Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today we're coming back to revisit a series that we started a few weeks ago. We ended up going off and doing some other stuff in the meantime, but today we're coming back. This series was called The Thing Before the Beginning.
That's right, what existed before the creation or emergence of the universe of reality itself. It's a big one. So this is one of the reasons we figured, Hey, even after a couple of weeks, folks are still going to be interested in this. Lord knows we are.
Sorry. If I was just looking around all over the place, I realized we started recording without me popping rob out into the little window that I put you in. Folks at home, I don't know if you know that we have to arrange things on our screens just right and just so. I was just messing around with that. Okay, Now, everything's where it should be there.
You have two screens, though, right.
I do, but I only look at one while I'm recording. Oh okay, I mean if I look at the other one, it's gonna be really weird. I'm like down here.
Yeah, I guess I technically have two screens because there's also the little camera screen.
But that's just me.
I don't want to look at that. Yeah.
Yeah, no, I'm looking at you up here. I got my notes here, so I think we're all good now. But yeah, anyway, so we are talking about what existed
before the creation event in creation stories. Now, this might seem like a paradoxical question, because like, how can there be something before the creation of the world, But it's really not paradoxical, because, as we talked about in the last couple of episodes, most creation narratives actually do not describe a universe being brought into existence from a state
of total nothingness. Instead, most creation stories describe the beginning as some kind of ordering or transformation of a previously existing state of affairs into a stage of some sort where the history of the gods or of human beings
can take place. So in the first episode, we talked about the Chinese story of Pengu, the ancient coiled one, who emerges inside a cosmic egg from a formless, misty primordial state known as the Wuji pengu is often described as a hairy giant who manages to separate the essences of yin from yang and pushes or holds the sky up from the earth. We also talked about the biblical creation story in Genesis chapter one, which is interesting for
a bunch of reasons. For one thing, it is commonly misunderstood as a creation ex nihilo, a creation of the world from nothing, when actually scholars now pretty much agree that it is a story of a God bringing order and furnishings into a pre existing world. That pre existing world is described as one of dark, deep cosmic waters.
We also talked about the Babylonian epic of creation, the Inuma a leash, which you could think of as having two different creation events and thus two different states before creation. So the first is a time when the sky above and the earth below were without names, implying a very interesting kind of spiritual non existence by virtue of the
fact that they are not acknowledged in language. And so you have that you have the essences of fresh water and salt water, which are named beings known as apsu and tiamot, respectively. These essences are mixed and swirling and This mixing gives rise to a sort of first creation and the issue of the first generations of gods and
goddesses from the mingled waters. Then you've got a second creation event, that is the creation by combat story, where the younger god Marduke wages war against the saltwater goddess Tiamot and against her monsters, and then fashions the heavens and the earth out of the dead body of his enemy.
In the second episode, we talked about an interesting creation account from Maori traditions, in which the pre creation state is this tight loving embrace between the skyfather Rungi and the earth mother Papa, and we talked about how the act of ordering emerges when their children, who are crushed between them, pushed them apart so that they can have
space and so that light can be let in. This one, I thought was really notable because it describes the pre creation state in human relational terms, so not like dark waters or a great void of welter and waste, but an eternal gesture of love which has to be broken before history can happen. We also talked about the Aztec creation account known as the Legend of the Five Sons. This one is interesting in that it posits before the creation of this world, there was another world, similar in
some ways but very different in others. And then before that there was another world, and going back, five ages characterized by five different suns. And so there's a cycle of creation and destruction and creation anew in this account. And we're back today to talk about more.
All right, Well, what do we have up for us first here? Ja?
Well, one that I wanted to talk about because I thought it was interesting and because it's so different from the stories we've talked about so far, is an account of the ordering of the world and commentary on the mysteries of the previous state in the creation hymn of the rig Veda. So, the rig Veda is a large collection of early Sanskrit hymns, considered the most ancient surviving Vedic text, making it foundational to the later development of Hinduism.
I've seen different dates proposed for the origin of the Rigveda. My Oxford Companion to World Mythology suggests that at least some of the hymns go back to between seventeen hundred and two thousand BCE. Other sources say more like fifteen hundred to twelve hundred BCE, and these are texts that would have been propagated through systems of memorization and oral
transmission long before they were actually written down. They're thought to have emerged from the northwestern Indian subcontinent, sort of around the region of Punjab, and the hymns of the Rigveda are organized into ten circles or mandolas, which you can think of like individual volumes or long chapters. So
interesting thing about creation within the Rigveda. Broadly, multiple hymns of the Rigveda make reference to the creation of the world, and thus this corpus actually gives multiple very different accounts of creation. Some indicate a creation through combat, kind of like we see in the Inuma a Leash, but with very different details. Other stories tell about a separation of the sky from the earth, like we see in the Chinese story of Pengu or in the Maori creation story.
