What follows will make the most sense to readers who have recently read the prior chapter in this unit, Lucid Dreams and Library Angels, which tells how my comparison of two creation stories initiated instructive lucid dreams. This chapter picks up where that piece left off.
Comparison of Creation Stories
This blog-site is a work of art; no claim is made that it represents advanced scholarship in comparative religion. Nevertheless, creation stories are respectfully scrutinized here to honor their exquisite awareness as time-capsules across the millennia, discreetly carrying the keys to perennial mysteries.
The following pair of creation stories are the ones that I first attempted to correlate back in 1999.
Chapter 42, Tao te Ching: A New Translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English says:
The Tao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And the three begot the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.
From the Holy Bible’s Genesis 1:1-6 (Original King James Version) (also of the Judaic Torah):
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day.
As you can tell, the two stories are radically different in their renderings. Despite their differences, every creation story must be describing the same thing: how what has never before existed initially comes into existence.
It takes at least three related things to reveal a pattern. With only two creation stories to compare and contrast, correlating them is nearly impossible. I say “nearly impossible” because the solution presented itself in a way I would never before have considered possible.
In the form of instructive, recurrent, lucid dreams, over a period of two decades, I received what can be thought of as a “decoder ring“. As such, Quadernity made it possible to interpret various creation stories so that their meanings aligned, despite their semantic and stylistic differences.
Although an intuited sense of meaning accompanied the patterns and graphic images of my question-driven, lucid dreams, I had no educational background whatsoever in which to contextualize these ideas. Fortunately, each ‘chalkboard-lesson’ would recur until I got its translation right.
My process of assimilation was similar to putting together a puzzle of shapes without the benefit of seeing a coherent picture forming as I went along.
As I share with you my artistic process of downloading impressions and fitting them together in puzzle-like fashion, I must say that it is more important to me to be truthful than to be factual. I have no official credentials for writing factual essays; instead, I merely share truthfully what I have “remembered” by asking focused questions and waiting expectantly for answers to reveal themselves to my active consciousness. Various religious, mythological, philosophical, poetic, and scientific writings confirm that my intuitive perceptions have been “remembered” throughout the ages by others before me who have asked the same or similar questions.
Two Additional Creation Stories
A few years into my dream process, the more ancient Rig Veda‘s passages came into my awareness as a third creation story.
Full of insights is the Nasadiya Sukta (Hymn of Creation), from the tenth mandala of the oldest of the Four Vedas, whose date of origin is unknown and highly contested*.
*Here is a linked site that informs us of the pre-history of India; and it includes a nice video on the topic, too.
From this creation story, given below, we find some intriguing parallels with Genesis.
Rig Veda, Translation by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty
There was neither non-existence nor existence then.
There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.
What stirred? Where? In whose protection?
Was there water, bottomlessly deep?
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day.
That One breathed, windless, by its own impulse.
Other than that there was nothing beyond.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning, with no distinguishing sign, all this was water.
The life force that was covered with emptiness, that One arose through the power of heat.
Desire came upon that One in the beginning, that was the first seed of mind.
Poets seeking in their heart with wisdom found the bond of existence and non-existence.
Their cord was extended across.
Was there below? Was there above?
There were seed-placers, there were powers.
There was impulse beneath, there was giving forth above.
Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen –perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not– the One who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only He knows or perhaps He does not know.
A few more years later I encountered the Enuma Elish, the first of the Mesopotamian Seven Tablets of Creation.
When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being…
Per LearnReligions.com:
The Enuma Elish was written across seven cuneiform tablets that were copied by ancient Assyrians and Babylonians. The Enuma Elish is considered the oldest written creation story, perhaps from the second millennium B.C.
George Smith of the British Museum published the first English translation in 1876.
Now we have three stories with quite a few similarities. Apparently the more ancient creation stories filtered down through time into the one presented in Genesis.
We can finally derive enough correlations from the three creation stories of Genesis, Rig Veda and Enuma Elish to effectively align them and translate their language differences. All this will be made clear by the last unit of the Quadernity story: The Creation Stories are Reconciled After All.
Day One of Genesis, as quoted at the top of this page and as interpreted by aligning the three stories, fits precisely into the original chalkboard Quadernity model (revealed in the next unit) that was delivered to me in the first few lucid dreams, back in 1999. Every aspect is clearly accounted for by the two inverse processes of Quadernity, INformation and OUTformation, which are dynamically engaged in feedback, tying together the earthly (physical) and heavenly (metaphysical) realms.
Still, Chapter 42 of the Tao te Ching remains a creation story in a class of its own. Only by reading the entire book do we find keys to correlate it with the three scriptures mentioned above. Only then, and by having multiple models of Quadernity that differ in perspective while always exhibiting the identical dynamic, are we able to correlate all four creation stories.
An aside is offered here to explore the persistence of ancient Myths and Mysteries.
The next two upcoming units reveal the various Quadernity models in the same order I received them in dreams, along with what I intuited from them. This way, the rationale of Quadernity as “the fundamental unit underlying all relationships on any scale, from quantum, to human, to cosmic,” will develop slowly but surely, for you just as it did for me.
May pondering my “puzzle” intrigue you, encourage your creativity, and inspire you to follow your own intuition!