I’d like to invite you to take a step back from reading boring old internet articles and imagine going to the Great Wall of China. You’ve probably heard about the Wall, its magnificence, and architectural significance. But you want to know more. Through the super-advanced powers of human imagination, you’re transported to Northern China somewhere along the border of Mongolia.  If you’ve never been here before, the climate, geography, people, and architecture are decidedly foreign. You want to know, to fill in the gaps of this painting with details, context. The first thing you do is hire a tour guide to get the whole experience.  As your tour guide, I will give you an all-encompassing description of the Great Wall of China: it is a wall… in China. No hyperlinks, pictures, or further descriptions. The imagination will do the rest.  How am I doing so far? Is that a satisfying way to intro an article? The truth is, despite my doing the bare minimum, you’re probably pretty upset with the tour you just got, especially considering it’s not even a real tour. When you sign up for a tour, you’re looking for stories, tension, passion, and mystery. You want to hear how the Wall was built and rebuilt by successive Chinese dynasties to protect their land from steppe invasions. How the Wall was built creating a strict geopolitical border between the lush farmlands of the Chinese Empires and the steppes of Mongolia. How the Empires of China handled diplomatic relations in their superregion: centralizing power in China while establishing protectorates and tributaries in a vast arc from southeast Asia into parts of India, Tibet, and Central Asia.How the nomadic horsemen from Siberia to the Pontic came to terrorize settled nations, how their culture and religion glorified in the horde unity of constant pillaging. How the nomadic steppe hordes never really got the memo and significantly challenged China’s rule. How powerfully devastating the horsemen were in the steppes against much larger armies of Chinese infantry. How constant pillaging from the north threatened the everyday life of Chinese noblemen and peasants alike. How despite all the things the steppe hordes did, China was by no means a helpless victim.  These are the things you want to know going on a tour. You want a story because stories are what bring a community together. These tours bring us together, giving us shared experiences and adding value to the nuances of our reality.    We Are the Stories We Tell Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all in our own tour groups. The tour groups of nationality, family, religion, education, and beyond all provide us with different stories to conduct our lives by and organize ourselves with these divergent groups. Sometimes the stories don’t match up, and often there is an inherent tension when we are required to believe one story over another, to stake our skin in the game of these stories that divide us.  Each tour group has something different to say about Christianity, the earth, and the people residing here. Some look at Gaia and see a massive tree, ancient and bespoken of wisdom. We are children of the tree, and it is our place to revere Her. Others see particle waves and energy dancing randomly in supposed circles. And some see the inherent value in the tree as a source of income, power, and prestige.  Gaia is still there, watching and smiling and waiting for us to make up our minds. The stories do not change the present state of reality. They do, however, shift our perspective of what that reality entails. Our Gaia experience depends on the stories we’ve been told and tour groups we wish to be a part of or apart from.  We belabor this point because many Christians and those living in a foundationally Christian paradigm (any nation in the west) are instilled with the idea that they are inherently sinful and evil from a very young age. We are also told that there is a creator god, and we are fundamentally separate from Him.  We want to go back to the beginning of the tour, take a look at this story and its implications to better understand ourselves and the place we have in Christianity. The foremost goal of The Liturgists this season is archiving tools and practices to bring about Total Christ Consciousness in every individual in the here and now. Not in the afterlife, but in this very moment.  To do that, we believe Christianity needs a reformation, not at the branches and leaves and fluff up top. But a true reformation, radical in the original sense of the word, going to the roots, to the Beginning.    Genesis For those in the west, the Christian story of the beginning with God creating everything will feel commonplace, nestled safely in the back in our minds as a foundation myth (or perhaps truth) of how the world came to be. For those who did not grow up with this story, it may seem peculiar or possibly align with the stories you heard. I’ll give a brief synopsis.  