Others make suggestions about acts of sacrifice as the origin of the world and of human beings. And I think this multiplicity of different creation stories within the same corpus in itself has interesting implications for how believers in the rig Veda as a sacred text would thus start to think about creation in a religious context. If you have multiple totally different stories all coming from this authoritative religious text, Like, how does that affect the way you think about you know,
the text itself and about the creation. Maybe we can come back to that in a minute. But the one hymn that I wanted to look at in particular from the Rigveda is known as the Creation hymn or the Nasadia Sukta, which is ordered as hymn number one twenty nine in the tenth Mandola. Now a note about translations here.
The Rigveda is famously difficult to translate, rob, I bet you've read about this before, Like, its original language is full of spiritually intellectually freighted words and phrases that have all these secondary meanings and ambiguities. Also, it is an archaic text, so some meanings are difficult to reach across history. Translations tend to be crowded with footnotes trying to explain complexities that can't really be captured in a straight translation
of the text itself. So I cannot do justice to all of that or compare a bunch of different translations in the time we have here, So please just take this section with the caveat that basically all translations of the rig Veda are going to be compromises in some way that fail to get at some aspects of the original. And you could say this is true of all ancient texts, but it seems to be especially true of the of the Vedas in general and of the rig Veda.
Yeah, in general, we are never the intended readers of a text like this.
Yeah. So with that caveat, the main translation I'm going to refer to here is the one in the Penguin Classics edition by the scholar Wendy Donager of the University of Chicago. So the creation Him begins like this, There was neither non existence nor existence. Then there was neither the realm of space nor the sky, which is beyond what stirred? Where in whose protection? Was there water bottomlessly deep? And just a note on the line in there what's
stirred and the part what's stirred? Where in whose protection? Donager as a footnote saying that this verb stirred here is often used to describe the motion of breath, which itself brings in a new ambiguity that I like, because I wonder does that mean stirring as in breath falling upon something and moving it, or stirring as in breathing in itself.
Yeah. That's a great point because as a modern reader reading this translation, I think stirred within this context, I think something stirring within the depths.
Yeah, but.
Maybe depending on how you interpret interpret the breath, you can maybe get halfway there. But yeah, fascinating.
Yeah. So this is the first verse of this creation hymn, and I'd love that it begins with not with a statement of what happened at the beginning. It begins with a statement of negation and paradox Like it says there was neither non existence nor existence, which is I think intentionally provocative and paradoxical because that's like violating the law of excluded middle. It's saying there was neither a nor
not ah. And then it also begins so it's got the the negation in paradox, and then it's got questions. Instead of saying telling you what stirred, it says what stirred? Where in whose protection? Was their water? Not there was water, but was their water? Was it bottomlessly deep?
Yeah? Almost makes me think of the poetry of Blake you know, you know what immortal hand or eye you know, And by asking these questions, you know, it makes the answer more ambiguous and more majestic.
Well, I think, like Blake. From what I've read, a major purpose of this hymn is it is often interpreted as meaning to provoke wonder. But anyway it goes on. There's a second verse that says there was neither death nor immortality. Then again a kind of paradox, neither death nor immortality. Then there was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day that one breathed. And this phrase that one.
In other translations, I've seen it rendered as something like that one thing, so you could think of it maybe like that. But Donnagier here has it as that one that one breathed, windless by its own impulse. Other than that there was nothing beyond darkness, was hidden by darkness in the beginning, with no distinguishing sign. All this was water, the life force that was covered with emptiness. That one arose through the power of heat. Desire came upon that
one in the beginning. That was the first seed of mind. Poets seeking in their heart with wisdom found the bond of existence in non existence. Their cord was ended across was there below? Was there above? There were seed placers, there were powers, there was impulse beneath, there was giving forth above? Who really knows? Who will hear proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards with the creation of this universe? Who then
knows whence it has arisen? So I like that point there, though. You know, gods often play a role in the creation of the world in stories, you know, within the Vedas and in other traditions. But here it's saying the gods came later with the creation of the universe, So what brought this earlier state into being? And then finally, the last verse is whence this creation has arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. The one who looks down on it in the highest heaven only he knows,
or perhaps he does not know. Hm nice I thought this. This is such an interesting contrast to many of the other stories we've seen so far, and again, like the Rigveda does not lack references to more traditional creation stories like we talked about, But here, rather than telling a story like this happened to bring the world into existence?
