Here's CWG's response to your question. Sorry for the extended quote but it's a big topic:
In the beginning, that which Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. Yet All That Is could not know itself--because All That Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. And so, All That Is...was not. For in the absence of something else, All That Is is not.
This is the great Is/Not Is to which mystics have referred from the beginning of time.
Now All That Is knew it was all there way--but this was not enough, for it could only know its utter magnificence conceptually, not experientially. Yet the experience of itself is that for which it longed, for it wanted to know what it felt like to be so magnificent. Still, this was impossible, because the very term "magnificent" is a relative term. All That Is could not know what it felt like to be so magnificent unless that which is not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.
The only thing that All That Is knew is that there was nothing else. And so It could, and would, never know Itself from a reference point outside of Itself. Such a point did not exist. Only one reference point existed, and that was the single place within. The "Is-Not Is". The Am-Not Am.
Still, the All of Everything chose to know Itself experientially.
This energy--this pure, unseen, unheard, unobserved, and therefore unknown-by-anyone-else energy--chose to experience Itself as the utter magnificence It was. In order to do this, It realized It would have to use a reference point within.
It reasoned, quite correctly, that any portion of Itself would necessarily have to be less than the whole, and that if It thus simply divided itself into portions, each portion, being less than the whole, could look back on the rest of Itself and see magnificence.
And so All That Is divided Itself--becoming, in one glorious moment, that which is this, and that which is that. For the first time, this and that existed, quite apart from each other. And still, both existed simultaneously. As did all that was neither.
Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there--but which must exist for here and there to exist.
It is the nothing which holds the everything. It is the non-space which holds the space. It is the all which holds the parts.
Now this nothing which holds the everything is what some people call God. Yet that is not accurate, either, for it suggests that there is something God is not--namely, everything that is not "nothing." But I am All Things--seen and unseen--so this description of Me as the Great Unseen--the No-Thing, or the Space Between, an essentially Eastern mystical definition of God, is no more accurate than the essentially Western practical description of God as all that is seen. Those who believe that God is All That Is and All That is Not, are those whose understanding is correct.
Now in creating that which is "here" and that which is "there," God made it possible for God to know Itself. In the moment of this great explosion from within, God created relativity--the greatest gift God ever gave to Itself. Thus, relationship is the greatest gift God ever gave to you, a point to be discussed in detail later.
From the No-Thing thus sprang the Everything--a spiritual event entirely consistent, incidentally, with what your scientists call The Big Bang theory.
As the elements of all raced forth, time was created, for a thing was first here, then it was there--and the period it took to get from here to there was measurable.
Just as the parts of Itself which are seen began to define themselves, "relative" to each other, so too, did the parts which are unseen.
God knew that for love to exist--and to know itself as pure love--its exact opposite had to exist as well. So God voluntarily created the great polarity--the absolute opposite of love--everything that love is not--what is now called fear. In the moment fear existed, love could exist as a thing that could be experienced.
It is this creation of duality between love and its opposite which humans refer to in their various mythologies as the birth of evil, the fall of Adam, the rebellion of Satan, and so forth.
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In rendering the universe as a divided version of Itself, God produced, from pure energy, all that now exists--both seen and unseen.
In other words, not only was the physical universe thus created, but the metaphysical universe as well. The part of God which forms the second half of the Am/Not Am equation also exploded into an infinite number of units smaller than the whole. These energy units you would call spirits.
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My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient part of Me so that I could know Myself experientially. There is only one way for the Creator to know Itself experientially as the Creator, and that is to create. And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole.
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My purpose in creating you, My spiritual offspring, was for Me to know Myself as God. I have no way to do that save through you. Thus it can be said (and has been, many time) that My purpose for you is that you should know yourself as Me.
This seems so amazingly simple, yet it becomes very complex--because there is only one way for you to know yourself as Me, and that is for you first to know yourself as not Me.
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There is on way I could have caused all of My spiritual children to know themselves as parts of Me--and that was simply to tell them. This I did. But you see, it was not enough for Spirit to simply know Itself as God, or part of God, or children of God, or inheritors of the kingdom (or whatever mythology you want to use).
As I've already explained, knowing something, and experiencing it, are two different things. Spirit longed to know Itself experientially (just as I did!). Conceptual awareness was not enough for you. So I devised a plan. It is the most spectacular collaboration. I say collaboration because all of you are in it with Me.
Under the plan, you as pure spirit would enter the physical universe just created. This is because physicality is the only way to know experientially what you know conceptually. It is, in fact, the reason I created the physical cosmos to begin with--and the system of relativity which governs it, and all of creation.
Once in the physical universe, you, My spirit children, could experience what you know of yourself--but first, you had to come to know the opposite. To explain this simplistically, you cannot know yourself as tall unless you become aware of short. You cannot experience the part of yourself that you call fat unless you also come to know thin.
Taken to ultimate logic, you cannot experience yourself as what you are until you've encountered what you are not. This is the purpose of the theory of relativity, and all physical life. It is by that which you are not that you yourself are defined.
Now in the case of the ultimate knowing--in the case of knowing yourself as the Creator--you cannot experience your Self as creator unless and until you create. And you cannot create yourself until you uncreate yourself. In a sense, you have to first "not be" in order to be.
Of course, there is no way for you to not be who and what you are--you simply are that (pure, creative spirit), have been always, and always will be. So, you did the next best thing. You caused yourself to forget Who You Really Are.
Upon entering the physical universe, you relinquished your remembrance of yourself. This allows you to choose to be Who You Are, rather than simply wake up in the castle, so to speak.
It is in the act of choosing to be, rather than simply being told that you are, a part of God that you experience yourself as being at total choice, which is what, by definition, God is. Yet how can you have a choice about something over which there is no choice? You cannot not be My offspring no matter how hard you try--but you can forget.
You are, have always been, and will always be, a divine part of the divine whole, a member of the body. That is why the act of rejoining the whole, of returning to God, is called remembrance. You actually choose to re-member Who You Really Are, or to join together with the various parts of you to experience the all of you--which is to say, the All of Me.
Your job on Earth, therefore, is not to learn (because you already know), but to re-member Who You Are. And to re-member who everyone else is. That is why a big part of your job is to remind others (that is, to re-mind them), so that they can re-member also.
All the wonderful spiritual teachers have been doing just that. It is your sole purpose. That is to say, your soul purpose.
Quoted from CWG Book 1, pp. 22-28. |
