The Book of Lilith - Awakening by rgb RobertGBrown
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Lilith was the first woman to be given a soul by God, and her purpose is to give all the rest of Creation a soul by means of her love, beginning with Adam. Adam has a job too -- to create the rules that define sin and bring about a world governed by reason and law. Unfortunately, Adam insists on being on top whenever they have sex, which leads to problems...
Alternately funny, serious, and thought provoking, The Book of Lilith is just plain fun to read!
Visit The Book of Lilith Website at: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lili... to find reviews, previews, links, and much more!
This story is from this book:
The Book of Lilith
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chapter 1:
Awakening
Awakening
chapter 1
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updated Oct 15, 2007
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I opened my eyes and looked out at infinity. It was filled with stars that were so beautiful that they brought tears to my eyes. I tried to remember who I was, or how I came to be there, or where there was, but of the past, if I had one, there was no trace. There was no before, only the now.
I took a sort of an inventory of the richness that flooded into me
through my senses. There were sounds that I interpreted, as I thought about them, as coming from crickets. Crickets, once I thought about them were these little black insects that made a sort of music in order to attract mates. There were smells, smells that I interpreted as wood smoke. Smoke from a fire, which was an oxidation process that reduced wood to ash and released energy and light (and a certain amount of human comfort) in the process. There was a sort of salty wet taste in what I realized was my mouth. There were sensations of feeling – hardness behind my head, cold hardness beneath my back, my legs,my arms, my bottom.
As I thought about these sensations it came to me that I had a
body and that, if I tried, I could move it. So after a couple of twitches where my brain (what was a brain?) tried to hook up to the right nerves (what were nerves?) I sat up.
All of my senses reeled as the world before my vision whirled into a new orientation, and my feeling of balance was called into play. At first I tried to keep my balance as one would keep a stick balanced on a finger, by watching to see what direction I was falling and then trying to correct it. Several falls (and resulting bruises) later I discovered that my body did better if I left it to its own devices and just balanced so I stopped trying to correct with my conscious mind.
I looked around. I found myself sitting on a stone tablet in front of a fairly large bonfire, as bonfires go, on the floor of a small green valley surrounded by large and stately trees. Sitting on a sort of natural rock throne close at hand by the fire was a naked woman.
I wondered how I knew that she was a woman. This led me to
immediately appreciate the fact that there were two sexes of human being and that she (and I, for that matter) were of the female sex. There was also a male sex, which differed both anatomically and in their role in the reproductive process.
I don’t know how long we sat there, eying one another. It could
have been seconds, or it could have been forever – time spent in her company was ever like that – timeless. An eternity ended when she spoke.
“Welcome to Creation.”
This seemed like a noble enough sentiment. However, it triggered
thoughts like firecrackers in my mind. Welcome implied that I just arrived. A creation was something made, but Creation (where one could always hear capital letters in her speech where they were intended) usually applied to the Cosmic All. And then there was speech! This was what I was using in my interior monologue, and this led me to discover that I could speak as well as listen. I shaped a clumsy mouth around my first, whispery words.
“Umm, thank you. I think. Who are you?”
Even as I asked, I realized that I knew the answer. This was God.
“God, of course, and you’re very welcome. How do you feel?”
I thought about it.
“I feel good. In fact, I feel great! A bit, what is it, hungry?
Thirsty? I feel a sort of urging towards something but I’m not certain what it is.”
“That would be about right. I repaired your body and in fact made
it perfect, and timed its metabolic state so that we could share a bite while we talked. It’s a sociable thing to do, and you have much work to do for me building a society, so you might as well start learning how.” She gestured to the side, where a table covered with a white silk tablecloth was set with silverware, plates, napkins, and a lovely looking dinner. We arose, me weaving a bit as I found myself thinking again a bit too much about balance, and went to the table to sit down.
God poured two glasses of wine for us, and then gestured that we
should fall to. I sipped the wine and it was simply the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Of course it was the first thing I’d ever tasted, but to this very day even the memory of that taste makes my mouth water. The food was ambrosia, the drink was nectar (I wondered how I knew of those terms) and not a word was spoken until plates were cleaned and glasses emptied and refilled again.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said, somehow knowing that this was
the right thing to do. “That was incredible.”
