By James Donahue

The phrase quoted in the above headline: “In the beginning, God . . .” may be among the most familiar four words in the literate world. They are the very first words in the ancient text of the Book of Genesis. They have been the subject of many Christian sermons since the very origins of the church, and possibly even before when the Hebrew people were gathering text.

The Christians perceive the significance of these words to prove that there was a beginning of everything as we know it and that the creator God is an eternal/external power that always was and always will be. They also see this God as the source of all creation.

This is not the only interpretation. If we perceive a universe created from our own minds, then we must think of the god as the creator that exists within us. Thus the “beginning” becomes the starting of perhaps our own awareness of an existence.

If this is so, then when, we might ask, did this personal awareness begin? Have we always been since the beginning of time? Did our existence begin at the creation of the Earth? Have we gone through many existences, returning from the astral world to inhabit new bodies time and time again? Or is this trip our first and last time around?

That the book should begin with a statement declaring there was “a beginning,” may only mean that it is the beginning of the story of man. Or since it was intended as a Hebrew story explaining the creation as the writer perceived it, the reference to the beginning may only point to the origins of the Hebrew story. Man was on this planet long before the Hebrew people began keeping records.

There is something deeply spiritual, however, in the phrase that puts God at the beginning. Just what and who the creator is, whether a great external intelligence that looks down upon us from afar, a spiritual presence watching our every move, an alien race involved in manipulating our DNA to make intelligent animals of us, or the spirit that exists within each of us, it is correct to state that the god was, indeed, present at the beginning of the story.

The very concept of God is perhaps beyond the ability of mere humans to grasp. When we consider the belief by many spiritualists and even primitive people that the entire universe is alive, and that everything in it, the suns, planets, and creatures like ourselves are small parts of the whole, then we find ourselves overwhelmed when attempting to perceive of the whole of creation as a living entity.

Indeed, if there was a beginning . . . and we declare that from a human perspective alone . . . certainly the creator God was present. Since time appears to not exist outside of our own three-dimensional presence, then perhaps it is incorrect to say there ever was a beginning, nor will there ever be a conclusion.