“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth.”
Grace Van Duzen portrays Man as being first spirit, later to be clothed with form. Spiritual Man clothed with an earthen body—God incarnate on earth—to continue God’s work of creation as a steward of the creative process and keeper of the Garden. That’s the biblical story of Man’s origins.
Grace tells her “Story of Man” in THE BOOK OF GRACE from a cosmic view:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth. . . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. . . .
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”
At the conclusion of each creative Day, God saw that “it was good.” After the creation of Man the comment was that He saw every thing that he had made, and. . . it was very good.
On the Sixth Day, then, we have Man (and Woman), a perfect creation. In the sixth cycle divine Being was clothed in earth substance, in position to let God perform His cosmic creative acts on this planet through His earthly image and likeness—the means whereby the invisible things of heaven could be brought forth on Earth.
Dominion over every living thing is the result of obedience to the command to multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, which indicates a state where perfect control is operative in the act of multiplying, which involves sexual activity at all vibratory levels.
The opposite has occurred, with overpopulation the primary cause of hellish distortions rampant in every corner of this planet which was created to be a paradise. The results of aberrant function in the most vital area of man’s creative activity, the limiting of that act of creation to the physical level, are taking their toll in increasingly massive numbers.
According to this command, dominion over all creatures and kingdoms of the earth is entirely dependent upon control in this central function of life. Multiplication is an essential aspect of all creation, the “seed within itself,” and without the control that causes the design in the heaven to take material form, the result is self-destruction, tragically obvious in man’s present function on this planet.
The fact that Man, male and female, was created with the faculties to extend the control and guidance of a wise and loving God to all the kingdoms of the earth causes one to look at the situation in today’s world, of misery and violence. Something went wrong! Man is afraid, not only of many creatures of the earth but of his own shadow; there is not much dominion in evidence. The drastic change in the being designed to control the earth and its creatures inevitably included that over which he was to have dominion. Animals took on the nature of their “fallen” god. It can also be seen how quickly a “creature” will return to the state of “grace” when in the presence of a human being expressing the Spirit of God.
The Being that incarnates into this planet at the present time assumes a much denser substance than that in which man was first created. A finely tuned body, clothed with the highest vibrational substance natural to this part of the cosmos, would be equipped to travel vibrationally wherever the Spirit directed. Could this be the origin, deeply buried in the subconscious mind of man, of the concept of angels, radiantly robed in white, with wings that enable them to fly? It is an image that has persisted throughout the ages, and I was awed when I became aware, some years ago, that someone had perceived, in the aura of another’s body, the outline of a shape that resembled wings, extending from the area of the shoulder blades. I am not suggesting that the physical form of man’s imaginary wings would be the vehicle for his transportation, but the essence of the design is present, regardless of all that has been done, and cannot be dissolved by fallen human beings. It is still present.
CREATION IN MYTHS
Richard Heinberg tells the creation story as memorialized in myths. Myths paint a much more colorful and imaginative picture. According to myths about “The First Time,” man’s abode was the heavens, the sky, in which we moved about like birds in the air—spiritual beings made by God—before diving into the water-covered planet Earth. That’s one scenario of Man’s origins. There’s a second scenario that has man emerging from Mother Earth—physical man formed by “the makers.” Heinberg cites both in Memories and Visions of Paradise:
The Earth Diver
Earth Diver myths tell the creation story from the perspective of a representative from the upper world who dives into the primordial chaos to bring forth the first seed of order. The Earth Diver myth tells of how a divine being (usually an animal) descends into the water to bring up bits of mud, which grow to form the whole Earth or even the entire Universe. Earth Diver myths are common among the northern North American tribes, whose cosmologies feature an original upper world inhabited by the immortal Elders and an unformed chaos of water below.
The symbolism in Earth Diver myths is often whimsical: the Diver is often pictured as a muskrat, a duck, or a turtle. Yet the underlying meaning of the myths is nonetheless profound. Water is the unformed reality out of which matter appears, and the descent into the abyss is analogous to baptism, in that it is at once a cleansing and a creative act. “In the beginning there was nothing but water,” says a Huron myth.
Similarly, the Hindu Vishnu Purana tells of an original chaos of waters:
He, the Lord, concluding that within the waters lay the earth, and being desirous to raise it up …. He, the supporter of spiritual and material being, plunged into the ocean.