She smiled, “What is the point of being the Creator if you can’t
make a decent meal from time to time? Of course most of those dishes won’t be invented for six thousand and umpty-odd years, but time is what I make of it.” My brain did another one of its distracting little whirls into a kaleidoscope of flashes on sushi, on bouillabaisse, on chocolate mousse, on Cabernet Sauvignon2 . I forced myself to concentrate on the Now, not on the Then.
“Now,” said the Creator, “I imagine that you’re still more than
a bit disoriented. We still have most of a bottle of Cabernet and as much time as you might need to get all squared away. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“Why am I so confused?” I began. “Every time I think of some-
thing like crickets, or wine, I immediately start thinking about exoskeletal arthropods with exotic mating habits or the effects of coastal Mediterranean climates on the maturation and fermentation of Cabernet grapes, carefully aged in imported french oak barrels and I don’t have any idea what any of that means” I rushed on in a bit of a panic as fermenting led to bottling led to glass making led to windows led to a vision of tall buildings gleaming in the sun as they reached up towards heaven, coated in mirrored glass and filled with Cabernet-swilling business executives...
I let out a little cry and tried to stop thinking, stop thinking and breathe, breathe, breathe, stay with the breath, trying not to think of this as a yoga calming technique even though I immediately recognized that this is what it was...
I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and immediately felt calmer.
In fact, I felt downright blessed. It was almost silly. A few minutes (or was it centuries?) later I shook myself out of a trance and wiped the idiotic grin off of my face.
“Poor girl. You’ve got preternatural knowledge of the whole Uni-
verse, that’s what you’ve got. It came with the Soul. I couldn’t make up my mind what to leave in and what to leave out so I left almost everything in. Everything but your personal past (you have none) and your personal fate. They would have removed your Free Will and ruined the game.”
Preternatural knowledge. Great. That explained it.
And it did, of course. Once I realized that all I had to do was think of something and I’d know it, it became a little easier to not think of everything. It was just another kind of balance. The trick was to let the natural flow of thought and conversation delicately tease facts out of the immense ocean of knowledge that was ever poised over my head without triggering the irrelevant flood of connected facts.
I looked into my head for knowledge of God, but discovered that
preternatural knowledge or not, there was a rather large void there.
“Sorry,” God chimed in. “It’s hard to be ‘friends’ with anyone
you have preternatural knowledge of. So I’ve somewhat deliberately blanked my knowledge of you and yours of me so that we can at least make a stab and being friends.”
“How does reading a friend’s mind work in that process,” I said a
bit cynically.
God blushed. “I don’t do it all the time. Or rather I do, but I’m much more complex than you might think and I can actually multitask on an interrupt-driven basis so that I only ‘know’ your thoughts when it is meet and just for me to do so. You still have your privacy, mostly.”
“But Don’t,” God said with a baleful glare, “Tempt Fate by thinking rude thoughts just to see if I’m listening in.”
I mentally sighed, squelching the thought that had unbidden risen
almost to the point of verbal articulation in my interior monologue. Besides it wasn’t true. If anything, God seemed pretty nice, although how I had any experiential basis for comparison was beyond me.
“Look,” said God. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. If you think that you have preternatural knowledge problems, you should think about me. For example, think for a moment about time...”
...
A sound, a sound of one hand clapping. One Godlike hand clapping, in fact. Clapping me, fairly gently, on the face. “C’mon girl,
wake up. Lilith, time to go. You can stop thinking about time now...”
I kept myself (just in time, so to speak) from thinking about time again so that I could stop, and managed to hold on to one important insight from an eternity of timelessness. God, of course, existed beyond time, and if I thought about it a certain way so did I. So how was it that we could sit and converse, a thing that appeared to involve sequential ordination of conceptual material with a clearly articulated syntactical
sense of ‘tense’.
“What happened? How long was I gone?” I said.
“As long or short a time as you like. We are currently outside
of the time-stream of the Universe that will become your home. So duration here means nothing compared to duration there. In fact, your preternatural knowledge of there is largely knowledge of the skein of time and space there as a whole, which is in fact static and immutable, if you look at it too closely. So I don’t.”
