In the beginning the Logos was, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was Divine.
Even before I knew the deeper meanings of Logos, I felt the beauty of the opening lines in John’s Gospel. They spoke to my heart, bypassing the thinking mind, which is what all truly inspired poetry does.
The opening lines of John’s Gospel are asking us to stand at the point of the beginning of creation. This means to come fully into the present, because the beginning of creation is always here, now: it is never in the past. This is very explicit in the original Greek.
The diagram of the point within the circle, left, is a symbol of Logos: A dimensionless point, eternal – nothing that we can say is anything – becomes the circle of existence through the principle dynamic movement: “in the beginning.” This is the immanence of the Divine in sacred space, the creative unity of every thing that exists, every possible possibility.
Just as Jesus says: “The Kingdom of Heaven is here, now,” so too, the beginning of creation is here, now. This means becoming aware of your spiritual body, the core of which is at one with the source of all life.
Logos denotes the stillness out of which creation continually emerges.
Logos denotes the pre-existent Divine universe, the eternal, which is now: all time-space continually emerges from it.
Logos is the stillness out of which all movement emerges; the silence behind every sound; the sacred space in which creation takes place. All of creation is sacred and the birth of the universe and its emerging diverse complexity is the continuation of this, the one great miracle.
The Gospel says that the Logos is with God, and the Logos is Divine, which means that God cannot be contained by existence, is limitless, beyond all our concepts of existence. It is through Logos – the Divine immanence of God – that God creates life. Divine immanence is total consciousness – true Love.
Logos was used as the name – the Divine immanence – of God, the source of creation, by Hellenized (Greek cultural) Jewish mystics and philosophers of the diaspora, living in places such as Alexandria in Egypt and Ephesus in Asia Minor.
Why is Logos translated as Word?
Around 600BCE the philosopher – mystic Heraclitus used Logos to denote the formless unity of the Divine. Logos has a range of meanings to do with pattern, proportion, ratio, balance, harmony, mediation, and also means to lay out or arrange in order. So the term Logos contains the play or pattern in sound – which is language; not just spoken words, but music, the wind in the trees, the waves of the sea, the movement of a flock of birds, the rippling of light reflected in a million, million places. You can know Logos through witnessing the unfolding of creation in the natural world, and in the stars in the night sky.
The diagram right, from the book “Patterns of Creation,” illustrates the six directions of space emerging out of a central circle. The central circle symbolises the formless unity of life, out of which creation continually emerges.
Logos is the formless essence of every woman and man, it is your Being, your goodness, beauty and true heart or centre. The teachings given through Jesus tell us that every woman and man is an expression of the Divine immanence of God.
It is only when we become unconscious and believe ourselves to be small and separate that we lose the sense of life’s abundance flowing through us, which John’s Gospel calls grace upon grace.
Since Logos is the essence of all life you can never be separated from it – separation is a mental illusion, which causes us to suffer and inflict suffering on other people and fellow creatures. Healing is remembering that you are One with all life.
To realise Logos, your connection with all life, spend moments throughout each day in stillness and silence – even while walking and speaking it is possible to remain aware of stillness and silence – this is to be conscious of Logos – the beauty of all life, here now.
The eternal light of Logos emerges from deep within; it is here within you now, and within every living thing, giving life to every star and planet, every animal and plant, every rock and speck of dust. Through your conscious presence the universe is becoming aware of itself. This the gospel of John calls Logos.