God created the world in seven days. Each day he added a layer onto the one before it, adding complexity to the whole while keeping the foundation intact. First, there was emptiness (besides God, of course, try figuring out where God came from and let me know, I’ve always wondered). By the end, there were humans.  Somehow the humans were placed as a middleman between God and everything else. Because of the structure of the creation, there was an implied hierarchy. That is, humans lorded over animals who resided among plants that grew on rocks and so on. The main thing is that the first human is supposed to be better than everything else around it and privileged to lord over it all.  But the plot thickens. The first human was a man named Adam. By some magic mumbo jumbo beyond the scope of modern medicine, he gave birth to the first woman, with his rib of all things. Her name was Eve.  So man lorded over a woman first, and then everything else. Both were innocently living in a garden of ignorance when a badass snake peer-pressured Eve into trying the new narcotic on the streets: magic fruit which gives you rationality. In other words, the fruit was a crazy psychedelic that gave Adam and Eve self-awareness, empathy, and an emerging ego.  They realized they were naked. They discovered many other things, like why are they the personal pets of an all-powerful creator who could have just not had the fruit there, or hired a pest control guy to deal with snakes, or just let them eat the fruit.  So Adam and Eve are kicked out as punishment for trying to be cool and hang with the snake. They live in guilt for the next few centuries (human beings were really old and powerful back then, but successive inbreeding reduced them to modern-day life expectancies). Eventually, all the humans did something to piss off God, and he released a flood to punish them again.  Okay, that wasn’t very brief, and it’s definitely not a version you’ve heard before. Perhaps it’s blasphemous, or funny, or even dull. As the tour guide, that’s how I prefer to tell it. I believe if we take things too seriously, it limits our ability to see the truth. So I offer a bit of levity in presenting this story to analyze its themes without taking ourselves too seriously. There is no right way to tell the tale or interpret it. However, if you’re interested, we can dig into several ways that this story affects our lives and the stories we tell ourselves.  Other Beginnings… The Same End We can begin by looking at some other Creation myths across cultures and see what they have in common with the Christian paradigm. In this way, we can view the Christian beginning from different perspectives and gain a better vantage point.  The Upanishads In the Hindu Upanishads, there was existence alone, and in its reflection, it found emptiness in itself, emptiness and itself. In this way, it meditated on itself and began dividing infinitely into the universe’s complexities while remaining at every part of existence. In knowing itself, it began the creation. In understanding the creation, it was the creator. All are one, out of emptiness.  Enuma Elish If we look at the Enuma Elish, possibly the oldest written scripture on the planet, it speaks of undifferentiated water swirling in chaos. These waters were divided into the sweet, pure water of Apsu and the oppressively bitter waters of Tiamet. These two forces formed a union that gave birth to the lesser gods. These gods lived in constant tension with one another: Apsu, the father, was troubled with his children and decided to kill them, which prompted their mother to warn them. This created an Oedipian counterstroke of son killing father, which horrified the mother, who summoned titans of chaos. A great battle ensued, and finally, the mother was slain by her children. Then they used her corpse to form the heavens and the earth and all the creatures who reside there. Humans were created to serve the gods and reign-in chaos on earth.  The Big Bang Finally, we have the modern creation story. Although many would call it absolute truth, the same way many consider biblical Genesis the literal truth. The Big Bang happened either at the beginning of this universe or possibly the end of another collapsing one. Truthfully we have no idea because we can only judge light emissions reaching the earth out of the center of the galaxy from 14 billion years ago. In the beginning, things happened very fast, matter and anti-matter divided, the most basic sub-quark particles formed into quarks, these combined to form subatomic particles, which eventually formed atoms, molecules, etc.  Groups of each particle formed within each other. Galaxies, maelstroms of subatomic particles formed. Suns came to populate them, massive fusion reactions for basic atoms. These, in turn, created molecules that coalesced into planets. Basic molecular communities structured themselves into crystal formations and so on. Eventually, we arrive at the current world of organelles, cells, tissues, and humans living in flora, fauna, communities on up. In this story is the logical procession of time, the march of progress. Each form builds upon and includes the state before it. All is included. Every part is not apart from the whole.  