“You,” said God, “have difficulty thinking about wine without re-
calling everything that there is to know, intellectually, about wine. Wine grape horticulture, crushing, fermenting, bottling, aging, and of course drinking. I, on the other hand, have to be careful not to think too closely about wine or I call to my mind the actual taste of every drop of wine ever made, and not just in this Universe – the taste of every drop of wine that could ever be made. If I do this, of course, I can take no actual pleasure from drinking a glass of wine. For an omnipotent being to think is to do, and to do with such ease is to render the actual doing pointless.”
“Consequently it is a great pleasure to incarnate myself, to bind
myself to time’s stream, to not think about the infinity of possible sips of wine, just so that I can experience the unique joy of this real one.” God took a healthy swig from her full glass.
I appreciatively sipped at my glass of wine as well, letting its rich flavors of berries overlaid with a hint of oak, vanilla and smoke develop in my mouth and relishing the gift of time.
God leaned over towards me, looking me square in the eye. In her
eye I saw reflected a flicker of light, and found myself falling into an infinite whirlpool of blackness – or was it whiteness – unbroken except for a thin Grey line that burst into light (or was it darkness) for a space and then rejoined the dark or the light, or both, from which it emerged. The flicker shaped the very spaces around it into a form that danced.
Then I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in God’s
eye.
“There’s a lesson, there, if you choose to take it,” God said, leaning back to drink her wine. “When I’m unitary and all seeing and all knowing, there is no time, and without time things are really pretty boring – so boring that it is difficult to distinguish the state of existence and nonexistence. The only way to avoid a state of perfectly boring perfect being is to become complex instead of simple, to break up the featureless perfection of the infinite into what appear independently to be imperfect, finite pieces.”
“Complexity thus requires duality (or more properly, multivalency
for some extremely large number of values). This, then, is the paradox of God the Unity – that’s me – and the Individual Human Spirit – that’s you. You contain within you a spark of me. Yet your spark is contained in my greater light and but a small part, a very small part, of my All, and if ever either one of us gazes upon the Whole, we leave time altogether and become All-seeing, and hence blind. Only apart is there change, and only in change is there meaningful existence.”
The silence that followed was companionable but stretched on for
centuries as I digested this, comparing it to various holy writings from the future on God that seemed to be a part of my preternatural knowledge, sipping gently at the great wine. Eventually I realized that it was probably time for another question.
“Why did you create me. Or if you like, why did you create me
in particular, as I think you just answered at least part of the former question.”
“What that one’s easy, girlfriend. I’ve taken great pains over
billions of years to create a simply lovely world with all sorts of fascinating animals and a rich ecosystem, and it is time to put people with souls in it. You’re number one. The very first human with a soul.”
[This book is available from fine online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and BookSense partners. Its ISBN is: 978-1430322450.]
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I took a sort of an inventory of the richness that flooded into me
through my senses. There were sounds that I interpreted, as I thought about them, as coming from crickets. Crickets, once I thought about them were these little black insects that made a sort of music in order to attract mates. There were smells, smells that I interpreted as wood smoke. Smoke from a fire, which was an oxidation process that reduced wood to ash and released energy and light (and a certain amount of human comfort) in the process. There was a sort of salty wet taste in what I realized was my mouth. There were sensations of feeling – hardness behind my head, cold hardness beneath my back, my legs,my arms, my bottom.
As I thought about these sensations it came to me that I had a
body and that, if I tried, I could move it. So after a couple of twitches where my brain (what was a brain?) tried to hook up to the right nerves (what were nerves?) I sat up.
All of my senses reeled as the world before my vision whirled into a new orientation, and my feeling of balance was called into play. At first I tried to keep my balance as one would keep a stick balanced on a finger, by watching to see what direction I was falling and then trying to correct it. Several falls (and resulting bruises) later I discovered that my body did better if I left it to its own devices and just balanced so I stopped trying to correct with my conscious mind.
I looked around. I found myself sitting on a stone tablet in front of a fairly large bonfire, as bonfires go, on the floor of a small green valley surrounded by large and stately trees. Sitting on a sort of natural rock throne close at hand by the fire was a naked woman.
I wondered how I knew that she was a woman. This led me to
immediately appreciate the fact that there were two sexes of human being and that she (and I, for that matter) were of the female sex. There was also a male sex, which differed both anatomically and in their role in the reproductive process.
I don’t know how long we sat there, eying one another. It could
have been seconds, or it could have been forever – time spent in her company was ever like that – timeless. An eternity ended when she spoke.
