THE FIRST VIRTUAL CREATION
The ancients avoided this trap by suggesting that the universe was created by God, or the field of pure consciousness.
This field is eternal: It existed prior to creation; it exists now, during creation; and it will continue to exist after creation.
Prior to creation, however, the field was dormant, as if it were in a state of deep sleep; it was covered by a veil of pure ignorance. At that time, the layers of consciousness, universal gods, or universal vacuum states were all present, but they were “asleep”—that is, nonactive.The Vedic seers held that the creation of the universe is cyclic, that the universal gods, like all living beings, experience cycles of waking and sleeping. When the gods sleep, creation is dissolved, and when they wake up, creation is initiated. Moreover, they held that these cosmic cycles of waking and sleeping, or creation and dissolution, span hundreds of trillions rather than a few billion years. For them, these cycles are governed by the force of time, which manifests the will of God, the Supreme Being.
When we as human beings begin to wake from the state of deep sleep, we experience an intermediate state during which we are neither fully asleep nor fully awake. It is a dreamlike state filled with forms of virtual reality, which respond to our slightest intentions and present our ideas in living color. The seers held that when the universal gods begin to wake, they experience a similar cosmic dreaming state characterized by virtual forms of reality. This is where the ancient theory of creation begins.
As in modern theory, the ancients held that the creation of the universe starts from a single point—but this was not viewed as a point of nothingness. Instead, it was seen as a point value of consciousness viewed as the seat of the first semiawakened soul, which was destined to become the Creator of the universe: When the Creator was first born from the cosmic womb, or the field of pure ignorance, he was in a cosmic dreaming state and was therefore semiawakened.
He did not experience the empirical forms of reality that we associate with the waking state; rather, he experienced the virtual forms of reality that we associate with the dreaming state.In the beginning, this cosmic dream was formless. It involved the cognition of the universal fields of transcendental sound and transcendental light associated with the first matched pair of layers located immediately above and below the half measure. Prior to this initial cognition, these fields were dormant, hidden by the veil of pure ignorance so that they were reduced to abstract fields of silent darkness. It was only when the Creator emerged from the cosmic womb, and then took his first step on the divine ladder, that the veil of ignorance was removed and the universal fields of light and sound shone forth in an instantaneous flash of pure intuition.
In the first hymn of the tenth mandala of the Rig Veda,1 this initial emergence of light from the darkness was compared to a great fire: “The great fire at the beginning of the dawn has emerged, and issuing forth from the darkness has come with radiance.” The hymn goes on to tell us that this great fire “filled all dwellings with shining light.” These are none other than the dwelling places of the imperishable souls that constitute collectively the metaphysical Logos. They correspond to the crystallographic cells of the transcendental superlattice, each of which serves as the abode for an imperishable point value of consciousness.
The hymn further explains that this great fire was the “embryo of heaven and earth.” It represents the first virtual form of the universe conceived within the cosmic womb on the scale of the first matched pair of layers immediately above and below the half measure. It was not insentient; it was personified as Agni (fire), the first ministrant priest, who is described as “all-knowing”2 and is cognizant of the path of the fathers that leads to the gods.3 This personified conscious fire represents the first virtual embodiment of the Creator at the dawn of creation.
As we have seen, this first virtual form of creation embraced initially the first two layers above and below the half measure. The layer below, which represents the luminous body of the Creator, was dominated by transcendental light and filled with local analytic power, and the layer above, which represents the Creator’s sonic soul, was dominated by transcendental sound and filled with nonlocal synthetic power. The first virtual embodiment of the Creator involved the union of his luminous body and his sonic soul, the first matched pair of layers in the cosmic spectrum.
The emergence of the great fire at the dawn of creation was the first virtual Big Bang and marked the onset of the virtual creation (shuddha srishti) wherein the universal layers, universal gods, or universal vacuum states, would become enlivened progressively as the awareness of the Creator simultaneously ascended and descended through them in sequence. It was only after the Creator had ascended to his own divine station that the virtual creation began to be transformed into the real creation. Only then did the virtual particles and waves begin their transformation into the real particles and waves from which was fashioned the empirical universe.
The real creation followed in the footsteps of the virtual creation. It started from the beginning, on the scale of the first matched pair of layers immediately above and below the half measure.