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CREATION.
the unchanging laws of nature. The theologically trained mind, eager to maintain the claim of its Supreme Being to be the creator of the universe, proceeds to establish it on the argument of analogy between a watch and the world, and asserts that, as there could have been no watch without a watchmaker, so there could be no world without a creator. How far this argument is sound will be enquired into later, but we might avail ourselves of the present opportunity to examine two of the points involved in the claim advanced by theology. These are the notions of a creation from nothing and of a first beginning of the universe.
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So far as the first of these two points is concerned, the idea of nothing involves a contradiction in itself. In the popular sense, nothing is an empty concept, and, as such, inconceivable by the mind. We might describe the state of nothingness as a condition of existence when this thing, that thing, the other thing, that is, when each and every and all things, were not, but we then have merely a notion of the negation of sense objects; and when we endeavour to think away substance itself, mind refuses to obey the impulse and the lips to formulate speech. Assuming, then, a beginning of the world process, we must say that the true state of existence prior to the manifestation of the universe must have been one in which all things lay unmanifested in the bosom of Existence itself. A beautiful description of this state is given in the Book of Dzyan, from which we quote the following:
"The eternal Parent wrapped in Her ever invisible robes had slumbered once again for seven eternities.
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