6. CREATION AND EVOLUTION - page 3

The Basic Pattern

The "seven Days" of Creation set forth in the first chapter of Genesis represent seven characteristic phases of the creative process of the universe. But the pattern revealed in the symbolical Biblical narrative is true of all creative processes everywhere and at every level. Creation, I repeat, is not a mysterious event which happened six thousand years or many trillions of years in the past. Creation is now. God is active now. The Biblical narrative applies to every situation in which the remains of the past are being transformed into a more integrated, more "ideal" condition of being in the future. Such a transformation is constant; to resist it is to resist the creative spirit of God-Elohim. To refuse to change futureward is to begin to die spiritually. And the basic power able to affect future-ward changes and metamorphoses is always imagination.

Creative imagination acts through the mind; but the creative Mind of God is to be clearly differentiated from the human mind. Nevertheless the essence of mind-activity is in both instances a formative power. Mind brings activity to a focus by means of a form. But the divine Mind focuses the vast, immense outpouring of God's creative imagination and God's love-charity, while the human mind is essentially the faculty of association — the ability to relate, generalize and abstract from the multiple data provided by the human senses.

The human mind generalizes from particulars, building theories and systems out of the results of experiences and experiments in the world of life and materiality. The divine Mind focuses the universal into particulars. As a crystal-clear lens condenses diffuse sunlight into the image of the sun-disc, so the divine Mind condenses the creative imagination and love of the Father (i.e., the diffuse universal power of the Fatherhood) into a multitude of precise "images and likenesses" of the Father, each a potential "son", a potentially perfect "divine soul".

This formative activity of the divine Mind unfolds through a sequence of six basic phases symbolized in the first chapter of Genesis by "Days". These "Days" represent six steps in the involution of the Spirit of God into the realm of archetypal forms and souls; and at the end of the sixth Day the perfect Archetype, Man, the image and likeness of the Father, is created as a Form in God's Mind. This perfect Form or Theme, Man, is then projected and impressed into materiality — somewhat as the blueprint of a house is used to build the house itself, the house made of clay, mortar and wood.

Thus man appears in the life-sphere as a "living soul" (cf. Genesis 2). The evolution of the soul begins; and this evolution takes place gradually in three characteristic periods which the Biblical narrative outlines: from Adam to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, and from Moses to Jesus. Such an evolution should be understood as an ever closer "coming together" (a "covenant") between God and man. The soul evolves from the condition of "living soul" to that of "divine soul"; but God, in a symmetrical movement, gradually becomes more "involved" in man, until God and man become utterly one in Christ Jesus.

Through this Incarnation of God and Transfiguration of man the possibility opens for all truly individualized "sons of man" to become creative agents through Christ, to extend and multiply the creative activity of the Father into a Host of "sons of God". It is because of this possibility that man, even though he be as yet in a state of individual evolution far remote from his ultimate goal, must progressively become oriented and attuned to the creative process as it operates from God.

Truly creative experiences, however, do not come through the use of the merely human mind functioning as the associative intellect and directed by emotional impulses bent matterward by the gravitational force of selfish desires for power, wealth or fame. Man can never be truly creative except he becomes an agent for the divine Mind; except Elohim, HE-the-gods, creates through him.

What is created during the first six Days of Creation described in the first chapter of Genesis are, one must emphasize, organizations of creative Thought, and not material entities and bodies in the sense in which we use the term "material" today. At most one can think of these archetypal "organizations" of divine creative Thought as "models" for what will subsequently be produced in the life-sphere. They might be likened to the architect's blueprints, to the composer's musical score. In the perfect blueprints and score the finished products are completely defined down to the smallest detail; yet many of the actual performances of the symphonic score may be lamentably inadequate and often complete betrayals of the creator's intent and purpose; and many a contractor and builder fails to actualize in matter the ideal temple which the architect envisioned and fully formulated in his finished blueprints.

Every creative process leads to a number of failures or mere approximations of the Archetype in the creative Mind. The causes of such failures are complex and inherent in the character of the relationship between matter and the Creator. They are inherent in the nature of time and change, in the eternal polarization of unity and multiplicity. They are the reasons for the periodical need for universal re-integration.

All creative processes can be considered as the formulation and working out of a "project". God's project is the eventual production of a multiplicity of perfect souls in His image and likeness. Why these souls? Not for God's "glory" — for that would reduce God to very human proportions indeed! — but so that through the activity of these souls (His many "sons") the chaotic remains of the past might once more experience integration and unity, and the past be transmuted through the present cosmos into a divine future.

Man has been called the Temple of the Living God. But no real temple is built just to be "beautiful" or as a monument to the architect's fame. It is built to do a work. It is conceived and erected to gather people so that they may experience the Presence of God in a consecrated place, and thereby be progressively transformed into more-than-men.

Always and at any level what God creates is for the purposes of integration, then of transmutation or transfiguration. The "individual soul" is transfigured into the "divine soul", and the materials that were chaos in the beginning are refined, then transsubstantiated into divine energy; matter in the state of chaos being energy dis-animated and reduced to a condition of almost absolute inertia.

The Seven Days

1. The first phase of any true creative process refers essentially to the realization by the creator that there is a need which should be met. We may think of this need in a myriad of ways; at the human level a man may start a creative project to meet a psychological as well as a material need. If the artist creates "because he must", this simply means that the need is expressed in terms of a psychological compulsion. However, this compulsion may be used in some cases by creative Powers higher than man to actualize an Archetype in God's mind. The creator desires, or is inwardly forced, to answer the need. He mobilizes his energies (i.e., he "wills") in order to meet the challenge.