The Emergence
The Emergence myth centers around the symbolism of Mother Earth, from which human beings emerge through various stages or levels of underworld. Emergence myths are found among the Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, and Pawnee Native Americans, and certain groups in the South Pacific islands. In the Emergence myth the Earth is the fertile source of being, containing within herself the essences and potencies of all life. The lower world is described not as a hell, but as a previous mode of existence, a womblike paradise. Neither is the underworld considered to be a literal subterranean cavern, but rather a place “where at death we will all return,” another plane of existence “under”—that is, underlying-the perceptible physical world. Sun or Corn is often the agent of transformation and quickening, leading the First People up into the light. “Before the World was we were all within the Earth,” begins a Pawnee myth; “Mother corn caused movement. She gave life.”!’
In part, the Emergence myth is a metaphor for the journey from a spiritual plane of existence into manifestation in the material world. But the myth also epitomizes the role of the feminine in Creation: it is a symbol and a memory of the primordial Mother, the Earth herself, as she originally was—fresh, new, fertile, the source of all form, the receptacle of all seeds, the nurturer of all life. The tale is told from the perspective of the Creation, emerging from the womb of Earth Mother. . . .
Among nearly all of the variants on the creation-from-clay story, the breath of life is a common feature. For example, according to a Hawaiian myth, Kane and Ku breathed into the nostrils and Lono into the mouth of a clay image, which thereupon became a living being. In an Australian Creation story, Bunjil, the All-Father of the southeastern tribes, is said to have made two clay images, male and female, which he shaped onto pieces of bark. He looked at them, was pleased, and danced around them for joy. Finally he lay down on them and blew into their mouths, noses, and navels, after which they stirred and arose. Likewise, the natives of the Kei islands of Indonesia say that their ancestors were fashioned out of clay by the Creator, Dooadlera, who breathed life into the earthen figures. . . .
In many languages, the words for “spirit” and “breath” are identical. Creation-from-clay myths imply that the breath within us—the essence of our being, our life—is a divine gift, a spark of deity. “I am Osiris,” declares the God of ancient Egypt. “I enter in and reappear through you, I decay in you, I grow in you.” The fundamental message of the Hindu Upanishads, similarly, is that Atman (the individual’s innermost Self) is identical with Brahman (the ultimate Cause of All-That-Is). Tat tvam asi—“That thou art”—perhaps the most famous phrase in Sanskrit, is a proclamation of this underlying oneness of God and man, a oneness that ultimately extends to all creation:
You are everything … O self of all beings!
From the Creator (Brahma) to the blade of grass all is your body, visible and invisible, divided by space and time. . . .
O Transcendent Self! We bow to you as the Cause of causes, the principal shape beyond compare, beyond Nature (pradhana) and Intellect ….
We bow to you, the birthless, the indestructible, You are the ever-present within all things, as the intrinsic principle of all.
We bow to you, resplendent Indweller (Vasudeva)!
the seed of all that is!
While the story of the animation of clay by an all-powerful Creator describes the union of spirit and matter from creation’s standpoint (matter receiving the breath of spirit), the story of the descent of spirit beings to Earth, sometimes described as their taking on coats of flesh, describes the same process from the heavenly view of the Creator. According to the Molama clan of the Zulu, their remotest ancestors were a man and woman who came down from the sky and alighted on a certain hill. A similar idea is met with among the Wakuluwe, who live between lakes Nyasa and Tanganyika; they say that the first human couple came down from Heaven and produced their offspring from parts of their bodies.
Heinberg waxes eloquent in this summation:
In the beginning there is One—a preexisting Intelligence, alone and limitless. The One, in which the polarities of existence are united in perfect harmony, exerts a conscious act of will and becomes Two—masculine and feminine, active and receptive, Heaven and Earth. The Two work as equal partners in initiating the cyclic cosmic pulsations from which all life emanates.
The reciprocal—one could say sexual—interplay of the Two generates a multiplicity of divine beings, whose further activity, based in the same creative principles, results in the appearance of a manifest Universe of infinite scope and detail. The divine beings plunge into the watery abyss of chaos and return with the first seeds of physical form. Attaching themselves to these nuclei of substance, they continue to gather material about themselves and gradually emerge from the inner, invisible realms of eternity into the visible, tangible world of space and time.
Through this grand process, the One Intelligence differentiates itself into a myriad of self-conscious beings incarnate in material form. And thus there is generated a Universe of limitless diversity, of which each minute part is grounded in a single ultimate Reality.
As I bring these things forward, a question in the back of my mind asks “Why is this brought to me now at a time when the entire world is in the throes of a pandemic of historic proportion?” Actually, I started this series before the Coronavirus made its public appearance. Perhaps its value lies in remembering that we are immortal beings incarnate in mortal flesh bodies. That design hasn’t changed. God incarnates yet on Earth through Man. The question might be “When are we going to return to our divine commission as keepers of the Garden of Paradise?”
I will continue with this series in my next post. Until then,
Be love. Be loved.
Anthony
tpal70@gmail.com
Healing Tones 