Some of the responses from my last article, “The Topological Metaphor and Genesis 1” have brought to my attention some gaps in my exposition on the subject of the Creation of our Universe vis-a-vis the story of Genesis and the understanding put forth especially by the Mormon Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of the responses came from a man whose work I have come to greatly admire, one Dr. Joseph Farrell, whose extensive work on alternative understandings of History, on myth and symbol and the nature of human consciousness, have been a great joy to me in my auto-didactic journey through the vast array of human cosmological ideas. Particularly, his expositions on the ideas of the Topological Metaphor have been formative to my own understanding of the meaning of the creation stories of the various mythologies and religions of the human race, and particularly the creation story taught within my own faith, that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Dr. Farrell’s response was simply this, “An interesting article, but one thing: the Trinitarian distinctions are not merely notional simply because they’re topological.” His response is echoed in the response of one reader name mikeymikemike99 from the /r/LatterDaySaints sub-reddit who wrote the insightful comment, “even I hold the stance that God had a body and a God before he was ours. Per the King Follet speech, we know that God had a form in whatever dimension or plane that was, similar to the one he has now, and like the ones we have today. To say that God created himself sort of nullifies the doctrine of ‘As Man is God once was, and as God is, Man may become’. I could be misunderstanding your narrative, and am fully open to correction.”
To address these responses and fully clarify what I have attempted to put forth from my visionary experiences, I am sitting down today with a prayerful heart and an open mind. I pray that the Holy Spirit will guide me in the immensity of this undertaking, that I may do justice to the vast and incomparable work of God that is wrought in our universe and in us, His spirit children. I will do so by referencing the aforementioned King Follett Sermon given by our great and noble prophet, Joseph Smith, which is oft maligned and misunderstood because of its grandeur and multi-dimensional vision of the true foundations of the universe. I don’t claim to fully understand the magnificence of these architectures and artifices of God in the way that Joseph Smith did, and certainly I do not claim to understand them in the way that our Heavenly Father understands them, but I will attempt now to clarify in what ways I can the things that I have been shown, not for just for my own sake, but for the edification of all beings who have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.
As our wise prophet Joseph began in the King Follett Sermon, by saying “if we start right, it is easy to go right all the time” let me begin first with the famous couplet of Church President Lorenzo Snow, “As man is, God once was: as God now is, Man may be.” This is an illustrative verse showing us the pure nature of the Eternal Round. As Joseph begins in the King Follett Sermon, so shall we. Joseph begins by saying, “There is the starting point for us to look to, in order to understand and be fully acquainted with the mind, purposes and decrees of the Great Eloheim, who sits in yonder heavens as he did at the creation of the world. It is necessary for us to have an understanding of God himself in the beginning.”
He goes on to say, “What kind of being is God? Does any man or woman know? Have any of you seen Him, heard Him, or communed with Him? Here is the question that will, peradventure, from this time henceforth occupy your attention. The scriptures inform us that “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3.)”
We set forth now to discuss the nature of God, and the nature of His son Jesus Christ, even our great Jehovah, who is our Lord and God. Joseph continues with the great exposition, “I will go back to the beginning before the world was, to show what kind of a being God is. What sort of a being was God in the beginning? Open your ears and hear, all ye ends of the earth, for I am going to prove it to you by the Bible, and to tell you the designs of God in relation to the human race, and why He interferes with the affairs of man.
“God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man; for Adam was created in the very fashion, image and likeness of God, and received instruction from, and walked, talked and conversed with Him, as one man talks and communes with another.”
I agree in every single whit with what Joseph is saying here. God the Father has a physical form, that is to say, He is not merely a “notional distinction” because He was created first by topological distinction. No, that is not what I have been saying at all. God the Father is a truly distinct form and sbustance, whose root is in the infinite divine substance of whom He is the greatest Lord and Fruit. We give unto him the title of Elohim, which is not a name but a plural title, for there are others who fall in to the category of Elohim, such as our Lord Jesus Christ, YHVH, Jehovah, who shows himself by this title in verses such as “And the LORD God (YHVH) said, ‘Behold, the man is become as one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever: So the LORD God (YHVH) banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken” (Gen 3:22-23) where we see that Jehovah is speaking of a plural “Us” which is to say beings of the title Elohim, which we can discern means at least God the Father, and himself, Jesus Christ the Son. We see this again in Exodus 6:2 which reads in the KJV, “And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD.” In Hebrew, this reads as “and Elohim spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah.” By this we can begin to see that Elohim is more of a distinction of title. A state of Godhood. Jehovah is the name of this Elohim, who is our Lord Jesus Christ. God the Father is also a being like unto this, but whose proper, distinct name we are not given as we are given the name Jehovah.