While from wildly different cultures and perspectives, all of these stories tell the same story with the same archetype as a way for us to better understand the mystery and all-encompassing nature of creation. Taken literally, each story limits our perspective of the whole and how it came to be. Viewed allegorically, we see the self-same smile of creation shining through every moment of existence.  In each story, there is a beginning, constituted as emptiness. Whether that be space, water, aether, etc., there was some sort of undifferentiated Other. And despite itself, or because of its very nature, this emptiness desires form to complete itself. Spoken this way implies a guiding hand in creation, which is not necessarily so. All we know is that the universe as we know it apparently came from nothing.  For emptiness to exist as such, it needed form to create the reference point of itself. Emptiness is only empty in relation to fullness and form. This differentiation of form began at the most modest and fundamental levels, subatomic particles, light and dark. At each subsequent stage of envelopment and development, the current stage builds upon the stage before it. Each step in the hierarchy transcends and includes the previous step.  At each stage, emptiness is trying to know itself as itself. Form rises in complexity in such a way to mirror emptiness back onto itself: consciousness. Because consciousness, or emptiness radiating out of form, confuses itself with form, it goes through constant trials and tensions to come home and find itself, know itself.  This is one of the implicit lessons within the archetype of creation: the duality of form and emptiness is not a duality. There is no separation. But to know the truth of the illusory nature of separateness, there must be separateness. Creation is the birth of separateness out of nothing, the Big Bang, an inhale, the first notes of a crying baby. In that separateness, we find ourselves, it is scary, and we are lost.  But the shining light through and through these myths and explanations of our beginnings is that the end-goal: emptiness, lack of separation, wholeness is also that which predicates the beginning happening. That is, for there to be creation, there must have been wholeness, an Other, emptiness from which form manifests. The alpha, emptiness, is the omega, the end. Everything that comes fades to the past. All is impermanent. All will fade to nothing.  We think of this as death, and that is one form of it. But we also tell ourselves that we exist, that our lives belong to us, that we are separate entities born once and die once, and that’s all we get unless we subscribe to the Heaven channel on MeTube. We tell ourselves that Genesis and the Big Bang are stories of the universe. But we also tell ourselves that this is the only universe, this is the only world, this is the only time and place that anything at all could be happening.  All of our lives, all universes, all stories are a breath. An inhale, the universe unfolds, an exhale it collapses. In between, there’s form, or there’s emptiness, but these are just names we have to abstract the Absolute.  These stories can help us evade the fact that we are already complete, we have already conquered death in the infinity of now, all is impermanent, nothing matters. But these stories, myths, and archetypes also bring us towards the truth of Now—the reality of infinity in This Moment, of life everlasting as a prerequisite to existence.  In the beginning, there was emptiness, and in the end, too, is emptiness. The thing is, emptiness doesn’t know a thing about time or space, of linear abstractions of before or after. Emptiness is always right now. Emptiness lives through every moment, fills every creation, and consumes every death. The creation-myth is an allegory for this moment.  And this moment. And every moment.  Every moment is a universe, a world, a life. It will come, it will pass, and life goes on. That is the key of genesis and all creation stories: they unlock the gates of Now. These stories, created by humans, advanced by humans, often muddle the Truth of the allegory with political agendas. Were there two people at the beginning of the world who sinned because they had no choice, and we are all supposed to be punished for it? Or is that a particular tour group that wants to advance an agenda of repressed sexuality to control its followers’ actions? We can debate that all day.  What can’t be debated is This Moment, the Now. Everything else comes and goes. Stories rise up in all-consuming flames until they are smoke in the wind. Through these stories, we can begin to unlock the mystery, the darkness, of now. Through creation, we can discover this moment again, and again, and again! That is the heart of genesis. Not guilt, not sin, not anyone lording over anyone else. Simply an invitation to Now.