QA251 QUESTION: In a recent question and answer session, I believe you spoke of the place where life meets the void as the place where evil is created – where the choice between following God’s will or separating from it is made. What I would like to know is, is the void you speak of a part of what you call the lower self, a distortion of the divine energy and consciousness? Or is it more nearly defined as an emptiness, an area that has not yet been filled by the divine force? In other words, are there places where the divine force does not exist in any form, or is all that is – including the void or the abyss – a part of divinity already? If the void is part of evil or the lower self, I don’t understand why you say that where life meets the void is where life is expanding into new areas, and therefore where the possibility of evil – separation from divinity – can occur.

ANSWER: The void is not evil. It is the universe – for lack of a better word – that has not yet been filled with God’s breath. As God takes further, deeper breaths, the unfilled void is being filled with divinity, with consciousness, with awareness, with light, with eternal life, with love and goodness. Evil comes into existence when life meets the void, when life particles separate from the whole and thus lose the connections – until they come together again.

QA253 QUESTION: Many of the older lectures speak about men and women as incarnations of spirits who have fallen and are now finding their way back to God. At the same time, some of the newer lectures speak of human life as being an expression of the crest of the wave of consciousness and light that is expanding to fill the void. Can you give a unified view of these two somewhat different cosmologies? Has man fallen so that he can become an agent for the life force filling the universe? How would the life force expand to fill the void if some angels had not fallen, or was the void created by the Fall?

ANSWER: I shall attempt to answer this question again, for I have done so before. It is a difficult concept, and I will try to make myself clearer. The Fall is a result of divine substance meeting the void. In the process of this meeting between life – consciousness and being – and nothingness and nonbeing, consciousness cannot always penetrate this void in full force. Only aspects or particles of its own essence can at first sweep into this enormous block of darkness and nonbeing, of nothingness.

So the enlivening of this nothingness is at first only a partial one and the aspects of divine life cannot immediately summon all of its knowing, its light, its life, its wisdom. So a gradual process comes into play, which we call evolution, in which the smaller particles of consciousness – Fallen spirits – struggle to reunite with their totality and their essence. So you see, here we do not have two cosmologies. It is merely a question of looking at the process from different points of view.

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