We read from Joseph Smith’s Discourse: “it is necessary we should understand the character and being of God and how He came to be so; for I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see.
“These ideas are incomprehensible to some, but they are simple. It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God, and to know that we may converse with Him as one man converses with another, and that He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did; and I will show it from the Bible.”
“The scriptures inform us that Jesus said, as the Father hath power in himself, even so hath the Son power—to do what? Why, what the Father did. The answer is obvious—in a manner to lay down his body and take it up again. Jesus, what are you going to do? To lay down my life as my Father did, and take it up again. Do you believe it? If you do not believe it you do not believe the Bible. The scriptures say it, and I defy all the learning and wisdom and all the combined powers of earth and hell together to refute it. Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power. And I want you to know that God, in the last days, while certain individuals are proclaiming His name, is not trifling with you or me.”
“These are the first principles of consolation. How consoling to the mourners when they are called to part with a husband, wife, father, mother, child, or dear relative, to know that, although the earthly tabernacle is laid down and dissolved, they shall rise again to dwell in everlasting burnings in immortal glory, not to sorrow, suffer, or die any more, but they shall be heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. What is it? To inherit the same power, the same glory and the same exaltation, until you arrive at the station of a god, and ascend the throne of eternal power, the same as those who have gone before. What did Jesus do? Why, I do the things I saw my Father do when worlds came rolling into existence. My Father worked out His kingdom with fear and trembling, and I must do the same; and when I get my kingdom, I shall present it to My Father, so that He may obtain kingdom upon kingdom, and it will exalt Him in glory. He will then take a higher exaltation, and I will take His place, and thereby become exalted myself. So that Jesus treads in the tracks of His Father, and inherits what God did before; and God is thus glorified and exalted in the salvation and exaltation of all His children. It is plain beyond disputation, and you thus learn some of the first principles of the gospel, about which so much hath been said.”
What is Joseph saying here? He is telling us that God the Father, rooted in the great divine infinite, distinguished itself by means of topological distinctions within the great infinite void, and rendered unto himself a kingdom. He built from a great void that was in truth the infinity of all potentiality the universe that we know today, growing through the eternities to become the great God he is now. At some point he created Christ the Son from His own being in His own image by Topological distinction. These things may not have taken place in time proper as we know it, because God’s divine mind lies within the vast eternities, and time is but a construct of our lesser minds with which we make sense of the vast possibilities of the infinite and siphon out the meaning of the “here and now” from the eternal infinite potentiality of all things. We do this in a process of moving from lesser to greater steps. As Joseph puts it, “When you climb up a ladder, you must begin at the bottom, and ascend step by step, until you arrive at the top; and so it is with the principles of the gospel—you must begin with the first, and go on until you learn all the principles of exaltation.”
“I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible; I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible—Berosheit. I want to analyze the word. Baith—in, by, through, and everything else. Rosh—the head, Sheit—grammatical termination. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the baith there. An old Jew without any authority added the word; he thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head! It read first, “The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.” That is the true meaning of the words. Baurau signifies to bring forth. If you do not believe it, you do not believe the learned man of God. Learned men can teach you no more than what I have told you. Thus the head God brought forth the Gods in the grand council.
“I will transpose and simplify it in the English language. Oh, ye lawyers, ye doctors, and ye priests, who have persecuted me, I want to let you know that the Holy Ghost knows something as well as you do. The head God called together the Gods and sat in grand council to bring forth the world. The grand councilors sat at the head in yonder heavens and contemplated the creation of the worlds which were created at the time.”
Joseph is here speaking of the Elohim, the great title of the councilors of God, of whom our Lord is Jehovah, the Son of that great Head God, God the Father. The workings of this creation of God and Gods, and the complexity thereof, is given simply in Genesis, as I have explicated in my previous articles “The Topological Metaphor and Genesis 1” and also “The Iron Rod, or the Moment I First Realized the Book of Mormon was True.”
“In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted [prepared] a plan to create the world and people it. When we begin to learn this way, we begin to learn the only true God, and what kind of a being we have got to worship. Having a knowledge of God, we begin to know how to approach Him, and how to ask so as to receive an answer.
“When we understand the character of God, and know how to come to Him, he begins to unfold the heavens to us, and to tell us all about it. When we are ready to come to him, he is ready to come to us.
