Plunge into the night

So when you ask how many levels there are in the cosmos, it depends to a certain extent on how you look at it and how much acid you have taken. At the very least, human beings are condemned to span two great dimensions -- the exterior and the interior, an objective pole and a subjective pole, the “great outdoors” and the even greater within. The more general category of existence simply presents itself on the one hand as ponderable matter, and on the other as a pondering subject. These are not opposites that can ever be resolved, but complementarities that give rise to perpetual ambiguity in the space in between.

Now in Rom 8:22, Paul says that "the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs," and that "we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body." In other words, not only is creation itself a process of birth, but the locus of that birth process is within our very bodies.

Sri Aurobindo speaks of existence as “God’s covenant with night.” In his poem Savitri, he writes,

And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh,

That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space

If existence represents God’s “plunge into the night,” as being descends from level to level, then spiritual development reverses this cosmogonic process, so that human beings, in their vertical aspect, potentially span all levels of creation, from top to bottom. posted by Gagdad Bob at 11/28/2006 08:33:00 AM One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin