From a Sermon referencing the following readings:

Genesis 2:19-21
Matt: 13: 10-24
Jn: 14: 16-18
Romans: 1 : 20-24

Lets take a few deep breaths.

First, a quick exercise. Please, everyone close your eyes. We’re going to, quite literally, stretch our imaginations. So, when you feel quite calm, imagine projecting a line out of your forehead. Project it forward until you feel the wall here, at the south end of our church. Get a good sense of that distance. Now, holding that line in place, project a line out the back of your head. Project it behind you until you feel the wall in the north of our church. If you’re seated near the back, maybe go into the street—try to keep the same distance as the first line. Hold both those lines in tact. Now, out of your left temple, send a line to the wall in the east. If you’re close to the wall, send the line into the garden somewhere. Hold those three lines while you project a fourth to the west. You now have four lines of sensation that should give you a good conception of space, shooting out into the quarters of your imagination.

So now, remembering the four lines we’ve already sent out, we’re going to send a line out of the top of your head, up to the ceiling. Try to keep a sensation of all the lines while performing this. Now, send a line down, into the basement.

Here comes the fun part. We’re going to join the ends of the lines together! Start with the line you sent out in front. Draw a diagonal line to the end of the line you sent out to your right. From the right draw a diagonal line to the end of the line you projected out behind you. From there to the line you projected to your left, and then back to the front. Now, from the four corners, send lines up to the summit of the line near the ceiling. You have made a pyramid. Now, make another one beneath you—feel the lines, all of them, and the two pyramids have become an octahedran.

Everyone got that?

OK, now spin the octahedran! Spin it first slowly forward, around the line that goes east west. Now backwards. Now spin it around the line that goes front back. Clockwise and then counterclockwise.

And finally spin around the vertical, frist one way, then the next.

Did everyone feel that?

OK. You can open your eyes. I hope everyone found that interesting. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, also, in light of what I am going to speak about, Feel free to do that exercise at home. It’s a great way to expand your sense of awareness.


That God is a verb, as well as a noun. A brief history of creation.

Let us ponder the creation; let us ponder how we came to be. Not just why we are here, but how we came to be asking this very question, how we came to reason and through deliberation and understanding how we can know God.

Surely you’ve had the wonderment at being alive on this day, this very minute, seeing the world through your own eyes and recognizing yourself in the eyes of others. Who are you? From where did this ‘I’, this observer, spring up?

A religious scholar might answer we came to be to find God—so that our freewill would again discover God’s greatness—His glory—and know it as good. That freewill is the variable that proves God in the cosmic equation of being.

This is perfectly true. But lets look at things a little differently. Lets look allegorically at the initiation of reality—the initiation of Will, the first cause, the moment that brought forth everything, including our own questions.

So how does a singularity become multiform? How does a unity become all, so seemingly separate and disconjunct?

Let us start with an image. Of course God is too large to fit any image—including the images all of us have of Him—for God is not containable in symbols. God is beyond concept, God is beyond form. What I hope to do is use symbols to elucidate God, show the idea of God, through metaphor. After all, perhaps this whole earth is but God’s metaphor? Perhaps we, as beings, are just albums for God’s photographs?

Anyway. Let’s think of eternity. Not endlessness, for that must have a beginning, but eternity—the unbeginning and nonending. It’s not easy. So we take a slide of this unending nonbeginning; a cross section; and start somewhere in the middle. Think of nothing. A vast empty sky that disappears into itself. There’s no boundaries, there are no visible ends, but from any viewpoint it looks the same. Blackness. Formless. If you were to stand in the middle of it you would see infinity in all directions. Nothing. If you want to see infinity, just close your eyes!

Now this nothing is actually something. Think about this. Infinity and the point are actually one thing—they are not separate—in fact, in the same way time results from space (time is the experience of space) so the point, infinitesimal, arises from the eternity, the infinite. The experience of the infinite is a center.

Why? Well, one good thing about eternity—infiniteness—what the Jews call the Ain Soph—is that no matter where you are in it, you are always in the center. How? Because no matter which way you look there’s infinity in each direction! You are infinitely far—and thus equidistant—from each quarter no matter where you are. Thus, in endless nothing, an observer instantly becomes the center. This collapse into awareness is the first moment of differentiation, the knowledge that if there is the infinite, there is also the infinitesimal.

The infinite and the infinitesimal are essentially the same phenomenon, just like space and time are really one and the same phenomenon.

From the nothing, we have made a point. Now, from the point we make the line, and distance is born. It is impossible to draw a line without a point—without at least two points: The first consequence, and the relative second. Thus, in eternity a line—an horizon—is drawn.