This creation narrative is at its heart questions and expressions of skepticism, encouraging the reader or the listener, the person engaging with this hymn, to have questions and doubts of their own and to kind of think about what it means for things to exist. I do like that. One of the few things that it seems to posit sort of confidently or definitively is something about there being a mind principle at the beginning of things, though not attributing
it to any particular person. Like it's talking about desire coming upon this unnamed one, that one at the beginning had some kind of desire, and this was the first seed of mind, and this seems to be a power that gives rise to other things. But then it's never described in explicit like creative terms. It doesn't go from there to saying, therefore God created X, Y, and Z.
It's interesting how when you think of a creation myth in which everything is described in statements, it is inevitably going to produce questions in the mind of the reader or the listener. Here we're establishing it via questions, which in a way kind of creates an ambiguous certainty if that makes sense in the mind of the reader or the listener, you know, like it's not like, do the questions have formed the mental image, rather than us being given a mental image, than then we have questions.
About Yeah, that's true. That there's almost there's a way in which you can have more confidence in a mystery, because if you're given a story and told to believe it, then naturally one must have doubts. But if instead you are you are posed a question and told it is a mystery, I mean, how can you argue with that?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah. If you definitively say well, this individual was, say, the son of the gods, the son of this god or that goddess, then well then you got to describe how that happened and what were the ramifications of that, and what was the why of that. But if it's just no one knows who this individual was, what was their origin? Were they the child of a god? Were they a mortal who became to halfway divine? You know, if you ask it in that sense, it's like, oh, yeah,
nobody knows. Maybe it's all those things at once superposition.
Yeah, And I love the last statement too, where it's saying, uh, you know, nobody really knows the answer to this mystery. What what create? What caused creation to arise? What brought the world into existence from this state of Again, I love how it's saying before that it's not nothingness. The pre creation state here is not nothingness. It is neither existence nor non existence, which is somehow less than nothingness. It is a contradiction in terms. Yeah, but oh but anyway, Yeah,
I only did the second half. I only did the first half of that statement because I got interested in that. So, yeah, it begins with this logical contradiction or this neither existence nor non existence. When existence comes, what brings it into existence? We get this claim that well maybe it is only the one in the highest heaven who knows, but maybe he does not know.
And then they go on to write, if you know, write it down and send it to the following address.
So anyway, I really like this him and I think this is a really interesting contrast to the things we've talked about before in multiple ways, Like I love the questions, the role of questions in establishing the pre creation state and the act of creation, the the implicit and explicit encouraging of of questions in the mind of the listener, the raising of doubts, and the closest thing that it really gets to describing the pre creation state is the use of logical contradictions and paradoxes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, which which kind of situates is a thing outside of reason, outside of our our even our ability to understand it. I love this. All right. Well, let's, uh, Lena,
let's return briefly, at least to Egyptian mythology. You know, we we've discussed Egyptian mythology multiple times on the show before, and we may have I think we alluded to it in passing in the previous and stuff elements of the thing before the beginning, just pointing out that, well, you know, this, this line of thought, or this particular mythology, it has some parallels in Egyptian pod and all. So I want
to bring up a specific Egyptian creation myth here. And in bringing this up, we're going to end up touching on a couple of pre creation ideas that we've already discussed in other examples. One, of course, is common to so many different religions, and that is the idea of primordial waters.
Water is big, big, in the pre creation space. A lot of people are thinking about water there exactly.
Yes. And then the second idea is that that the pre creation state is a thing that also continues to exist either within its own pocket dimension or beyond the boundaries of creation, and maybe at least by certain individuals and certainly divine individuals can still be reached and interacted with.
That is really interesting. Yeah. That so that the pre creation world is not just something that exists in the past. It was what the world was once like and has now been totally transformed. You could imagine the world we live in as maybe a subset of reality that has been transformed into the world we know, but that somewhere else there is the world that was before and it's still like that.