“Welcome to Creation.”
This seemed like a noble enough sentiment. However, it triggered
thoughts like firecrackers in my mind. Welcome implied that I just arrived. A creation was something made, but Creation (where one could always hear capital letters in her speech where they were intended) usually applied to the Cosmic All. And then there was speech! This was what I was using in my interior monologue, and this led me to discover that I could speak as well as listen. I shaped a clumsy mouth around my first, whispery words.
“Umm, thank you. I think. Who are you?”
Even as I asked, I realized that I knew the answer. This was God.
“God, of course, and you’re very welcome. How do you feel?”
I thought about it.
“I feel good. In fact, I feel great! A bit, what is it, hungry?
Thirsty? I feel a sort of urging towards something but I’m not certain what it is.”
“That would be about right. I repaired your body and in fact made
it perfect, and timed its metabolic state so that we could share a bite while we talked. It’s a sociable thing to do, and you have much work to do for me building a society, so you might as well start learning how.” She gestured to the side, where a table covered with a white silk tablecloth was set with silverware, plates, napkins, and a lovely looking dinner. We arose, me weaving a bit as I found myself thinking again a bit too much about balance, and went to the table to sit down.
God poured two glasses of wine for us, and then gestured that we
should fall to. I sipped the wine and it was simply the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Of course it was the first thing I’d ever tasted, but to this very day even the memory of that taste makes my mouth water. The food was ambrosia, the drink was nectar (I wondered how I knew of those terms) and not a word was spoken until plates were cleaned and glasses emptied and refilled again.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said, somehow knowing that this was
the right thing to do. “That was incredible.”
She smiled, “What is the point of being the Creator if you can’t
make a decent meal from time to time? Of course most of those dishes won’t be invented for six thousand and umpty-odd years, but time is what I make of it.” My brain did another one of its distracting little whirls into a kaleidoscope of flashes on sushi, on bouillabaisse, on chocolate mousse, on Cabernet Sauvignon2 . I forced myself to concentrate on the Now, not on the Then.
“Now,” said the Creator, “I imagine that you’re still more than
a bit disoriented. We still have most of a bottle of Cabernet and as much time as you might need to get all squared away. Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”
“Why am I so confused?” I began. “Every time I think of some-
thing like crickets, or wine, I immediately start thinking about exoskeletal arthropods with exotic mating habits or the effects of coastal Mediterranean climates on the maturation and fermentation of Cabernet grapes, carefully aged in imported french oak barrels and I don’t have any idea what any of that means” I rushed on in a bit of a panic as fermenting led to bottling led to glass making led to windows led to a vision of tall buildings gleaming in the sun as they reached up towards heaven, coated in mirrored glass and filled with Cabernet-swilling business executives...
I let out a little cry and tried to stop thinking, stop thinking and breathe, breathe, breathe, stay with the breath, trying not to think of this as a yoga calming technique even though I immediately recognized that this is what it was...
I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and immediately felt calmer.
In fact, I felt downright blessed. It was almost silly. A few minutes (or was it centuries?) later I shook myself out of a trance and wiped the idiotic grin off of my face.
“Poor girl. You’ve got preternatural knowledge of the whole Uni-
verse, that’s what you’ve got. It came with the Soul. I couldn’t make up my mind what to leave in and what to leave out so I left almost everything in. Everything but your personal past (you have none) and your personal fate. They would have removed your Free Will and ruined the game.”
Preternatural knowledge. Great. That explained it.
And it did, of course. Once I realized that all I had to do was think of something and I’d know it, it became a little easier to not think of everything. It was just another kind of balance. The trick was to let the natural flow of thought and conversation delicately tease facts out of the immense ocean of knowledge that was ever poised over my head without triggering the irrelevant flood of connected facts.
I looked into my head for knowledge of God, but discovered that
preternatural knowledge or not, there was a rather large void there.
“Sorry,” God chimed in. “It’s hard to be ‘friends’ with anyone
you have preternatural knowledge of. So I’ve somewhat deliberately blanked my knowledge of you and yours of me so that we can at least make a stab and being friends.”
“How does reading a friend’s mind work in that process,” I said a
bit cynically.