Now a point and a line become the foundations of area. From the first dimension springs the ability to make the second—distance makes area, concomitantly. There is no area without distance. So it is that the line becomes a radius in a circle. And the circle, as everyone knows, is just the shadow of the sphere. Perhaps the lines shoot out of this point in all directions, if an infinite number of lines spread out in all directions from a central point, we make a sphere, not by drawing the circumference, but by drawing the radiance! Thus we make a circle, and a sphere, in infinity. The third now places form in the plain. An infinite number of circles sharing the same central point create the sphere. The cube is the six directions—the up, the down, the front and back, the left and right. From nothing we have now made a solid! Naturally and concomitantly. We could say a dot has gone the distance and found the area to become a sphere!

Each of these possibilities has arisen from nothing, where a center is made in eternity. The center will always be where the observer is. Thus, maybe the ancients weren’t wrong to say we are the center of the universe… perhaps it’s just that the universe is many centered…. (The growth of the universe is measured with time, and the radius of its expansion leads us to the present. But we’re not really talking about the material universe, we’re speaking in allegories about possibilities.)

So long as there is eternity there will always be a center. So long as there is a center there can be a line. As long a line, an area—a circle—a circle a sphere. Each springing form the other. A sphere, once contained, can then MOVE. It can spin. It can roll. It can whirl, wheel, and careen. It’s fun to be a sphere! Speeds, motions, eddies… a sphere can pursue other centers relative to itself through motion! Through eternity, then, like rain on a summer’s day, roll innumerable spheres.

With motion comes properties, what we can call natures: defined relative to each other. As the nature of a line is to join points, se we can say the nature of this sphere is, say, 186,000 mph, or an easterly trajectory, etc.

We have now made four dimensions—and motion, viz. Speed and velocity—from nothing.

Now, lets impose a fifth dimension. If the spheres can change color, for example, we can assign more natures to them—a blue speeding sphere, a slow red sphere, we can give the names according to their ‘behaviors’; a star smasher, a white dwarf, what have you. Now lets impose a sixth dimension of change: will. Now, when the sphere is able to effect its own nature, it can be said to be alive. Spheres are blue when they’re fast, say, and red when they’re slow. Let’s say they start avoiding each other, as they switch direction, exploring new centers….

In the same way a bird can alight on a tree and chirp at dawn, glorying in the rise of a sphere that effects the day. Animals are the embodiments of the natures—a horse is renowned for its power, a dog for its loyalty, a lion for its regency. So it is that flowers become butterflies, pollen and ambers become bees….

But we won’t stop here, at the sixth dimension. We have now reached the seventh number; the next dimension able to manifest change on the material plane is choice. But not just choice to eat, to sleep, or to respond to stimuli (like the animals who embody natures), but the choice to adopt a nature! After all, that is what freewill means, the choice of choice! The choice to choose how to choose! The choice to define and create oneself according to one’s will. So it is that the human—in one form or another--is that which makes itself everything, incorporates all natures into its being, effects mother nature to his whim, in his playground of self discovery. It is humans that make similes… It is humans that make metaphor…. He flew, like an eagle. He bit, like a dog. With ape-like strength, he swung through the blizzard of leaves etc…

Is this why God brought all the animals in front of Adam to receive their names, and why they were each named according to their nature?

So it is we make kings, policemen, bankers, even real estate agents, creating new natures—like our creator, indeed—human nature, then, is the wearing of natures like garments in the theater of life.

Drama, and thus art, are uniquely human. “The world is a stage, and us just players upon it” said the bard. Do we see what he meant? What it means to create roles by which to understand reality?

In any given day, the breadth of human experience covers everything—from the worst, the most painful, to the sweetest, and most delightful. It is between these extremes that God is to be found.

Whereas the animals are pieces that together combine to reveal the whole, the whole is evinced in the human, whose nature is omniform. Man IS the microcosm, given the ability to be—to know—all things. By thus being complete within the completeness man is the closest image of the divine. He contains all things in that all natures are within his grasp, that he might know the breadth of creation. We are made in God’s image! Ours is the dream within the dream! We are like a perfect drop in the perfect cloud!

All this has come from nothing. (I’m not kidding, there was an empty page staring at me before I wrote this!) But seriously, the unity of void becomes a unity of place (what physicists term the singularity). From here radiates everything.

So God is, in a sense, an emanation! God is an endless becoming! And yet, He is much more than this!

So, now to the allegory itself. Considering what I’ve just been talking about, it is perhaps appropriate that all that previous allegory was just the basis for this allegory. An allegory of allegories!