Yeah, yeah, And you know, part of this is certainly as we'll get into with the we've discussed this before. How with the ancient Egyptians, a lot of their belief system, it is, is informed by the importance of the nile. It is it is shaped by the movement of water, and so in one on one level, there is the idea that water is flowing from a source to a destination, and then there are these you know, we have this periodic surges in floods, and that's going to have both
destructive and creative ramifications. But you can easily imagine like, okay, we have all this water, This water is important, it must come from somewhere. And what is water like when it's not doing anything? It is stagnant, it's still, it's dark. And so we get into similar ideas here. So, as we've of course discussed in the show, you can't just talk about Egyptian ancient Egyptian mythology as if it's a
single codified thing. Rather, we're dealing with an array of beliefs and traditions that exist across time and across different parts of Egypt over the course of many thousands of years. So there are actually multiple creation myths. But worth discussing for our purposes here especially is that of none or noun or none. It's sometimes spelled in English as noun like a noun or nune like a holy sister of the cloth. And this is the personification of the prime
evil ocean. So the prime evolution in Egyptian mythology consisted of the waters of chaos, a kind of vast stagnant potentiality, the prime evil matter here was dark, moist, boundaryless. And these attributes are embodied in a group of primordial deities, all the Ogdode of Hermopolis. The exact makeup of this group varies from one telling or tradition to the next, but it generally consists of eight deities consisting of four male and female counterparts representing about four qualities of the
primeval waters. So the lineup is kind of like the Avengers. It's going to vary, but you know, but in this case, all the different lineups of the Ogdode are going to include none. None is often included in this kind of frog headed form, and he's included alongside his female counterpart nonet. And according to Geraldine Pinch in Egyptian Mythology, in one of my main books that I look to for this sort of thing, quote obeying some primitive instinct unquote, the
Ogdode comes together to form the Primeval Mound. This is the first emergence of land from the prime evil ocean, and this would serve as the center of the un universe and the place where subsequent creation happens. Think of it as like base camp for all creation, and it remains a place of continuous creation and renewal.
Yeah, so in one literal sense, you can think about this because it's easier to do things on land if you just think about human organizational activities, you know, ordering, it's easier to take place on land. You can build stuff, you can sort things. But also I think it's important to think about the raising of the land from the primordial waters as an act of separation. You are making a distinction between two places or two types of things.
And like so many of these creation myths, somehow they focus on an act of separation or distinction drawing, like you take a previously undifferentiated place or substance and you separate it into two different things, and then you have the beginnings of order.
Yeah, and you see that with the octode here as well, because it's like they are all they all kind of seem to emerge out of descriptions. They're almost like linguistic attributes of the primeval waters. So they are like they're kind of like the the the hashtags, they're the they're the word cloud for the the primeval matter. And then they become personifications of that and separated into male and
female energies. So the prime evil Waters of none, embodied again by the god and goddess None and None that they continue to exist. This continues to exist, these waters both above the stars and beyond the boundaries of creation, feeding the life giving waters of the rivers and the ocean. So here we get back to what I mentioned earlier, the idea of like the river being all important. Where does the water come from? Well, the water has its
source in this stagnant potentiality. Now I'm going to keep referring to the entity as none, but again it also exists in the feminine as none, and Pinch refers to the entity as an it the oldest of beings, the father of the gods, but also something with an eternal potential to create life, a demi urge and quote a kind of instinctive movement towards consciousness. But again within this, within this context here it is also a place that may be returned to and has a like a has
a lot of renewing energy. And here's an example of it. We've discussed the god Ra or Ray, the Egyptian god of the sun, and how during the day he's piloting the sun barge across the sky. It's a movement of the Sun and then in the evening what happens goes down into the underworld and traverses the underworld. But there's something else that happens down there as well. He also undergoes regeneration in the nun so And this is interesting because again None is both the water and also the
personification of the waters. And in some ancient Egyptian iconography you will see None pictured as a giant, like a like a male giant raising the sun barge, the solar barge out of the waters above his head like bench pressing it back up and and and therefore playing a vital role in just continual you know, nightly renewal of the energy of the Sun and of the Sun God.
Very interesting that this implies, at least in a metaphorical sense of belief in the constant returning to the pre creation state, like every night there is some kind of recommunion with what the world was like before it was created. Yeah.
Yeah, because as we've talked about before, like the voyage of the sun barge is one in which there are enemies there they have to be fought off like it's it's it is a it is a cycle that is perpetual, but not all the way guaranteed. And you know, certain things have to be observed in this world and in other worlds for this to continue.
That's right. I mean a big part of Egyptian religious ritual was humans engaging in rituals that were designed to help the sun, the god raw and the sun barge on its journey through the underworld. So like we have to do rituals to help the god make the journey and make sure that he succeeds.
