In the Beginning:

Meditations on the Virgin Birth and the Creative Process

The following serves as the personal foundations for all the other pages I have written. What has been written in scriptures and what has been said by the great mystics and sages mean nothing unless we experience them directly. I don't want to hear of a Goddess or God. I want to taste the sweetness of the Goddess and God. What is the use of a God I can't taste for myself?

I hope it will be clear as you explore this web site that my experiences are nothing more than a part of the Virgin's weaving. This weaving is done in such a way that each point mirrors all other points. My experiences mirror the words of scriptures and the sayings of the great truth seekers manifesting throughout the ages.

If you pay close attention, you will find the same is true with yourself.

My initial memories of the Mother were as a young child (around 4 years of age). At that time, I had multiple visions of a Woman dressed in a sky-blue gown. Though She never spoke, I believed She had created me for a secret purpose, and would monitor my progress in life. Sensing an immense Presence behind this Woman, I also believed She knew everything about me. Eventually, I stopped having the visions, and placed them to the side as “silly childhood fantasies.” I forgot the Woman and denied the visions ever happened. In hindsight, I realize the Woman has been with me throughout my entire lifetime. She has nursed me into a realization of a God transcending all religious and cultural boundaries. Indeed, She was a metaphor for that God.

For example, when at a natural setting, I am often cognizant of a Conscious Presence in the Silence of Nature. The entire world erupts simultaneously from this Presence, as a newborn baby erupts from his mother’s body. This Presence is quite a mystery. It is analogous to an intense point that is everywhere. Yet, I cannot locate It anywhere. It is an incomprehensible and vast ocean with no bottom or shores. Yet, It is smaller than a pinpoint. It is gentle and serene. Yet, It is of an intensity by which an exploding star, in comparison, is but a pinprick. In realizing Presence as my Source, I transcend myself and dissolve into peace.

In Nature, I also realize a subtle “HUM” about everything. Everything vibrates. I cannot imitate this “HUM”. My vocal cords cannot make the sound. I often contemplate these natural experiences by relating them to Kings I: 19:13 of the Bible:

As a mirror to these experiences, I have also experienced my life as being born from an Infinite Consciousness, or State of Being. Today, I call this Being the Virgin. When I dissolve into the Virgin, I call Her nothing at all. She is nameless. This virgin State of Being exists as a radiant and translucent “darkness” outshining all the suns in the universe. When immersed in this Place, I have no past and no future. An instant and an eternity are one. I realize my life’s movements in time and space are temporary “illusions” illuminated by “snapshots” of Light flowing from this Infinite Being. I perceive my life as a Light born, nurtured, and dissolved within an ineffable Consciousness existing before time emerges.

To understand these experiences from a metaphorical point of view, consider the following dream I had as an adult of the Woman who appeared to me as a child:

The basic imagery to this dream entails birth: The oval (vulva or egg) shaped layout; the Woman; and the feeling of everything erupting from the Woman. She was the power giving birth to the dream, and my role in it. When the Goddess said, “AND I command you,” She was saying: This dream is my baby and you are a character in it. The dream blatantly ties the Woman to the sense of Presence birthing the world simultaneous to the “HUM” (“OM”) of Creation. These were images of the Virgin Birth. The Woman was naked in the dream because She was revealing Who She Is. In that revealing process, She revealed me.

Experiences and dreams such as these have led me to various beliefs about who we are in relationship to the cosmos. These beliefs serve in tying my life to the great body of myth and scripture throughout the world. I would like to discuss these beliefs to share how I perceive the web of the Mother in the universe's life and my own. In so doing, I am in hopes the reader will begin to see how the web manifests in his, or her, life.

* The universe ultimately exists in sacred time.

