A spiritual cosmology, and the problem of evil

[Advance postscript: Some people have told me that they found the following post confusing. If that applies to you, I've tried to clarify it further in my posts on 28 October 'The Four Universes' and 29 October 'The Human Being'.]

I intend to be a little bolder, and considerably more provocative in this post, and tackle the question that has been thrown up for millennia by the critics of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim God, which can be formulated as follows:

Why is there evil in a universe created by an omnipotent, loving God? Either God is omnipotent, or loving. The existence of evil suggests God cannot be both.

In order to respond to this perfectly rational question, we must think the practically unthinkable, for human brains anyway. This is that the entity/ground of all being/”absolute” responsible for anything existing (–and I’m talking about all levels of existence here: Divine, spiritual, psychological and physical-) in other words, the prime cause that needs no cause itself- is nothing, i.e. no- thing that we could possibly imagine. We can only describe it by what it is not, and that includes any adjective we can think of. Those adjectives/labels include ‘omnipotent’ and ‘loving’. It is impossible to describe the entity that is responsible for existence in any way, let alone apply words like ‘loving’ or ‘omnipotent’.

However, as I have already suggested, there are several levels of existence between the material/physical universe that most of us are familiar with, and the ‘ground of all being/”Absolute”’, and all of those levels the original entity gave birth to (parthenogenetically!), or rather, is continually giving birth to.

You can envisage it like this:

         Or like this:                                        

Several mystical traditions have it that the first universe to emerge from this “Absolute”, which is referred to as the ’Divine universe’, is beyond ordinary human comprehension. However, this Divine universe in turn produced out of itself the ‘spiritual universe’. At the head of this spiritual universe is the Being we can think of as the Creator God. So, to clarify, the ’Creator God’, referred to in the first verses of Genesis, is an aspect of the original “Absolute” and the original ‘Divine universe’.

In western Kabbalah and Gnostic Christian Kabbalah, the “Absolute” that calls forth from itself the Divine universe is referred to as ‘Ayin En Sof’ (‘endless nothing-ness’) and in at least one version of eastern Vedanta the concept is referred to as ‘Brahman’. The Creator God on the other hand is the ‘Keter of Beriyah’ and the ‘Tiferet of Azilut’ (the Crown of spirituality and the Truth of the Divine’) in Kabbalah; and as Brahma -without the final ‘n’- in Vedanta.  

    

Those who have had direct experience of this Creator God do report feelings of absolute bliss, peace, understanding, wisdom, compassion belonging-ness and one-ness with It in Its presence. (Not all of them are able to bring these attributes back with them.) (In fact not all of them come back and some, who are not sufficiently prepared, go happily mad.)

So, in answer to the original question set out above, my own thoughts on this is that the Creator God had to work within the ‘rules’ already set out by the ‘“Absolute” nothing-ness’ when it initiated all existence out of itself. The Creator God could not make 2 plus 2 equal 5, for example. Similarly it could not make an edible omelette without breaking eggs, just as you can’t build a comfortable, civilised town without having sewers in place. Thus the Creator God could not ‘choose’ to create a universe without what we think of as evil and suffering.

There is also the question of balancing ‘force’ and ‘form’, both of which are needed to make a multi- dimensional universe. On the side of force you have: expansive tendencies, creative impulses, revelation and wisdom. On the side of form you have: tendencies to contract and pull in, limitation and definition (e.g. structure), contemplation of what has been revealed, and understanding. (‘Understanding’ balances and channels ‘wisdom ‘ – this is a huge area that I’ll return to in future blogs.)

 As is the nature of any dynamic process, these two sides, force and form, can go out of balance, even before humankind started running around acting out of free will and often in opposition to God’s will. As I said in my last blog, too much force and the universe will go spiralling outwards and out of existence; too much form, and the universe would be too uncomfortable to be lived in (possibly disappearing up its own fundament). Between these two sides runs a ‘pillar’ holding the balance. In this strand of creation are will, grace, compassion and truth.

So, to re-cap: The Creator God not only brought the spiritual universe into existence out of itself (the exact process being described allegorically in the first chapter of Genesis), it also formed, out of the spiritual universe, the psychological universe (sometimes referred to as the astral or mental universe), from which the spiritual universe can be accessed; and from there (the psychological universe) made the physical universe, from which the psychological world can be accessed. It’s what brains were made for….

So Darwin was right, but only gave part of the picture. We are evolving back up our original involution.  The brain might act as a vehicle for the mind in evolution, but the whole body came about as a vehicle for the mind in involution.

Every human being has a physical, psychological, spiritual and divine aspect, because we are ultimately made out of the stuff the Divine universe. (What a lovely thought:  our bodies are made of stardust, literally, and both our bodies and inner selves are made of stuff that is, in its essence, Divine.) We all have immediate access to the physical and psychological worlds on being born. We have access to our spiritual and Divine selves by making our way up that central pillar of truth, compassion, grace and will. We do this through meditation, contemplation, prayer and appropriate action. [There is more about this in a later post called 'The Human Being'.]

There. I hope I’ve now put a stop to over 4,000 years of people asking such a pesky question…

[As mentioned earlier, if this isn't clear, have a look at the posts of 28 and 29 October.]