In an endless sky, pure blue, a sky that disappears in all directions into itself, a cloud is forming. The cloud is forming because water droplets are condensing around each other, like the first thoughts of a beginning. When a critical charge has built there is a flash—like a synapse firing—and lightning discharges, wringing the droplets from the ether. They fall to the earth which is visible after the flash of light—perhaps its always been there—and as they are absorbed into the earth, like ideas, flowers spring up. A whole world of grass, or forests, of rivers and oceans, of water-carved mountains, arises from each drop of this rain.

Where did the rain come from? This is the clincher—it came from the oceans that arose after it fell! This is not to say that the oceans made the rain, only that the rain made itself through the possibility of the oceans. The condensation of those first droplets were the product of the future—there is no time here—they are the oceans, contain them, and so they were made by what has yet to come…. In the same way that a point is, ultimately a small sphere….

There is a mutuality. The beginning is in fact the end! Round and round it goes, the self-created, unbegotten source of all!

God is of Himself complete, and can exist without (and within) everything. And yet God knows Himself through human kind—like the mountains know the rains. The realization of God—that moment when the child recognizes the truth of his own nature—when he discovers the divine nature hidden in all things—IS the formation of the first thought! From here all things come into existence—stretching through the past, the present and the future.

All things exist for you! And all things exist because of you!

Your eyes are the vision of your mind. Your mind is the vision of your soul. And your soul is the vision of God.

Thus God is a VERB as well as a noun, for he moves through Himself, and comes to recognize His own.


God is the eternity that made a center. God is the center from which all things spring. And God is the springing and the realization!

God fills Himself to completion, and overflows, overflows, overflows.

God is without image—he is too great for that. He is illimitable as well as infinite. Yet perhaps we have an image we associate with God? Maybe a light? Or the inevitable white bearded man, the wise old sage? But God is beyond these images in the same way that a gift is separate from its price tag. (You can’t understand—experience a corvette—by its price tag! We can get a good idea about a car from its HORSEPOWER, its MPG. But we still can’t know the car through these words—we can’t know the vehicle through these other vehicles. Well, despite our limitations, God gets to Drive in Man!)

Anyway, to wrap up, I want to talk briefly about the great names of God. This may seem contradictory in light of what I have just said, but these names are applied to the stages of emanation of God, from the incomprehensible, illimitable, self created, unbegotten, supreme Good to the archetypal, symbolic, manifestations of divine will and power.

Like the Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, these names exist as fingers on the hands of the pianist—without such appendages and offshoots it would be impossible for the pianist to make music.

The Hebrew name Michael means Who is like God? Gabriel, means ‘The might of God”. Raphael, God has healed. Uriel is the Light of God, the fire of God.

In the Judeo-Christian religion these names of God refer to different manifestations of this Holy principle that becomes, and takes on images, as a conveyor of information (and ultimately self discovery).

Thus Elohim Sabbaoth, the God of Hosts, is different from Jehovah Sabbaoth (translated usually as Lord of Hosts) who are both different from the Macroprosopous, (Ehieh, Jah, and YHVH Elohim). This gets all the more interesting when you consider the symbolic meanings of the Hebrew letters, and their arrangement, and numerical values. There is even the grand 72 lettered name of God that Moses used to speak in the Tabernacle! These names are different wells that lead to the same waters, hidden beneath the grounds of our perception, the rocks of our senses. (And please note, All rocks must turn to dust.)

Our ancestors have done a good job of classifying the unclassifiable by meditating on these principles. And there is great similarity here with other religions. Sanskrit, Cuniform and Hebrew do have commopnalities in their symbolic representation of emanantion. From Aleph, Mem, and Shin, (for example) the whole universe was created! But truth is universal, and just as the same cloud can rain over a single mountain to produce a multitude of springs, so God becomes many names. As the waters sustain all life, so God sustains all reality.

God is not just the cloud, or the wellsprings. God is the fact that it CAN rain!! God is the letters and the alphabet. God is the words that come out of these. But God is the paper, the pen, and the author of all things!

Know thy self! For one day you will be united with the supreme!

Symbolism in Motion.


“The only constant is change…” So says the famous adage we have all hear a million times.

But, to my mind, change is really a movement. In order for something to change it has to move from one state to another.

All things move. Life is, in many ways, an experience with movement. Not only do we move through time, aging, and experiencing, but the senses themselves work by perceiving movement. On the atomic level all is vibration. The senses are vibrations sensing other vibrations, creating electric potentials that move currents we understand as feelings. As a stylus can transform the roughness of a record to music, so humankind can use their senses to make meaning.

A particular meaning we make of this endless movement is the idea of Time. Time is a reference to motion, and motion to distance: Time is the experience of motion, and motion the experience of distance.

