Watch YouTube Presentation: Let There Be Light
When our space program took us to the moon, we were enthralled when we saw for the first time our gorgeous gem of a planet rising through the black backdrop of space to a place just above the horizon of the moon. We’d never seen an earthrise. Taken by the beauty and wonder of this image, we may not have quickly gleaned all the implications that it so clearly demonstrated.
We see the earth in this photo because it reflects the sun’s light. What this tells us is that the sun’s light is just as present in the apparent blackness as it is on earth’s surface. In this sense, sunlight is omnipresent, but it is only apparent to us when an object capable of reflecting light is present.
In the Genesis account of creation, God says, “Let there be light.” This first step can be accomplished and still appear only as the black of space. Place an object in this stream of light, however, and you see that the light was present before the introduction of the object.
The Big Bang theory contradicted this order of creation, suggesting that matter came first and then life (thanks to something like a perfect combination of chemicals and an extraordinarily lucky lightning strike). This would be a little like saying that the earth in our photo produces the light that enables us to see it.
I can more easily grasp the idea that the energy we know as life, the light of every living creature, permeated the otherwise formless universe. The biological objects that were capable of reflecting or expressing this life then came along. All that makes up the life, love, power and intelligence that we know as God was present long before the biological reflecting agents appeared. God does not evolve; the biological reflecting agents do, but probably not in the way we imagine.
When we refer to ourselves as spiritual beings, we are, by analogy, referring to an aspect of ourselves that is equivalent to the primordial light. The light that we are does not evolve. It is already complete. Nor does our ability to reflect this light evolve. As with any object placed in the path of sunlight, our ability to reflect this divine field of energy is inherent in our makeup. The light actually made us for this single purpose of reflecting itself. It did not start with an inferior product that it would eventually perfect. It started with that perfection.
That we are capable of believing God is absent or in any way separate from us is like the earth saying, “I’m surrounded by blackness. When will the light dawn?” The whole time the light is present, powering all the many systems of earth, asking nothing more from the earth in terms of its awareness or deserving. Nor does the sun ever say to the earth, “You owe me big time for giving you all this free light.”
Although we are capable of capturing and reflecting the unseen light, our senses-based, intellectual orientation has prompted us to invent the illusion that something more must happen prior to our immersion in the light. Many have accepted the false belief that if enough of the race evolves, the rest will be carried in on its coattails. This superstition stands like a great shield blocking the ever-present light. We abide in the shadows of ignorance, passing on from one generation to the next that this shadow is a thing with which we must contend, that there is more than one presence and one power in the universe, and that in some near or distant future we will all know only the one. The metaphysician, in this regard, is as prone to superstition as the Christian fundamentalist awaiting the second coming.
The groping in darkness we see currently in our world perpetuates the myth of spiritual evolution. The presence of strife, however, is no measure of the presence of Truth.
Emerson observed, “We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.” Those who strive only for the short and turbulent pleasure provided by the shiny objects of material gain overlook the deeper, all-sustaining truth of that divine, infinite sea of light forever shining in the darkness, a light without which nothing else would exist.