“Now, I ask all who hear me, why the learned men who are preaching salvation, say that God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing? The reason is, that they are unlearned in the things of God, and have not the gift of the Holy Ghost; they account it blasphemy in any one to contradict their idea. If you tell them that God made the world out of something, they will call you a fool. But I am learned, and know more than all the world put together. The Holy Ghost does, anyhow, and he is within me, and comprehends more than all the world; and I will associate myself with him.”
“You ask the learned doctors why they say the world was made out of nothing, and they will answer, “Doesn’t the Bible say he created the world?” And they infer, from the word create, that it must have been made out of nothing. Now, the word create came from the word baurau, which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos—chaotic matter, which is element, and in which dwells all the glory. Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end.”
So we see here what Joseph is saying: that God organized the vast eternal potential of the original, undifferentiated infinite, and divided it by topological distinction in to smaller, holographic infinites which were all created in the precise, spiritual image of their origin. What we have here is all the questions we might need to answer about the origin of the universe. We know who, we know how, we know why, we know when, and so on. We have been taught the method of creation through scripture itself. It is clearly explicated for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. These things are created so that all of us, the spirit Children of God may understand the vastness of the great plan which He has laid out for us, that we may take up our shovels and scythes and go forth and reap his Great Fruits and build up His Kingdom and lay up vast treasures of love and light unto Him in to the great eternities. We will fill our universe with love and light through the teachings that He has passed down to use through our prophet Joseph, and especially through the works and atonement of our Heavenly Father’s only begotten Son Jesus Christ.
Joseph goes on to teach: “We say that God Himself is a self-existing being. Who told you so? It is correct enough; but how did it get into your heads? Who told you that man did not exist in like manner upon the same principles? Man does exist upon the same principles. God made a tabernacle and put a spirit into it, and it became a living soul. (Refers to the Bible.) How does it read in the Hebrew? It does not say in the Hebrew that God created the spirit of man. It says, “God made man out of the earth and put into him Adam’s spirit, and so became a living body.”
“The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is co-equal [co-eternal] with God himself. I know that my testimony is true; hence, when I talk to these mourners, what have they lost? Their relatives and friends are only separated from their bodies for a short season: their spirits which existed with God have left the tabernacle of clay only for a little moment, as it were; and they now exist in a place where they converse together the same as we do on the earth.
“I am dwelling on the immortality of the spirit of man. Is it logical to say that the intelligence of spirits is immortal, and yet that it has a beginning? The intelligence of spirits had no beginning, neither will it have an end. That is good logic. That which has a beginning may have an end. There never was a time when there were not spirits; for they are co-equal [co-eternal] with our Father in heaven.
“Intelligence is eternal and exists upon a self-existent principle. It is a spirit from age to age and there is no creation about it. All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement.
“The first principles of man are self-existent with God. God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory, because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like himself. The relationship we have with God places us in a situation to advance in knowledge. He has power to institute laws to instruct the weaker intelligences, that they may be exalted with Himself, so that they might have one glory upon another, and all that knowledge, power, glory, and intelligence, which is requisite in order to save them in the world of spirits.
“This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. They are given to me by the revelations of Jesus Christ; and I know that when I tell you these words of eternal life as they are given to me, you taste them, and I know that you believe them. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know that it is good; and when I tell you of these things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet, and rejoice more and more.”
So what we see here, very clearly given by Joseph, and also by the Topological Metaphor of the Medium as put for by Dr. Joseph Farrell, and by my work with the Topological Metaphor and its conjunction with Kabbalistic explication of the creation story of Genesis 1, all demonstrate the same thing: that the great infinity was a great, undifferentiated void of all potentiality which was then organized, by the spirit of the one we call God the Father, in to smaller distinctions that are topological in nature, and so contain the exact, precise image of the great infinity from which they came. By this we know we are co-existent, co-eternal intelligences with our God, our Heavenly Father, and yet it is also true that we are his Spirit Children and He is the great Creator of Us and what we know as our selves in this day and in this time. God has rendered unto us all existence as we know it, and we owe a great debt to Him, our Heavenly Father.
Let all who have ears to hear read this and be inspired in their worship of God, to know their own true nature of divinity, and to know the divinity of God and His Son Jesus Christ, and of the veracity of the Holy Spirit. Let the Holy Spirit testify of these things to you in your own way. Pray and seek these answers for yourself, for you should not believe anything simply because it is written and told to you on the the basis of authority, no matter how pleasing or correct it may sound. Seek out with diligence the Truth of God, and do so in the name of Jesus Christ and the by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. I offer this testimony now to you, my brothers and sisters, in the hopes of relieving the suffering of all beings, and bring all beings to the salvation prepared for them from the beginning of Time and the foundation of our World by our Lord Jesus Christ and our Heavenly Father. I testify of this and of the truth of our Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