Yeah, exactly, And so in all this all creation is realized in the nun as well. And also there's this other little tidbit that pinch mentions that, and that is that in some tellings, the world will end one day when the creator and slash creators, you know, the creative almost you can think of it less in terms of a creator entity, but sort of like the creative movement
returns to the nun. So in a sense, again, if we come back to the idea of a great expansion, we kind of get into the idea of a great collapse that one day everything will just return to primordial, stagnant potentiality, and then maybe it will come out again. Maybe we'll get the same pattern throughout history.
If only we could get this exact same pattern again, wouldn't that be great?
Well, maybe the next one will be better, right, hopefully. It is kind of like the Aztec model, where each new draft is an improvement. Uh. You know, you don't want you you don't want your sixth draft to be worse than your fifth. Maybe there shouldn't have been a fifth draft. Maybe fifth should have been final, that sort of thing. All right, So obviously this is this is a case. And like most like all these examples we've been discussing, these are cases where you're you're dealing with
generally the ancient world. You're dealing with ancient peoples asking, you know, deep complex questions about the nature of reality and their place in reality, you know, informed by their observations of the world, deep human contemplation. Uh. And and also other religious influences of the time, either something that was practiced in their own culture or has been brought
in from another culture. But I think it would be an interesting exercise here to look at a few recent religious movements, new religious movements to consider what happens when you throw in some modern influences, especially the idea that these would be religious movements that emerge during the scientific age. That's not to say that these are necessarily science informed religions, but they are at least culturally informed by a world that is shaped by science as well as science fiction.
I would say that a lot of recently formed religions, in my view, they partake of the esthetics of science. They don't make necessarily functional use of science, but there is a sort of poetry or the language of science that they try to incorporate rate into their beliefs.
Yeah, and at the same time they may do the same with ancient religion as well. I mean, we see this in esoteric thought and in mysticism all the time, where you're also drawing on these ancient practices and you know, depending on how you're doing it, who's doing it, and so forth, and as well as intention, you know, they
might be rather accurate. You might be you know, bringing in some of these concepts and actually slightly reworking them in a way where they function better for certain populations of the modern world while still retaining their value. Or it could be entirely superficial, you know, where you're just taking the dressings of something ancient and using it to sell something new. I mean, it's going to run the gamut of possibility here.
There are a lot of reasons to bring in things that are ancient, but one of them is that antiquity brings implied authority. When you say something is very old, people are like, oh, well that's something I should pay attention.
To, which, of course is an interesting scenario to consider it with a new religious movement something, you know, where somebody's come along and they're like, this is this is the new path, this is the way, and they're going to lean on maybe some ancient and some sort of ancient knowledge one way or another in order to prop it up. And that is not to not to not to you know, disparage this idea, because of course we look at any of these ancient religions, all of these
were new religions at one point. You know, none of these actually like predates the first humans who advanced them. You know, again, they may be influenced by earlier models and and always were, but yeah, any ancient religion was once a new religious movement. We just continue to do this.
This is a continual human practice. Either you're going to reach the point and it makes sense too the world changes, culture changes, you either have to continually create new drafts of a particular religion, or you have to change ourselves to match an old model of religion, or you come up with something to some extent entirely new.
I don't know if I've ever put it in these terms before, but I just had the thought, I wonder if a lot of the venerable and respectable seeming aspects of older religions are actually things that traditions mature into the results of things existing for a long time and evolving and maturing. That would kind of run counter to an intuition that a lot of people have that things
begin pure and then devolve from there. I wonder if some religions actually gain a lot of respectability over time as they sort of evolve and grow.
Yeah, yeah, I mean certainly they're you know, we could we could easily get into the nuances and the history of various new religions, where you know, early on, there are a lot of places where you can misstep, certainly if you're in an area where everything isn't completely codified and is highly controlled by you know, one or two individuals.
That sort of thing.
But then again, there are counterexamples of that as well. So for our purposes here, I don't want to get
two into the weeds. This is all fascinating, but I want to try and focus mostly on the idea of pre creation in some of these religions, without really getting into much in the way of, you know, discussing like the values or the criticism of any of these religious models, and again kind of basing it broadly in the idea that all religions were new at one point, and there's nothing there's nothing strange about there being new religions today.
