Discovering God: Essays

Meister Eckhart says, "Heaven is pure, touching neither time nor space. Corporeal things have no place in it. It is not inside of time; its orbit is compassed with speed beyond belief. The course of heaven is outside time—and yet time comes from its movements. Nothing hinders the soul's knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments, whereas God is one! And therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know God above time and outside of space; for God is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one!

"God is equally near every creature. The wise man says, 'God has spread his nets and lines out over all things, so that he may be found in any one of them and recognized by whoever chooses to verify this.' One authority says: 'To see God aright is to know him alike in everything.'"

The sermon above, "The Kingdom of God is at Hand," (Scitote, Quia Prope est regnum dri. Luke 21:31), was written in the 14th century.

I have read Hyperspace, a book about string theory and a multi-dimensional universe and the effort to find a Theory of Everything—to "know the mind of God," as Stephen Hawking expressed it. According to author Michael Kaku, current theories, backed up by mathematics, are that once (before the beginning) the universe consisted of ten dimensions. Then, because the ten-dimensional universe was unstable, it fragmented. Six of the ten dimensions compressed, and, simultaneously, four rapidly expanded. These four are our known universe. The other six are, mathematicians say, compressed into a tiny ball, too small for us to see. Here is the mystery, then: What caused the Big Bang is increasingly being seen as this collapse of the ten-dimensional unstable universe into two fragments.

This morning I thought I would read Eckhart again, because he, like William Blake, is so joyful about God. Then I read the sermon about the Kingdom of Heaven, and I was walking along a creek at work, and I just stopped by the rushing water and read it again: for to me Eckhart in the 14th century was talking about the original universe!

Several years ago, walking up a long hill, I prayed most intensely to God, "Please tell me Who you are." Today I have heard, perhaps, part of the answer.

Before time and space and matter, then, was God Who was One. God moved: that is correct, and exact, then, from the Old Testament. God is the ten-dimensional universe. And God made us—that is, made the four-dimensional universe out of Himself.

The great barrier for us is the speed of light: it is the mystery. I think when we die we go back most naturally (as Eckhart would say, without being corporeal) to the speed of light—back to God. Back to the ten-dimensional realm we cannot by our nature as humans experience.

home