This is one of my favorite excerpts from Conversations With God – Book 1 by, Neale Donald Walsch, in which, God explains The Creation to Neale. . .
GOD: Let me explain it to you this way:
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 was—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 magnificent unless that which is not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.
Do you understand this?
NEALE: I think so. Keep going.
GOD: Alright The one 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.
Can you understand this?
Are you following this?
NEALE: I think I am, actually. Believe it or not, you have used such a clear illustration that I think I’m actually understanding this.
GOD: I’m going to go further. 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. 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.
Just as you have chosen to personify pure love as the character you call God, so have you chosen to personify abject fear as the character you call the devil.
Some on Earth have established rather elaborate mythologies around this event, complete with scenarios of battles and war, angelic soldiers and devilish warriors, the forces of good and evil, of light and dark.
This mythology has been mankind’s early attempt to understand, and tell others in a way they could understand, a cosmic occurrence of which the human soul is deeply aware, but of which the mind can barely conceive.
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. In some of your religious mythologies it is stated that “God the Father” had many spirit children. This parallel to the human experiences of life multiplying Itself seems to be the only way the masses could be made to hold in reality the idea of the sudden appearance—the sudden existence—of countless spirits in the “Kingdom of Heaven.”
In this instance, your mythical tales and stories are not so far from ultimate reality—for the endless spirits comprising the totality of Me are, in a cosmic sense, My offspring.
My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient parts 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.
This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the “image and likeness of God.” This doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that our physical bodies look alike (although God can adopt whatever physical form God chooses for a particular purpose). It does mean that our essence is the same. We are composed of the same stuff. We ARE the “same stuff”! With all the same properties and abilities—including the ability to create physical reality out of thin air.
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 times) 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. . .