I'm going to begin with with all three of these are ones that I think everyone has heard of, but maybe you're not as up on exactly what they seem to be saying about this strange idea of the thing that existed before reality. So I want to start with the Raelian Movement. This is an international atheistic UFO religion founded by the French religious leader Rayel born nineteen forty six. This religion is based on his alleged UFO experiences in
nineteen seventy three. As of this recording, he is still alive. So this is kind of a this is an interesting example and that this is a new religious movement in which the founder is still living and presumably active in
the faith. So I'm not going to get it. As with all these I'm not going to get into all the teachings, but the Raelian movement teaches that life on Earth originated via directed panspermia, so like directed seating of the planet's life twenty five thousand years ago by aliens known as the elhem However, mirroring modern conceptions of eternity and some cosmological models, Raelian teachings contend that there simply
is no beginning and there's also no end. Both space and time are boundless, and their chief religious symbol of infinity is a combination of the Star of David and the swastika, meant to convey some sense of all of this.
I'm going to read from their website that this is certainly one of those one of the modern religious movements where they have a lot of information on their websites and you can just go and just read exactly what they are saying about themselves, and this is what they say, quote the extraterrestrials who created humankind, and laboratories have proven that the infinitely small and the infinitely large have the
same structure. The atoms in our hands contain tiny galaxies, which themselves contain planets and minuscule humanities, and our own galaxy is a tiny particle and a huge atom that forms part of an immense world, etc. At infintium. So powers of ten basically, except with like little universes inside us and our entire universes inside of something inside of a macro world, and it just goes on forever. There's
no beginning, there's no end. And it does match up with you to some extent with numerous cosmological hypotheses that have featured on one level or another, the idea of a cosmos without true beginning around.
Yeah, the universe is beginning from other universes and seeding other universes beyond. I don't know of anybody. I don't know of any theories that say, like atoms actually have universes inside them. Maybe somebody thinks that with scientific basis, so I kind of doubt it.
Yeah, I think you're getting more into the realm of mysticism here when you start considering that. But you know, in another way, it kind of rubs up against the idea of many worlds, right, I mean, they're being a
multiverse out there, that sort of thing. So again, I think there's an important distinction to be made here, Like we're not making the case and I don't think we're not discussing it anyway as if these are examples of scientifically informed religions, but they are religions that have emerged within a scientifically literate culture, and therefore they are going to at least rub up against these scientific concepts.
Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, and in a way, you know, you think about it, that might not actually be different than ancient creation stories. It's just that we have more and different knowledge that we think of as scientific about the world. I mean, you know, ancient cultures didn't really have a concept of scientific but they would have had understandings of the natural world that included maybe complex knowledge
about how to do certain things. You know, you can imagine creation accounts that involve things about technology, things about agriculture and metal working and building of structures, things like that, all these things that are sort of physical discoveries about how things work in the universe and things we can do with the substances around us, and that knowledge, like secular functional knowledge is included into the creation accounts of old Yeah.
Absolutely, I think that's an important point all right. Now, in talking about scientifically informed or inspired religions, we of course have to talk about one of the big ones, at least in name Scientology, founded by science fiction author l. Ron Hubbard who lived nineteen eleven through nineteen eighty six. He claimed to have developed the teachings through this is rather interesting through experimentation rather than divine revelation, at least
in the hard sense. And I think this is rather interesting. You know that the idea that it's not that I have gone back and discovered something in ancient writings or I have you know, uncovered some forgotten tone of knowledge. This is like a product of my own research, in my own like sort of lab work.
Yeah, that's funny. I one day, when I was long long ago, there was a day when I was basically stuck in a library all day with no ability to go anywhere or do anything. So I was just wandering around and I found a copy of Dianetics in the library and I started reading it. I remember actually being disappointed and thinking that it would be more interesting than it was. It's got a slog for me.
I had, I had, I had a similar experience with it. You know, I was, I was interested, I was, you know, has a volcano on the front for crying out loud? Yeah, it seems like it's going to be dynamic. It had some pretty cool television commercials back in the day, and I assume they're still probably doing some TV commercials. And and then when I started reading it, it like starts off very confrontational and and and in general, I can sometimes I can find Hubbard's writing a bit hard to crack.
