Being and Essence

If you try to 'touch base' with the Creation in yourself, you embark on a wonderful journey. The relationship is reciprocal: self and Creation, Creation and self. Self is all you have to start with - like the contents of the knapsack you take with you. But self includes, of course, tangentially, all the contacts you've had with the created world since time began - including all the marks you've left in the earth, so to speak. Therefore, when you set off on this journey, with your knapsack, you are already affected by every part of the earth's existence. Thus you are related to Creation in two ways: existentially, through continuous contact; and 'essentially', through the divine spark of the creative 'I' within you. Being and essence, if you like.

For me the wonderful swing of this relationship - reciprocal in nature - forms the important part of the journey. I experience it as a lemniscate - a figure of eight, the dynamic symbol of infinity. At the top - if you can say there is a top, which there isn't really - I find the small point of the self, a divine spark, actively present and participating in the first great outpouring of Creation. At the bottom - which again you can't really say - I feel myself as created being, sitting among the totality of existing things: the created world, in which I have scratched the marks of my existence. In the middle - at the crossing-point - I meet myself in the passing. I take hands and pass on - exchanging and sharing the impulse of creativity, the certain knowledge of being-hood.

This describes, in a few short sentences, the flowing relationship between self and Creation. To experience yourself in that dynamic movement can be an enormous help in breaking the bonds of creature-hood we've manufactured for ourselves in modern civilization. The divine spark is always there at the point of outpouring. And it always will be.

Jay

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