Brian Greene (from Until the End of Time)
Across millennia, cultures too have produced particular stories that have also managed to rise above the others and achieve a broad impact on their community's view of reality. These are a culture's myths-stories held in sufficient regard to garner a sense of the sacred. It is notoriously difficult to define myth, but we will take it to denote stories that invoke supernatural agents to explore culture's grand concerns: its origin, its long-practiced rituals, its particular ways of imposing order on the world. Through their longevity, wide appeal, and portfolio of fundamental explanations. myths become the basis of a shared heritage, a corpus of tragedy and triumph, of chronicle and fantasy, of adventure and reflection that defines a people and shapes a society.
Watch scenes from NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang
Brian Greene (from Until the End of Time)
Through language, story explodes the limits that would otherwise be imposed by our own narrow experiences. As the masterfully chosen words direct our imagination, we gain a deeper sense of our common humanity and a more nuanced understanding of how to survive as a social species.
(1) When God began to create*When God began to create Others “In the beginning God created.” heaven and earth— (2) the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from*a wind from Others “the spirit of.” God sweeping over the water—
Energy of Big Bang, over billions of years, solidifies into our Universe
Avivah Zornberg (from The Beginning of Desire) - The Jerusalem Talmud, Rashi's source, extends the kinetic, tactile basis of the imagery. "Rav said, 'Let there be a separation'-let the separation strengthen, let it crystallize, let it freeze, let it consolidate." "To be" is represented as a sort of jelling process, as the formless liquid primary substance finds its limits in space, solidifies, assumes its proper form.
Darkness and water are where we begin - they precede us
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (from Opening to Darkness)
14. It's the twenty-first century, and it feels like we are returning to the beginning, to the dark origin from which humans emerged. The trouble in the world is asking us to assess and recreate how we live. Along the way, we lost track of the stars and now find ourselves in fear of one another, of living and dying, and of the consequences of the human being's impact on the planet we live on. The greatest question is "What will happen to us next?" It is my experience that we come from the inexplainable darkness of birth into a life that is also dark and unknown....
The dark road within has been blocked with incomplete or the absence of sacred transmissions for being with darkness...
15. Within each of us, darkness is embodied, whether we acknowledge its existence or not. Simply being born from darkness has anchored an experience of it within us...
19. Perhaps something is always in the dark waiting to be born repeatedly in the interest of change and transformation both personal and collective. The more darkness, the more change.
When different things begin to exist at Big Bang
Rabbi Arthur Green (To Dwell Within- weekly commentary)
The Targum renders the opening word of Torah as be-khokhmata "through wisdom." Wisdom comes before all. This Torah/Wisdom is unknown to us. It is "Torah before it became garbed in material clothing," say the Kabbalists. The holy Zohar then reverses the subject-object order of the verse. "Through wisdom did the Hidden Source - unknown, mysterious, beyond language - create Elohim." That One brought forth a single God in plural form, the One now appearing with many faces. Elohim: As soon as there was a world, there were multiple pathways to Truth. This multi-faced God was the first creation, emerging out of mystery. Your God, my God, God as I need to imagine Him/Her/It today, the God I will need to encounter tomorrow they are all One. This also means that the Talmudic teaching "Both these and those are the words of living Elohim" is an underlying principle of Torah. There is more than one way to attain truth.