This is the first Day in Genesis 1. The "heaven and the earth" do not refer to material realities but to what God becomes aware of as His attention turns toward the dualistic realization of spirit-matter, subjective-objective polarities. The realization is entirely within God, the One. The One "thinks", as it were, of the Many. The Hebrew word B'rashit ("in the beginning") means etymologically "in the head", in the mind; or in another sense, "in seed". In the opening words of John's Gospel the Greek term for "beginning" is "arche", which means essentially "principle".

The first "remembrance" of the past arouses in the harmonic being of God an active condition: "The Spirit of Elohim moved upon the face of the waters", thus taking cognizance of the "remains" — the submerged memory, the "deep" — of the past. The darkness upon the deep is the problem God faces. This darkness impels God to release light. God must act because He is what He is. Divine activity is inherently necessary activity; but "necessity" in God has not the character of what men know as compulsion. Acting and being are one and inseparable in God; creative action in Him is absolutely spontaneous even as it is necessary. There is no conceivable resistance, delay or conflict. Compassion is one with will, and will immediately becomes act.

The act is the release of Light: "Let there be Light." This Light surges from the very core of divine Harmony; it is the power of relatedness, and it is love-charity. It is Christ, the Alpha of the cycle of manifestation. Christ is the unity-center of the Elohim Creative Host. He is Light and He is also the rebirth of time, the Eon.

2. The creator, having willed to create and having polarized his consciousness (light-and-darkness can be interpreted here as the dualism of free imagination and self-criticism or self-testing) visualizes, in the light of spontaneity, a basic solution to the problem facing him — a "seed idea", a theme and its over-all development.

This stage constitutes the creation of the "firmament" during the second Day. The Latin term means a "firm mind". God calls the firmament "Heaven". But this is not the "heaven" spoken of in Genesis 1 : 1. It is the celestial expanse which the archaic mind believed to be the place of spiritual foundations, God's creative Mind, the universal Formative Agency "in the midst" of all there is.

3. The basic solution having been "caught in spirit" or intuited, it must be worked out as a new form or formula, a new way of relating elements which are the legacy of the past. A new symphony uses the same notes of the scale and much the same instrumental tones as did previously composed symphonies; but the relationship between these notes and tones is new, and is meant to assume a new function in the score of this new symphony.

This is the third Day of Creation. The "waters under heaven" constitute what will become the realm of life, the realm where the material particles of chaos are to be progressively integrated into living organisms. God plans for such a realm and the first manifestation of life. With the concept of "seed" (1:11) the whole cyclic pattern of life-manifestation is established — but established as an archetype in the Mind of God.

4. The fourth step achieves what was begun in the two preceding ones. The visualized plan (step two) becomes the finished blueprint of the temple, the score of the musical symphony, the step-by-step formula of a chemical (or spiritual-alchemical) process. This plan obviously needs not to be written on paper; but it is somehow "fixed" in the mind or memory.

During the fourth Day, God is shown contemplating what was begun during the second Day, the precise pattern, the basic rhythms operating in the "firmament". For the Chaldeans, and indeed for all the human societies of the first millennia B.C., the sun, moon, stars and planets represented the Formative Powers of the universe, the "Creative Hierarchies". During the fourth Day God outlines their work, as controllers and guides of all cosmic processes, which in turn will set the stage for the evolution of man and man's ascent toward the perfect state of divine Sonship.

5. The blueprints, the musical score or the formula are first mental abstractions. To make of them concrete instrumentalities the required materials have to be gathered, worked upon, treated and refined.

On the fifth Day, the animals which live in the sea and in the air are created, not as actual, material organisms (this comes only in Genesis 2:19) but as genera and species. In some manner the sea and air animals are considered as providing means to refine life-materials which will be used by man and his forebears. The reference is presumably to the alchemical elements, Water and Air, respectively connected with the emotional and the intellectual natures of man.

6. At the sixth stage the instrumentality is completed, through the use of which the need that called for the creative process will eventually be met. It is only an "instrumentality", the use of which still belongs to the future. That is to say, the model of the temple is finished, from which many actual, physical temples will in time be made; the engineer's machines which will gradually produce the many gadgets men need are completed; the formula of the process is laboratory-tested — it will work if properly handled.

During the sixth Day, the Earth element is conceived in God's Mind as the final factor in the archetypal Pattern of Man. It is differentiated and perfected through a new series of animal manifestations — the species that are to develop on the solid Earth-element. Then all the needed factors having been developed, in sketches as it were, Man is created in God's Mind as the divine Form in which the soul will be able to achieve its evolution toward the goal of perfection.

Man is created by the Elohim Host as the "image and likeness" of God, the Father. Man is conceived as the divine Vessel within which the materials of the earth can in due time not only experience organic unity, but in which they can be transmuted and transsubstantiated into divine energy — matter and energy being essentially one. But if man is the alchemical Vessel for transmutation, the soul is the Alchemist. And the soul must begin its evolution where only chaotic matter is to be found — in the life-sphere, on earth (perhaps on similar planets as well!). The soul must begin as the "living soul", constrained by the compulsive, repetitive, unconscious energies of life; and only as it raises itself and is raised to the level of individualization and mind-activity can it become a positive agent for God's ultimate purpose.

7. In the seventh stage the architect, satisfied with his work, "rests". But what actually happens in every seventh phase of a cycle is that there is a transfer from one level of activity to another. The architect places the future of his work in the hands of the contractor and building supervisor, who will manage the actual production of the concrete building of stone, wood, mortar, etc. and will direct the many workers. The composer of music presents his work to the orchestra leader, who will gather the instrumentalists needed to "incarnate" the abstract score into a sequence of living, significant, powerful tones — if all goes well! The Creation-in-mind is ended, insofar as the cycle of time and all entities subject to time are concerned; the production and evolution in and with the materials of the life-sphere begin.