Sacred time is timelessness. Events presented at the beginning and end of time are Now. When Genesis states the Lord erupted from the dark Primordial Waters (the feminine Tehom, or Marie, meaning Ocean), with His infamous “Let there be Light,” I was born. When Jesus married Jerusalem (meaning City of Peace) in Revelations, I dissolved into the Bliss of Presence. The notion of Light emerging from the darkness of Being is not something peculiar to me, or Genesis. The Stanzas of Dyzan illustrates the same process when it states, “Darkness radiates Light and Light drops one solitary Ray into the Mother Deep.” ² As my experiences reveal, this Light means me. I am as much Virgin Born as any God. I cannot separate myself from Him for He is the Light of my life. His penetrating Rays illuminate my form, and causes my life to unfold from the Depths of the Mother (Infinite Consciousness, or Being).

* Gender is a verb. Biological conception mirrors cognitive conception and universal conception. For a fuller discussion, see Conception or Gender

In human cognition, Feminine power manifests when a man gives birth to a thought. This is why we commonly refer to the generation of an idea as a conception. This mirrors Genesis: 1:3 (“Let there be Light”), because when we have an idea (a baby), we often refer to it as a “light going off in our heads.” Cartoons picture this process all the time when they situate light bulbs over the heads of characters with “bright ideas”. This image is about giving birth to the Word, or the Light of Illumination. In Egypt, this Light is the Sun God, Atum-Ra. Egyptians also knew this God as the Word. (see Dhyana's image on: Sophia's Web

Just as a man has the powers of Woman in giving birth to thought, a woman has the powers of Man in her ability to fertilize. When someone says to a woman, “Your words are food for thought,” they are saying her devoured words serve as a fertilizing agent. This is why the term linguistic is of the same root as the Sanskrit lingam, meaning phallus. Absorbed words serve as a fertilizing power. Interestingly, the term semen is from the Greek sema, meaning food and seed. Man is food for Woman. To illustrate, when we garden, mulch (food) serves a fertilizing (masculine) function in relationship to the receiving (feminine) soils of the Earth that ultimately bear and nourish new vegetation. The intercourse of Female and Male is the Creative Process.

* Evolution is an unfolding of what exists eternally within the Mother in its Unmanifest, or Implied, state.

Evolution means to unfold. This definition implies that what unfolds exists in a latent state until it is expressed. For example, when a fetus first evolves in his mother’s uterus, he does not look anything like a human creature. At one stage, he looks like a fish. At another stage, he looks like a serpent. At yet another stage, he appears similar to a baby bear. Even at these stages, one cannot say his humanness is not there. It exists in an implied state, awaiting the correct moment to unfold. This notion of being implied speaks to physicist David Bohm’s theory of the Unmanifest Implicate Order, which he describes as an Infinite Ocean of Energy. ³ The movements of this Ocean are an enfolding and unfolding, emphasizing the wholeness of the whole and the wholeness of the part. Bohm considers this Ocean the Source and Ground for the surface world in which we live. He refers to the surface world as the Manifest Explicit Order.

This notion of the Unmanifest generating the Manifest is the same notion as the Egyptian Mother-Goddess Ma-Nu generating the world. Egyptians imaged Ma-Nu as an Infinite Ocean of Uterine Blood (Life), and said She held all forms in a formless state until expressed in time and space. Likewise, in Native American Keres Pueblo mythology, people believed they lived in a cave alongside their Mother, Thinking Woman (or Spider Grandmother), before manifesting on this world. We have always existed. Before emerging, we exist in an enfolded (or implied) state within the Universal Mother while awaiting the right fertilizing moment to unfold.

* We are eternally in the Womb.

As a fetus unfolds in his biological mother’s uterus, we unfold in Presence. To understand this, watch your thoughts. They arise from the font of your mind, and you give birth to them through your lips in speech. Yet, even as your thoughts flow from you, they remain in the font of your mind. Do they leave forever when they disappear? Of course not. Under the right fertilizing circumstances, they are reborn. They exist as a memory, in their Unmanifest Implicate State! This idea mirrors the beliefs of the Native American tribe called the Kogis. These Natives refer to their Goddess as Aluna, and describe Her as a “darkly” Sea Goddess Who thought everything into existence. The Kogis also describe Aluna as the Universe’s Memory and Possibility. As Undifferentiated Life, the Goddess exists as pure Potential (or Memory), and is universally described as black, or “darkly”, for the same reason the pupil of an eye is black. She absorbs Light in conceiving the world.

