'Who Created God' And Other Questions I Couldn't Answer
Where did the universe come from, and how did we get here?
When I was a little boy, I used to wonder what could have possibly started the universe. My southern Baptist youth pastor told me God created the heavens and the Earth, but that always begged the question, what came before God? Who made God? Who made the person or thing that made that person or thing who made God? After a while, I gave up asking questions to my youth pastor or anyone at the various churches I attended. It’s funny because I would discover Albert Einstein had his own explanation for where the universe came from and it sounds a lot like Tao. Allow me to explain.
In the Einstein’s special theory of relativity, energy (E) equals mass (m) times the speed of light squared (c2). You can write it mathematically like this.
E = mc^2
In other words, mass can become energy and energy, under the right circumstances, can become mass. Think of inside a particle accelerator where energy is smashed together creating matter. While I understand this is an oversimplification, that sounds like something forming from nothing. No matter becomes matter which becomes no matter again. Cycles. Now, what about Tao?
I’m not surprised the Tao Te Ching, Taoism’s seminal text, starts with the creation of the universe. Much like the Bible, I assume the author simply wanted to start at the beginning. Below is Stephen Mitchell’s version of Chapter 1.
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
A scholar could write their entire thesis on this first chapter and it’s meaning. Because I’m not a scholar, or a master, I’ll simply write what I can.
The first and second verses state that no matter what word people choose to explain Tao, it won’t be it’s real name. There is no name or word that can describe Tao because people made up language. A word is only as good or as useful as the accepted meaning. For example, the word “tree” does not the real name for that growing plant with tall branches and many leaves. The plant we call tree has been called many names over thousands of years and just because my English community decided this thing is “tree” doesn’t make it so. Nothing on Earth has an inherent, truthful name in any language that has ever existed.
Verses three to the end start to unpack Tao itself, and this is where our own personal interpretations start to take shape. Humans have a wonderful gift; the personal desire to understand everything. The desire to understand brought us countless inventions, language, communities, and safety. It has helped us build the world we have the pleasure of living in. And when we discover something that we don’t understand, we immediately create words to describe it so we can evaluate, analyze, and interpret. But we just learned that we can’t really know what Tao is because words can’t describe it. So, now what?
I like to take the next view statements as one meaning; different parts of the same whole. According to these next verses, we need to understand that when we realize Tao can’t be understood, we begin to understand the truth.
In Chinese, Tao is often translated as “the way,” but I prefer the translation of “way-finding.” To seek Tao is to seek the way of the universe because Tao is the path that the universe takes. Tao is not the universe. Instead, it’s the eternal path existence takes— the flow and natural order of everything.
If the universe was a river of water, Tao would be what causes the water to flow in the manor in which it does. An unseen, yet unmistakably real, movement of life and energy. No one can deny a river exists because you see it, but you don’t see the trillions of reasons why the river flows. Rocks, fish, weather patterns, and billions of years of grassy hills caused the river to move the direction it currently does. That is the Tao. It’s what you can’t see; it’s the current. This is what it is meant when the text states “darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.” We can’t understand it, because it’s not there to understand.
So, what is Tao? It is what it is. Tao comes from nothing and returns to nothing, just as Einstein discussed. We can’t understand Tao directly, but we can watch it work through existence. This is the essence of chapter one from Tao Te Ching.
I like to pretend I can travel back in time to speak to my old church youth group pastor. I wish I could tell him that the craziest thing is true, something comes from nothing. We would agree more now than we did then, but for different reasons. He would say that God has always been and I would say, sure. I would say we can’t see Tao but we see it’s manifestations and he would say, sure. Of course, he was also caught looking at adult content while at church. So, maybe he isn’t the best person to go back and speak to about life’s mysteries.
Instead, I wish I could go back and talk to my great-grandmother. She passed away when I was eight and she was 94 years old. Born in 1901, I would have loved to hear what she had to say about the flow of life. She returned to the Tao in 1994, over 30 years ago, and I still think about her probably once a week. I have some of her old cooking utensils that I regularly use!
Perhaps, the life doesn’t make sense until we reach the end. If there’s no end, then the beginning wouldn’t matter. Similarly, looking at the beginning of my journey doesn’t make sense, but perhaps that’s because it’s not over. It’s easy to connect the dots looking backwards, but never forwards. I simply think about what needs to be done and move forward.
If you have a moment, think about your beginning. See if you can let your self flow through your day. As I mentioned above, we can’t grasp Tao, but we can see how it works— it’s manifestations. I have a lot more to say on those manifestations, but I’ll wait for another time.
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I often look at the river and think that it’s water always moving by but not the same water ever - so what is it that we are naming when we call it the river?
It’s strange when it covers in ice in January and the flow goes deep. It’s rushing and fast in June when snow melt rushes from the mountains. It’s lazy and great for tubing on in August just before harvest. It’s choppy and cold as fall folds into November. But the water is always moving never the same every time I walk along it.
One day I was walking on a path and a young man wearing a swimsuit took a run from his patio right in front of me. He was in the river and swimming in an instant just like e’d merged with the water flowing by. He swam with the current out of my view like a Merman returning to the waves.
We are part of the flow too.🙏
This reminded me of my seven-year-old getting worked up because a poem in her English class mentions a rainbow from earth to heaven; she was perplexed and agitated that heaven was even there—something that she believes doesn't exist. She is heavily influenced by our atheist-leaning beliefs, especially that of my husband, who believes God is probability; he is a mathematical biologist.
God is a mirror of our mind, isn't it?