I mean not to and that's not even necessarily a knock. It's like we're talking about like ancient religious texts that are difficult to understand and maybe intentionally a bit cryptic and suggestive. And you can certainly find that in scientology writings as well, again perhaps intended, but anyway, the broader teachings of scientology involve a number of philosophical and psychiatric concepts ideas from Western esoteric practices, along with some definite
Sci Fi related concepts. And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on scientology or its teachings, and I'm not a scientologist, but I'm to understand that the basic idea is that the universe we experience is the mess the nest the matter, energy and space time universe, and this was born seventy six sorry, seventy six trillion years ago out of a pre existing static universe of pure Thetan energy, So a universe composed all of Thetans, spiritual beings and our true selves. But then the Thetans
become lost in their own creation something to this effect. So, as far as I understand it as a non scientologist, the idea is that prior to the beginning, you just have like a pure sort of communal spiritual existence, but also one that you could think of is kind of you know, having a lot in common with these ideas of pure potentiality as well. But but then that you could also I think you can directly compare this too to sort of a you know, it has a certain
what prelaps arian energy as well. The idea that that through scientology, the practitioner is trying to sort of return to that condition before this reality and sort of reconnect with the Thetan that they are slash were, And this also brings in various concepts of human potential as well. Like I have to I have to find my true potential by connecting with the pure energy being that I was in the sort of the realm of potentiality that existed before our universe.
So the return to Eden is in this case that it's the return to the pure Thetan energy.
Yeah. Yeah, And and again you can you can kind of compare that to even the ancient Egyptian model. We were just discussing the idea that there's some sort of renewal to be found in the pre creation existence, and there is some connection between where we are now and what we are now, and that like vital pre existing energy.
Yeah, so I guess I created accidentally. They're created some of the wrong implications by saying Eden, because Eden is not a pre created state. It's just the good state.
Yeah, the good state.
But that's very much the created state.
Yeah yeah, yeah. And then I do not know, there may be something else in scientology that explores what existed before the Thetans, or perhaps Thetans I may be mispronouncing it, what existed before them.
I don't know.
Maybe they're they're a constant state that always existed. I suspect that might be the case, all right, And then one more to discuss. This one is by far the largest and much larger than the aforementioned groups, and generally considered the most successful new religious movement of the past couple of centuries, and that is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in
eighteen thirty. And it is easy to forget that this too is a religion that, despite its connection to older Christian traditions and its use of scriptures that invoke this feeling of ancient time, it's easy to forget that this too, is a religion that really takes shape and takes off in the scientific age. And we see that reflected. We've discussed this a little bit on the show before in
some of the ways that it is space friendly. Again not making the case that any of these new religious movements are necessarily science informed, but it has been observed that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is largely space friendly, explicitly stating that there are other inhabited planets, so at least, you know, acknowledging a modern understanding of the cosmos and in incorporating that into its worldview, and you know, into some of its ideas of what came before.
Yeah, I mean, you don't have to say that the scientific ideas taken on board are necessarily all that complex. Just to acknowledge that this is like a post Galileo religion. This is a religion from the age in which it is a It is common knowledge that the other planets are not just like movable points of light in the sky that move on different patterns than the rest of the stars, that they are spheres of like rock and gas, and there are other things like you could walk on the other planets.
Right, And therefore it's acknowledged that there there is life on other planets, and and then that has to be theologically worked out to some degree, which is not something that comes up in like you know, ancient Christian or Jewish thought. You know, like nobody's saying, but wait, what about people potentially living on other planets? Like what are you talking about? That's not going with it's not going
in the book. Yeah. So we again, as we've mentioned before, you know, several notable prominent NASA figures were LDS members, including fourth and seventh NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher. So I think a strong case can be made for being like a space friendly religion and some extent to some extent, but coming back to the bigger question. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter day Saints, what comes before the beginning then? And how does this rub
up against modern scientific concepts. Well, it's spelled out on their website, so again this is coming more or less directly from the Church. The idea is that Jesus Christ, under the direction of the heavenly Father, is not creating things out of magic, is not snapping his fingers and making things pop into existence. He is organizing pre existing matter.
Obviously, there's going to be a difference here in that it names and asserts Jesus as the creator, but at least in the aspect that it is an organization of some pre existing material world rather than a creation ex nihilo. It's interesting in that that is actually what the Christian and Jewish creation narrative in its original text does say, Like the text of Genesis is an ordering narrative, not a creation x nihilo narrative, but it is commonly misunderstood
as a creation x nihilo narrative. So it's funny that that this is like a making more explicit something that is true about the original text but is often misunderstood by believers in that text.
Yeah yeah, So, so of reacting to the misunderstanding and the interpretation that is kind of like you know, common to the world and then pushing against that and instead like adhering to say that the law of the conservation of mass and energy and saying like, you know, no, no, we're not saying that the divine architect just made all the materials. No, the divine architect move things around. And in fact, I'm going to read here from the this
is the from the LDS Book of Abraham. This is three twenty four from their website.