* Being Virgin is being Empty.

Sages often describe our Mother as an Abyss, a Living Void. For example, the Kogis describe Aluna as being nothing at all. Yet, the Kogis say our Mother’s emptiness is a fullness! We are just like our Mother. We are pregnant in our emptiness just as She is pregnant in Her emptiness. To understand this, consider the common statement, “The idea just came to me out of the blue.” The clear blue is the Virgin; the idea born of the blue is the Word. Consider also the metaphor of the pregnant pause. The pregnant pause is an empty silence that is a fullness. What does the pregnant pause contain? Unmanifest Words! Why else would the hieroglyph for Egypt’s Amen-Ra, meaning the Hidden One, be a pregnant belly? In Hebrew, the word Amen means Let it be. The Word in Hebrew is the Word in Egypt!

* All religions ultimately speak of the same Reality.

The Bible describes Wisdom as the unchanging agent of change (Wisdom: 7:27). Just so, the language of science and the various religions of the world change, yet speak of the same Being. Language changes; Reality does not change. What is Bohm’s Unmanifest other than a redressing of the ancient Sea Goddess? What are the Waters of Genesis: 1:2 other than the Waters of the Rig Veda? What is the Bible’s Wisdom and Understanding other than the Keres’ Thinking Woman, or the Kogis’ Aluna? Perhaps it is time to begin seeing this ultimate unity in the Godhead so we can live in peace instead of getting ourselves caught up in defending our ego and ethnocentric conceptions of Reality.

Realizing our unity in the Godhead means death. We will not survive this process because we will no longer be the fragmented creatures we are now. Man begets new life when He dissolves into Woman. Spiritually, this process takes two interrelated forms: Communion and Sacrifice (meaning to make whole). When we receive our Lord through Communion, we are functioning as a Woman in allowing ourselves to be impregnated by Him with Him. To become receptive to Him, we need to empty ourselves of ourselves. We need to become Virgin. When we become Virgin, we draw the Lord to us as water draws lightning. Similarly, when we offer ourselves to God as the Sacrifice, through allowing our egotistical and ethnocentric thoughts to dissolve into Her, we will be reborn into a more encompassing State of Awareness. We will awaken. This awakening is not in the future. It hides within us now, like a planted seed awaiting the right moment to flower from the womb. May we all die to our egocentricity so this birth of what has always been within us as Potential can occur, and we can know ourselves as Mothers of God!

I am the author of

Sophia's Web:
Understanding the Unity and Diversity
of Religion, Science and Ourselves.

You can order wholesale from the distributer from 1stbooks.com

Or, you can go to Amazon.com

TYPE	TITLE	SUMMARY
Poetic	Home	Introduces Site
Contemplative	Sophia and Nature	Discussion of the relation between Sophia and Nature
Contemplative	Go With the Flow	Getting beyond false definitions of self
Poetic	In the Woods	Provides an erotic spiritual experience of Presence.
Poetic	In the Beginning	Personal Experiences with Sophia
Contemplative	We are Lovers	Discusses relationship as essence of Creative Process
Poetic	Who is Sophia	The Nature of Wisdom
Poetic	Nature and Truth	Discusses the relationship of Nature and Truth
Other sites	Bonding with Others	Links to Sophia sites throughout the web

Your Source for your Wall Search:

© 1997 burl3hall@hotmail.com

Sophia has puckered Her lips times

² Quotation from the Stanzas of Dyzan is from Raghaven Iyer’s The Jewel in the Lotus, (London: The Pythagorean Sangha & Concord Press, 1988), p. 84.

³ Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991).

Join my links page? Add-A-Link