Billowing mists, unfathomable depths, crags that vanish into the heights. Primordial states and darkness, waters and winds, formlessness and uncertainty – it is not an inviting picture. Everything happens very fast, yet nothing changes, and perhaps there is not even time yet. Everything churns and seethes, something seems to rise into view, then melts back into nothingness. This is all…
The picture suddenly changes. A greening meadow, a babbling brook, songbirds, a spring breeze, paradisal states – everything is idyllic. The gloom and uncertainty have receded, as if they had never existed. Everything is ordered, harmonious, beautiful and safe, everything has taken on a definite form, man included. And yet a primordial uncertainty remains within: where from? where to?
The creation stories mostly agree that the cosmos arose from chaos, that order came forth from the inscrutable source. Early Sufi sources remark:
As we come and go, in this cycle no beginning and no end can be seen, and no one speaks with certainty of it: where the beginning comes from, and where the end leads… The sea of existence springs from the unknown, and who could bring the true pearl of knowledge to the surface? What everyone speaks of is illusion only, and no one knows what it truly is. You, O soul, who came so eagerly and in such haste from the spiritual world, are going astray.
As chaos becomes cosmos and the earthly place unfolds from cosmic space, so, when the world cycle has run its course, the reversion begins. The manifest phase of the material world we may call ‘creation’, and its reversion the end of the world, or chaos returning once more. This cycle is like the serpent biting its own tail.
Ouroboros
The motto of the serpent or dragon biting its own tail: ‘My end is my beginning.’ It embodies at once the eternal interdependence of breaking down and building up, of end and beginning, and eternal time. It appears motionless, yet it also shows the eternal cycle, and it depicts the course of the sun, samsara or the life cycle of the cosmos. Above all, it is an allegory of the spirit that descends into matter, into the world of bodies, and then rises up from it.
Which stage of this cycle are we in? In the manifest stage right now, in the cosmos, or rather in chaos? The peculiarity of the world of matter is that it is easy to become entangled in it, but hard to get free. This requires good fortune, but a high degree of wisdom as well, and the ouroboros serpent symbolises this too. Besides standing for matter that can transform itself – which appears in a thousand variations – it is also a symbol of immortality.
Beyond this polar change, they also speak of a world of permanence which, compared with matter that is now manifest, now unmanifest, is transcendent and never perishes. The spiritual and the material spheres border on each other; but the border is at the same time a dividing line.
The Soul is a barrier that divides the worlds. This barrier is crossed neither by day nor by night, nor by old age, nor by death and grief, nor by pious deeds, nor by wicked deeds. Every sin turns back from here, for the world of the Absolute is sinless.
Truly, having crossed this barrier, the sightless will no longer be blind, the wounded will no longer be hurt, the sorrowful will grieve no more. Truly, having crossed this barrier, even the night is like the day, for the world of the Absolute is ever radiant. (Chandogya Upanishad 8.4.1–3.)
One day everyone finds the way home…