Cosmogenesis

6. The Death of God

Each cosmic round recapitulates the stages of the previous one: the universe literally lives its life all over again, but goes further each time ~ sometimes just a small vital step, sometimes a giant leap. So it was that when God again reached the edge of the Abyss in the third round, he experienced the first déjà vu in cosmic history. He knew he had been here before, and though he couldn’t recapture the clear memory, the emotional residue of having held back from the brink now inclined him to the opposite choice: the urge to experience and explore overcame the yearning for spiritual beatitude. By a deliberate conscious act God unified his will and leaped into the Abyss.

The image of a leap and fall metaphorically conveys the cataclysmic change wrought by God’s act of will: it closed the portal to the love and light above, as if the fall was into an alembic of infinite size and the opening was now stoppered up. Enclosed in this empty void, without a flicker of light or a remnant of love to console him, God was overwhelmed by the first negative feeling that ever came into being: the stark, deadly prototype of fear. He feared that he would never return to bliss, and the fear fulfilled itself by extinguishing the last mote of hope within him, or threatening to. But then God evoked the might of his will, his power to be. This rekindled a spark of the light, not above him but in his hand. He wondered if this shard of the divine glory was the tool that could fulfill his desire to create ~ but now it would have to be in this dismal wasteland, or perhaps in new realms he might fashion that were even more remote from the light above.

At this prospect, God veritably shivered with a surge of dark pleasure. He recognized it as lust, fully coagulated for the first time in his heart, or perhaps a lower plexus. But he knew that if he succumbed to this urge he would lose the light again, and might never get it back. So he contained his lust, refrained to act, and sought in anguish for another way. And then he saw it, right there in his other hand: death ~ the opposite complement of life and lust, of creation, birth, and generation.

So now there was another solution to the tragic ring-pass-not of his own existence: God himself could cease to be ~ he could choose to die. He feared that this fatal act might bring the end of everything ~ but the glory suddenly beamed down from above and filled his heart, and he knew that this love is beyond the poles of life and death. He wondered what it feels like to die, and there was fear in the enigma, the final mystery. But the heart and the mind and the will of God coalesced into a perfect unity: he embraced death with his whole being, and inflicted it with his own hand ~ a willing, loving sacrifice of himself to the greater glory beyond the self, beyond all hope and fear.

There was a moment of shock, a sense of falling; a moment of terror, which dissolved into bliss. And then there was nothing at all.

7. The Resurrection of God