Marvels: Letters from an Elder, Part 7

Letter # 5, June 2nd, 1948 (continued)

You have all these truths on Earth but you don’t see them.

In the same way, you do not see the radio waves which are passing through your body all the time, or the rays from other stars which have travelled across galaxies to pass through the earth, invisible to your senses.

More energy than your mind can conceive floods your world every minute of every day, but you are not aware of it. If you lie out in the sunshine for any length of time, and ponder the glowing ball of exploding gas in your sky which cascades sunlight down onto your world throughout every day of your life, you may, after some time, apart from the immediate physical warmth, become faintly aware of the tingling which it is causing in your skin. Imagine how you would feel if you could sense all the other kinds of energy which likewise radiate down to your world, which, in essence, dwarf that of the sun. So much radiance emanates from above you and gushes through the world of matter, surging and spilling between those points which you consider to be solid atoms, that language struggles to describe it.

Indeed, the tiny units of reality which you perceive with scientific instruments and call ‘atoms’ are simply the perceivable tips of much larger and vastly stronger units of power or vitality, which, like icebergs beneath the waves of your senses, merge and clash and interact in inconceivably immeasurable ways beyond any means of detection in your reality. You see only the surface ripples, and only a fraction of those.

What you perceive as ‘reality’ is like a single radio station in a whole spectrum of varied and variable continuums. Were you for an instant to tap into any of these other frequencies, the volume of power you might touch upon would far exceed in a moment that of the entire galaxy in which Earth spins.

You can sense the limits of language here. My words sound excessive, strained, hyperbolic. But words grow out of a world: the languages of mortals are trees grown in the soil of mortal experience. Beyond mortality, they will not, cannot, suffice. Knowledge of God and of the immortal worlds is as difficult to capture with words as the volume of the ocean is with an eyedropper — they are simply unable to stretch to encompass a larger reality.

Why then are you there? What is the purpose of a mortal existence?

For any creation to exist, it must endure separation from its creator.

Water, separated in a stream from the main river, moves slower, eddies and swirls, perhaps grows still — but in that slowness and stillness it has an opportunity to perceive itself as something apart from the river.

A story, written down by an author, wanders hither and thither, its viewpoints embodied in characters, its motion encapsulated in a plot, its themes elucidated through images and events. Had it never been written, it would have remained as potential only, deep within the kind of the author — only by being written can it find itself, find being, find life, and become fully what it might have been in essence.

A child, conceived by its parents, is nurtured through its early years but then moves away and must fend for itself in the wider world. It will suffer pain and loss and grief, but also joy and pleasure and revelation. Were it never to have been born, never conceived, its life could only ever have been an image or possibility.

So it is with you.

You are a potentiality given the opportunity to become a reality. Pain is not necessarily inevitable, but it is quite likely: experiencing it is not a sign of weakness but an indication of creation coming into being.

God might have said ‘I will avoid all pain; everything that might have been will remain in potential only.’ But instead He said ‘Everything that might have been will Be.’

And so we have what we have: suffering and creation go hand in hand, but in the end there is Being instead of Might-have-been.