The Tao Te Ching is famous for mind-numbing statements about the nature of ultimate consciousness – statements like,

“Tao is everything and yet nothing.”

Some people, panicked with an overwhelming sense of confusion from such statements, feel compelled to take definite steps… great big ones in the opposite direction!

You have to ask, though, how can it be possible for the ultimate state of consciousness to be everything and yet nothing?

Well, what if it started out as essentially nothing – just a passive sense of awareness – and then decided to become active and create the universe? Then, its essence would be in everything in the universe. What the statement means is that Tao – the original consciousness of the All That Is – found a way to create the universe.

Better yet, the Tao Te Ching goes on to lists the steps that were necessary to make such Creation possible:

“Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.”

Let’s follow those steps in turn.

Tao produced One

Tao, as original consciousness, is an all-pervasive state of beingness. This has been called the Absolute, the Godhead, Brahman, Universal Spirit, and many other names. Personally, I like the term Infinite Being to describe that which existed before original consciousness formed the Creator.

Infinite Being. Complete, motionless, perfect beingness which, stirred by a sense of curiosity, decided to form an active version of Itself, to form the Creator of all things.

One produced Two

The challenge was HOW. How is it possible to create the universe as we know it when working with just one tool… that of consciousness?

Now, if you divide consciousness into two distinct types, then you have the beginning of something you can work with. Those two types can be described as thought and feeling, intention and attraction, yang and yin, or even expansion and contraction.

You could call them father and mother aspects, but that would not be the best analogy as human beings have a mixture of both types of consciousness. We’re talking here about pure, unblended scientific principles. Principles as different from each other as electricity is from magnetism. Two distinct energies, as different as the energy of a bar magnet is to a streak of lightning.

Two produced Three

Now you have two separate yet complementary types of consciousness, what can you do with them as energies? Bar magnets don’t DO anything unless you wave a conductive piece of metal near them. Static electricity doesn’t DO anything unless you give it a channel where it can discharge and make a big spark. Doing involves action. You need the principle of motion to make things happen.

Now, notice how all the physical energies in the universe travel at the speed of light. How convenient that they all travel at that exact speed. It’s almost as if they were designed to do that… and they were.

It is not by chance that the universe is expanding at the speed of light. That’s how the principle of motion is created and that’s why physical energies travel at exactly that speed.

The universe is fed through its central Sun with constant supplies of expansive yang energy and contractive yin energy. The two counter-balance and, if they were supplied in equal amounts, the universe would stay the same size. It would be static and energies would never move anywhere.

But they’re not in balance, and that’s the whole trick. The universe is fed with slightly more expansive yang energy than contractive yin energy so that it expands at the carefully-controlled speed that we call the speed of light. The principle of motion – the third part of the Creative Trinity – was created by this slight imbalance in the first two energies.

Three produced All things

With the three principles of the Creative Trinity in place, all else could be added in the creation of the universe. Realms of existence could be created at different densities. Energies could be used to bring meaning to those layers of existence. Galaxies could be designed and created, suns, planets, all forms of life, the list goes on ad infinitum.

Infinite Being manifesting as infinite varieties of Itself.

How to detect Infinite Being

The universe consists of this underlying sense of beingness expressed in an infinite number of ways. All things in Creation are made from consciousness and are therefore conscious in some way. Even a rock or a subatomic particle has consciousness, awareness and feeling.

Your own basic consciousness, the underlying sense of beingness that makes you know that you exist, is your own experience of the consciousness of Infinite Being.

From where did Infinite Being come?

The answer to the question, “Which came first – the chicken or the egg?” is easy. The chicken came first and was created to be self-reproducing.

A less obvious question is, “What came before Infinite Being?”

To find the answer, look at the definition of Infinite Being. It is original consciousness. It is passive, perfect, yet fully aware of all things. It is the awareness within all things.

It is the ultimate something. That something cannot be nothing. It cannot be a vacuum of nothingness, because then it would not be something.

As the Creator is made up of consciousness, as is everything in Creation, that tells us that the original something has to be consciousness.

It also has to be infinite in scope because if it were finite, then something else would exist beyond it.

The term Infinite Being encapsulates both properties – that of infinite scope and its nature as consciousness.

While the consciousness of the Creator is active, the original, underlying awareness of Infinite Being is passive. It is the Isness.

Infinite Being is the ultimate state of consciousness beyond which nothing can exist. In the silent stillness of its complete awareness, it is perfection.

Nothing preceded Infinite Being. It is the original something.