Man is a movement that knows he’s moving.

But if all is motion, what doesn’t move? The Mover.

If I pick up this pen, I have moved it. My hand moved it, but muscles moved my hand. The muscles were moved by electric charges issuing from nerves that move stimulation from the brain. What moved the pen? The idea to move it! And yet an idea can be changed, so in this limited analogy, the idea is the Mover, but the idea is not ‘immovable’.

Think of a tiny seed able, by an immovable, invisible principle, to assemble from the soil the necessary elements to make a large tree. The tree moves. The elements move. The seed, too, is comprised of motion. But the ‘idea’ of the tree—the code that makes a tree by assembling some elements and not others—remains constant throughout its growth.

This potential to become a tree is unmoving.

So movement breeds change, change allows decision (we often say we have moved our position when we change our minds), decision breeds character, and character can learn.

As a movement, can we learn to be still?

Learning creates meaning. If we have taken time to learn something, then we can understand its meaning. We can discover—subjectively understand—qualities like beauty in moments.

Does beauty move? What is beauty?

Think of a rainbow, the covenant between Noah and God after the flood. A rainbow is formed in rain drops that move. The light waves move through the falling prisms of the moving drops. But the rainbow, for the moment it arises, remains unmoving.

Anything that doesn’t move can’t ultimately be sensed by and of itself. It needs vehicles to illustrate its existence. Matter is really energy in a type of motion. But the Immovable lies beneath the senses, beyond sight—God, the Immovable Supreme Good that underlies all things, can’t be seen, but He can be known. The Invisible is made evident through the visible things.

For example, man takes an infinite distance, and makes ‘miles’. Miles he breaks into ‘feet’, and feet into ‘inches’. Each is used as a handle to grasp the experience of distance, and communicate its meaning. What is a mile, a child may ask? It is 5280 feet a parent might answer. What is a foot, a child may persist? It is twelve inches, perhaps we answer. What, then, is an inch? 1/12 of a foot. Thus we assign mutually dependant variables and create a formula. The variables change, and thus our measuring changes also, but the distance remains constant.

In the same way we make meaning, and fabricate our lives.

We are a movement that can understand our motion. We are a record that can hear its own tune.

Going back to the atomic level, even the process of vision is motion. Photons bounce off a substance, lets say that same tree, and enter our eye. They stimulate neurons in the retina, and electrical impulses carry this information along the optic nerve to the brain. Here an image is made. What is the substance of this image? Can I move the image? I can change it, so in a way it can be moved, but it is completely intangible, and completely personal. If I cut open your head, I won’t find a tree in there. And I can’t share this ethereal tree with others without a vehicle, such as words, to elicit a similar (but not identical) image in you.

We, as conscious beings, assemble what we recognize as a tree from a flux of charges. We create an image and make meaning—we can call this a tree, and talk about it. We can see flowers. And we can see bees. We see them as discrete and separate entities.

Now, in our reading from Ecclesiastes, King Solomon was heard to say ‘everything is meaningless’. He meant this, to my mind, to refute worldly ambition. What good is anything when the world has already been everything, and will be again, why bother ‘chasing the wind’ when there’s ‘nothing new under the sun’? He also says ‘the eye never gets its fill of seeing’, or something to that effect. And here is what I am trying to say. We get caught up—distracted—in our senses, in believing what we see, and not penetrating beneath it. We don’t ask ourselves, what is it that makes the image of an object in the brain? In many ways we take the miracle of being for granted because of the familiarity of our environment. And something as large as God, something that cannot be put into words as an adequate vehicle to share, is the most hidden image. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, seems to say all that is important is contemplation beyond the senses.

For example, despite their appearance, the flowers and the bees are not separate. They are mutually causative. The fig tree in Borneo cannot exist without the wasps that pollinate its fruit—and the wasps cannot exist without the trees, they are utterly integrated life-cycles. In biology this is termed an obligatory mutualism. One day, perhaps, the two species will be classified into one ‘super-species’. The fig tree is the wasp. The wasp is the fig tree! The flowers are the bees, and the bees are the flowers! The appearance of separateness can be overcome to see a symbolic ‘super organism’ larger than its parts.

As the bee is to the flower, so is man to God!! Man can know that which does not move, just as God can be known by man. Perhaps this is what it means to be able to make meaning? Perhaps being human is to come to know God?

This brings me to our reading from Isaiah. ‘We shall see the glory of God.’ While this is perhaps a reference to the Last Day when God reveals Himself to all, it is also perhaps an allusion to the potential for God to be known by man. The truth in the Bible is one that resonates with many meanings, a million interpretations. The voice calling in the wilderness isn’t just a prediction of John the Baptist—it is also the song of the world! Can we hear the song of the world, which continually calls out praises to God? If only we know how to look.

