The evolutionary process occurs WITHIN the spaciousness of Divine awareness.

 

Another way to reconcile evolution and divine creation comes  from meditative experience.  Using our exhalations to expand our awareness, we enter right into the spaciousness of God's awareness, a consciousness that is rooted in love.  We might say, in fact, that God is LOST in this spaciousness, emptied out in an ecstasy of joy, similar to the way we feel when we sit on a beach in the sunshine, listening to the constant roar of the waves.  During meditation, as we allow our identity to expand and merge with this vast awareness, suddenly all things - all thoughts, perceptions, objects and feelings - come popping out of that vastness as though out of nowhere!  It is out of this sacred spaciousness that the evolutionary process has arisen, including mutations, adaptations and all of the multitude of different species.  In other words, creation occurs WITHIN the Creator - inside divine awareness, within the mind of God!

Sylvia Boorstein is a Buddhist teacher who is also Jewish - a "Bu-Jew."  In a fascinating passage, she combines Buddhist meditation, an experience of God, and the process of creation all into one. Using the word "emptiness" as a synonym for "spaciousness," she writes: "I experience God as Source, the Emptiness that gives rise to Form . . . Looking at emptiness, I feel I see God.  Form is the manifest side of emptiness.  Creation keeps on happening . . . My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born . . . When I pray, I think of how 'God is One' and 'Emptiness' feel the same to me.  When I give thanks, daily, for my life, I think about creation as the amazing process by which nondifferentiated emptiness continually is reborn as form."

Photo: A rock lies on the beach at sunset, with the Quileute Needles in the background; First Beach, Quileute Nation, WA; July 26, 2013

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"I experience God as Source, the Emptiness that gives rise to Form."

"I experience God as Source, the Emptiness that gives rise to Form . . . Looking at emptiness, I feel I see God.  Form is the manifest side of emptiness.  Creation keeps on happening . . . My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born . . . When I pray, I think of how 'God is One' and 'Emptiness' feel the same to me.  When I give thanks, daily, for my life, I think about creation as the amazing process by which nondifferentiated emptiness continually is reborn as form."

Sylvia Boorstein,
a "Bu-Jew" (Buddhist Jew)
from her book, "That's Funny; You Don't Look Buddhist!"

Photo: The Marsh-Marigolds are beginning to bloom in the high mountains.  They are the first wildflower in the high country!  These are at Ouzel Lake, Wild Basin, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; June 3, 2013

Meditation Enables Us to Watch - Spellbound - as All Things are Birthed Out of the Seamless Expanse of God's Spaciousness

 

"I experience God as Source, the Emptiness that gives rise to Form.  This is my experience.  In periods of intensive meditation practice, at times when I have been very, very, still, I've seen the world I know and recognize as myself and my story dissolve and become the vibrancy of infinite space.  The place from which the sentient, discriminating awareness of life begins, is revealed.  It feels to me like the edge of creation.  Looking at emptiness, I feel I see God.  Form is the manifest side of emptiness.  Creation keeps on happening.  My experience of emptiness is that it is alive with the possibility of everything waiting to be born. Buddhists say, 'Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.'  Everything derives from and returns to its undifferentiated source.  The Jewish Kabbalists call God "Eyn-Sof, the Infinite, that which has no beginning or end." When I pray, I think of how the Jewish phrase "God is One" and Buddhist "Emptiness" feel the same to me.  When I give thanks, daily, for my life, I think about creation as the amazing process by which non-differentiated emptiness continually is reborn as form."

Sylvia Boorstein, a "Bu-Jew" or Buddhist Jew

On my birthday, I am grateful for the continual process by which each and every moment is born - magically - out of the seamless space of infinite divine awareness.

Photo: A glacier lily pops up through the snow, Mount Rainier National Park, WA, August 5, 2011