God blushed. “I don’t do it all the time. Or rather I do, but I’m much more complex than you might think and I can actually multitask on an interrupt-driven basis so that I only ‘know’ your thoughts when it is meet and just for me to do so. You still have your privacy, mostly.”
“But Don’t,” God said with a baleful glare, “Tempt Fate by thinking rude thoughts just to see if I’m listening in.”
I mentally sighed, squelching the thought that had unbidden risen
almost to the point of verbal articulation in my interior monologue. Besides it wasn’t true. If anything, God seemed pretty nice, although how I had any experiential basis for comparison was beyond me.
“Look,” said God. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. If you think that you have preternatural knowledge problems, you should think about me. For example, think for a moment about time...”
...
A sound, a sound of one hand clapping. One Godlike hand clapping, in fact. Clapping me, fairly gently, on the face. “C’mon girl,
wake up. Lilith, time to go. You can stop thinking about time now...”
I kept myself (just in time, so to speak) from thinking about time again so that I could stop, and managed to hold on to one important insight from an eternity of timelessness. God, of course, existed beyond time, and if I thought about it a certain way so did I. So how was it that we could sit and converse, a thing that appeared to involve sequential ordination of conceptual material with a clearly articulated syntactical
sense of ‘tense’.
“What happened? How long was I gone?” I said.
“As long or short a time as you like. We are currently outside
of the time-stream of the Universe that will become your home. So duration here means nothing compared to duration there. In fact, your preternatural knowledge of there is largely knowledge of the skein of time and space there as a whole, which is in fact static and immutable, if you look at it too closely. So I don’t.”
“You,” said God, “have difficulty thinking about wine without re-
calling everything that there is to know, intellectually, about wine. Wine grape horticulture, crushing, fermenting, bottling, aging, and of course drinking. I, on the other hand, have to be careful not to think too closely about wine or I call to my mind the actual taste of every drop of wine ever made, and not just in this Universe – the taste of every drop of wine that could ever be made. If I do this, of course, I can take no actual pleasure from drinking a glass of wine. For an omnipotent being to think is to do, and to do with such ease is to render the actual doing pointless.”
“Consequently it is a great pleasure to incarnate myself, to bind
myself to time’s stream, to not think about the infinity of possible sips of wine, just so that I can experience the unique joy of this real one.” God took a healthy swig from her full glass.
I appreciatively sipped at my glass of wine as well, letting its rich flavors of berries overlaid with a hint of oak, vanilla and smoke develop in my mouth and relishing the gift of time.
God leaned over towards me, looking me square in the eye. In her
eye I saw reflected a flicker of light, and found myself falling into an infinite whirlpool of blackness – or was it whiteness – unbroken except for a thin Grey line that burst into light (or was it darkness) for a space and then rejoined the dark or the light, or both, from which it emerged. The flicker shaped the very spaces around it into a form that danced.
Then I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in God’s
eye.
“There’s a lesson, there, if you choose to take it,” God said, leaning back to drink her wine. “When I’m unitary and all seeing and all knowing, there is no time, and without time things are really pretty boring – so boring that it is difficult to distinguish the state of existence and nonexistence. The only way to avoid a state of perfectly boring perfect being is to become complex instead of simple, to break up the featureless perfection of the infinite into what appear independently to be imperfect, finite pieces.”
“Complexity thus requires duality (or more properly, multivalency
for some extremely large number of values). This, then, is the paradox of God the Unity – that’s me – and the Individual Human Spirit – that’s you. You contain within you a spark of me. Yet your spark is contained in my greater light and but a small part, a very small part, of my All, and if ever either one of us gazes upon the Whole, we leave time altogether and become All-seeing, and hence blind. Only apart is there change, and only in change is there meaningful existence.”
The silence that followed was companionable but stretched on for
centuries as I digested this, comparing it to various holy writings from the future on God that seemed to be a part of my preternatural knowledge, sipping gently at the great wine. Eventually I realized that it was probably time for another question.
“Why did you create me. Or if you like, why did you create me
in particular, as I think you just answered at least part of the former question.”
“What that one’s easy, girlfriend. I’ve taken great pains over
billions of years to create a simply lovely world with all sorts of fascinating animals and a rich ecosystem, and it is time to put people with souls in it. You’re number one. The very first human with a soul.”
[This book is available from fine online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and BookSense partners. Its ISBN is: 978-1430322450.]
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