Quote.
And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and he said, unto those who were with him, we will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials and we will make an earth where on these may dwell. Okay, So yeah, so God is an organizer. God is God is architect, God is builder, as opposed to you know, a snap of the fingers and things you know, pop into existence.
Well, you know what, actually, I do want to come back on that, because there is a I think there are things in the Genesis narrative where God does bring things into existence that didn't exist before, Like he speaks things into existence, such as light. It seems like that he says, let their light, and then there is light. But it's just that he doesn't do that with the
world itself. There is already a material world, and he organizes that and then additional things he brings into existence by speaking their names.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so so again, Yeah, I think it's fascinating how you know, these these newer religions like the older religions. You know, they're ultimately answering the same questions.
They're using a lot of the same answers, but the way they're rolled out, you know, again, sometimes they have to there's an effort to make them adhere a little more to the modern world as we understand it, and to fit into like yeah, like you said, like in the ancient world, it was fitting in with social knowledge and say agricultural technological understanding, you know, crafting knowledge, that sort of thing. Whatever the the readily accessible metaphors were,
and today the metaphors are different. In the future, the metaphors will be different, Like what are the new religious movements of the future going to be rolling out. I mean, my main hope is that humans are still involved in the process of creating these uh these stories, but you know, inherently, inevitably they're going to draw on some different contemporary knowledge sets to do so.
Yeah. Interesting, I wonder if there are any religions yet that have a creation account, essentially a creation by biological evolution.
Yeah, that's a great question. I think we should come back to that in a future episode, you know, evolution and at least the if not the creation of new religious movements, but the up we can even discuss, like the the tweaking of understanding regarding these older faiths as well incorporating evolutionary knowledge instead of you know, completely rejecting it.
Yeah. But I don't know. I'm trying to imagine the particulars of how evolution would really work as a creation narrative. I'm not I'm not sure it really works.
I don't well that would entail I mean, one of the it also depends on, As with all of these things, it also depends on like how deep into the concept you're getting. So with evolution, for example, I think it is is very logical to say to take a view that if there is a divine creator, then that divine creator sets certain acts in motion. But you get into
this with evolution. You also have the situation where well, sometimes it at least from our human perspective, that is, you know, perhaps incomplete compared doing it, you know, in kind of like divine entity. Evolution can appear very cruel.
It can.
It can take directions that you know, end up being dead ends and so forth. So it raises additional theological questions like why, you know, why would the divine force set this act in motion if it was going to end and say the creation of a parasite that blinds children or something. You know. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot to unravel there.
I guess another question, if our world was created via evolution would be what what part of the evolutionary model is the world? Is the world the I don't know, a cell or an organism as a whole, or is it like a gene or a mutation? You know, like I guess is our world a mutation?
Yeah? I mean we get into the model presented in really Scott's Prometheus, right where exactly the engineers set things in motion and they have maybe a certain agenda in mind, but also accidents happen, and then those accidents have to be corrected later on.
That is my religion.
Yeah, it does kind of come back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints in a sense. I was reading a little bit about how this idea of a creator who is, you know, adjusting some sort of pre existing it kind of sort of reframed. It's almost like when a new I'm not making the case that this is directly what's involved here, but it's kind of like, imagine you have a new boss arrive on the scene. They get to sort of establish themselves as
the guy who's fixing stuff. You know, I'm instituting changes that are improving the company, and if there are problems beforehand, well that's that's kind of out of my hands. But I'm just here to fix things. I'm the good guy boss. And so in a way it kind of you can get into this area where you're establishing a creator deity
as as a complete good guide boss. To some extent, I don't know, it gets messy, it gets complicated, because you know that is that's the These are the problems of theology, and then we have to justify the ways of God demand and that ultimately is the role of poets.
Okay, does that do it? For part three of I think so?
Yeah? Yeah, I feel myself beginning to ramble here, because again, they can go in so many different directions with this. I will say that certainly, if anyone out there, if you were you know, a current or past adherent to any of the religious faces that we've discussed here, and you want to write in with your additional thoughts on it, or if we got something wrong, yeah, do write in.
We would love to hear from you and potentially hash that out in a future episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind listener mail, which we run those about once a month. Yeah, so write in. We'd love to hear from you. And we will also just go ahead and say, hey, if you wherever you happen to listen to the show or watch the show, if you're watching on Netflix, if there is a way to throw us some stars, throw us some thumbs up, one thumbs up, two thumbs up,
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