit possessing no body, no form. This 'fullness' is the fullness of the ever-present spirit of the non-manifest in which lies and is built the manifest universe. Boundless space of apparent cosmic emptiness, filled with both the non-manifest and manifest, from the microscopic to interstellar space and beyond. The Tibetans call this Ineffable Mystery 'Tong-pa-nid', the unfathomable Abyss of the spiritual realms. The human mind may occasionally plunge behind the outer physical garment, into the immense inner 'invisible' worlds, and the experience of many suggests that through deep meditation the mysteries of the universe unfold before us. Truth and the One Reality appear to find the same expression in all ages at all times.

The Secret Doctrine, given to us by H. P. Blavatsky in 1888, is a treatise stemming from the Stanzas of the Secret Book of Dzyan - an ancient ageless text in poetic verse written in response to the contemplation of deep symbols revealed in meditation. The beautiful words of the Stanzas express in essence this spiritual experience (abridged).

Stanza 1
i. The Eternal Parent wrapped in her ever-invisible robes had slumbered once again for seven eternities.
ii. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration.
iii. Universal Mind was not, for there was no Ah-hi to contain it.
iv. The seven ways to bliss were not. The great causes of misery were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them.
v. Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother and Son were once more one, and the Son had not awakened yet for the vi. new wheel, and His pilgrimage thereon.
vii. The seven Sublime Lords and the seven Truths had ceased to be, and the Universe, the son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranishpanna, to be outbreathed by That which is and yet is not. Naught was.
The causes of existence had been done away with; the visible that was, and the invisible that is, rested in eternal Non-Being - the One Being.
Alone the One form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in dreamless sleep; and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, throughout that All Presence which is sensed by the opened eye of Dangma. [purified soul]

Stanza 3
i. The last vibration of the seventh eternity thrills through infinitude. The mother swells, expanding from within without, like the bud of the lotus.
ii. The vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift wing the whole universe and the germ that dwelleth in darkness: The darkness that breaths over the slumbering waters of life.
iii. Darkness radiates light, and light drops one solitary ray into the mother deep. The ray shoots through the virgin egg; the ray caused the eternal egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal germ, which condenses into the world egg ...
vi. The root of life was in every drop of the ocean of immortality, and the ocean was radiant light, which was fire, and heat, and motion. Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own essence, the body of fire and water, or father mother.
vii .... Bright space, Son of Dark Space, which emerges from the depths of the great dark waters, ... He is the Blazing Dragon of Wisdom ... He shuts out the above, and leaves the below to be seen as the great illusion. He marks the place for the shining ones, and turns the upper into a shoreless sea of fire, and the One manifested into the Great Waters.
ix. Light is cold flame, and flame is fire, and fire produces heat, which yields water: The water of life in the Great Mother.
x. Father-Mother spin a web whose upper end is fastened to spirit - the light of the one darkness - and the lower one to its shadowy end, matter; and this web is the universe spun out of the two substances made in one, which is Svabhavat.

The Stanzas continue to describe the process of unfoldment and the dawning of the life of the world from the Boundless All - the creative universe. As H. P. Blavatsky puts it "The first re-awakening of cosmic motion, scattered through Space; appearing, when seen from Earth, in clusters and lumps, like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the 'star stuff' ... The Blossom of the Root of Life" [6].

References

[1] Geoffrey Hodson, The Kingdom of The Gods, Theosophical Publishing House Adyar, Chennai, India 1952, p 5.
[2] Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, Verses 4 - 5, pp16 and 17. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry India.
[3] Annie Besant, The Seven Great Religions, TPE Adyar Chennai Indian, 1966, p249.
[4] H. Murphet, What God Died. The American Theosophist, Spring 1967, p126.
[5] J. E. Berendt, Nada Brahma - The World is Sound. East West Publications 1988, pp106 and 102-3 quotes George Leonard in "The Silent Pulse".
[6] The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky Vol 1, p69.

For a list of recordings of talks by Susan Bayliss send a stamped addressed envelope to:
Tapes Department, Theosophical Society, 50 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8EA
or telephone Paulina on 0207 563 9815.

The Theosophical Society in England 2008
reproduced from 'Insight' Summer 2008, The Journal of The Theosophical Society in England