So how can we sense that which is ‘beneath the senses’? How can we perceive something that doesn’t move—or rather is immovable—when our senses are stimulated by movement?

1 Corinthians says to be fools, that the wisdom of man, like Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, is meaningless. (Interestingly, Socrates was the largest fool of all. He was one of the most intelligent men that ever lived precisely because, as the oracle at Delphi reportedly said, “he knows that he knows nothing.”)

To be a fool, in this sense, is to see the world anew. Your children are the most wonderful fools. Be like children, and have novelty with the world. Ask questions constantly, to yourself and others. Give up doctrines that make it all too familiar. Don’t accept the tree as a tree!

Our wisdom, our science, is an empirical science, one built on observation and proofs evident in nature. There is a theory in Physics called Logical Positism, that states if something cannot be proved between people, there is no point in discussing it.

And yet the idea of a tree, that ‘program’, that ‘principle’ within its seed is something that can only be witnessed as the tree itself. It isn’t mathematically determined. It isn’t empirical. And yet the tree exists. That’s empirical, that there are trees, but you can’t predict anything about a tree—other than its species—from a seed. You can’t even guarantee a seed will germinate. Much like quantum mechanics, at this level, you can only talk about probabilities. Science says ‘how’ it doesn’t say ‘why’.

Why? Why? Why? How many parents get a barrage of ‘whys’ from their kids? That is another immovable constant, it seems, the curiosity of the young!

Our reason that makes us curious is both the light to penetrate the darkness, and find God, and the distraction from God. We must be careful not to become familiar with everything, and satisfied with ‘logical’ proofs. Why is the sky blue? Because of Wein’s law, that light scatters proportionate to the inverse of its wavelength. Shorter wavelengths scatter more. A great description of a phenomenon, but little more. The sky is blue because blue light scatters most. This probably wouldn’t satisfy an earnest child, although it may shut them up… for a while. It is akin to answering the question ‘why did that painter paint the sky red?’ with ‘because he used red paint.’

If, as children, we want to be satisfied, we must learn to see symbolism, because God is a personal experience. God can be proved, personally, but He can’t be ‘solved’.

The material forms of the earth connote, continually, a larger theme. Just as inches move to feet, and feet necessarily move to miles as our experience of distance increases, so does nature move toward God.

Job 12: vs. 7-9: “Ask the animals and they shall teach you; and the birds of the sky, and they shall inform you. Or speak to the earth and she shall show you; and the fishes of the sea shall declare to you.’

Let’s quickly look at these fractals I’ve printed out. They make for a good allegory. A fractal is defined as an image that is self-similar through scale. If we zoom in at any point on the boundary of this image we get a perimeter exactly similar to the overall whole.

If we start with a single triangle, like in this one (Serpinski Triangle), and we add half-sized triangles to each side, we end up with this interesting image, whose perimeter is vastly different than a triangle, even though it is made up of triangles. This ‘non-triangle’ shape is termed the ‘strange attractor’ by chaos mathematicians. Well, using this analogy, God is the strange attractor to the universe. All things ultimately combine to reveal Him. Like in this one (Mandlebrot set) each piece is an image of the whole. Or we can reverse the analogy, and say that God is the triangle, and the increasingly complex shape formed from the repetition of a unity is nature becoming itself. Or we can say God is the other side of the perimeter, that he is the black triangle (in this example) and nature is the white triangles formed from the existence of the black ones.

All these analogies work, symbolically, to convey a description of God, the mover who is made evident through everything.

These shapes cannot exist without their successive parts, each which is an image of the larger shape. No matter what scale we travel to, the image is always constant. This is much like the cosmos. Does not Paul tell us we are Christ, and Christ is God?

God cannot be moved. He is the mover. God sends things out that they may return to Him. God has given us motion that we can learn stillness.

(Meditation is a stillness made from motion.)

So, finally, a personal analogy. God is everywhere, He reveals Himself constantly, if we know how to look. One morning the frost was heavy on my car’s windshield. I couldn’t find the scraper, and I had time, so I turned on the heat and waited for the frost to melt. What had appeared as a unity, unmoving, and opaque to the day’s light, began suddenly, with the application of heat, to break into a multiplicity of parts. It fractured along interesting boundaries, began to move, broke up, the pieces turned to liquid. With the application of heat—a movement—the unity had become a plenitude, had transformed to a different state—liquid from solid—back to a unity once more, and ultimately left me with a clear view of the most beautiful morning.