Are Rocks Living?

Many people have not read the CWG books in years, given that they were first published in 1995. So, from time to time, I like to offer a "deep dip" into one of the books, presenting a word-for-word "lift" of my exchange. I would like to offer in this entry a wonderful excerpt from Conversations with God-Book 3, which begins with God explaining the illusion that we call “time.”

WORDS OF THE DIALOGUE:  Life is a single occurrence, an event in the cosmos that is happening right now. All of it is happening. Everywhere. There is no “time” but now. There is no “place” but here. Here and now is All There Is.

Yet you chose to experience the magnificence of here and now in its every detail, and to experience your Divine Self as the here and now creator of that reality. There were only two ways—two fields of experience—in which you could do that. Time and space.

So magnificent was this thought that you literally exploded with delight! In that explosion of delight was created space between the parts of you, and the time it took to move from one part of yourself to another. In this way you literally tore your Self apart to look at the pieces of you. You might say that you were so happy, you “fell to pieces.” You’ve been picking up the pieces ever since.

FROM NEALE: That’s all my life is! I’m just putting together the pieces, trying to see if they make any sense.

WORDS OF THE DIALOGUE: And it is through the device called time that you have managed to separate the pieces, to divide the indivisible, thus to see it and experience it more fully, as you are creating it.

Even as you look at a solid object through a microscope, seeing that it is not solid at all, but actually a conglomeration of a million different effects—different things all happening at once and thus creating the larger effect—so, too, do you use time as the microscope of your soul.

Consider the Parable of the Rock.

Once there was a Rock, filled with countless atoms, protons, neutrons, and subatomic particles of matter. These particles were racing around continually, in a pattern, each particle going from “here” to “there,” and taking “time” to do so, yet going so fast that the Rock itself seemed to move not at all. It just was. There it lay, drinking in the sun, soaking up the rain, and moving not at all.

“What is this, inside of me, that is moving?” the Rock asked.

“It is You,” said a Voice from Afar.

“Me?” replied the Rock. “Why, that is impossible. I am not moving at all. Anyone can see that.”

“Yes, from a distance,” the Voice agreed. “From way over here you do look as if you are solid, still, not moving. But when I come closer—when I look very closely at what is actually happening—I see that everything that comprises What You Are is moving. It is moving at incredible speed through time and space in a particular pattern which creates You as the thing called ‘Rock.’ And so, you are like magic! You are moving and not moving at the same time.”

“But,” asked the Rock, “which, then, is the illusion? The oneness, the stillness, of the Rock, or the separateness and the movement of Its parts?”

To which the Voice replied, “Which, then, is the illusion? The oneness, the stillness, of God? Or the separateness and movement of Its parts?”

And I tell you this: Upon this Rock, I will build My church. For this is the Rock of Ages. This is the eternal truth that leaves no stone unturned. I have explained it all for you here, in this little story. This is The Cosmology. 

Life is a series of minute, incredibly rapid movements. These movements do not affect at all the immobility and the Beingness of Everything That Is. Yet, just as with the atoms of the rock, it is the movement which is creating the stillness, right before your eyes.

From this distance, there is no separateness. There cannot be, for All That Is is All There Is, and there is nothing else. I am the Unmoved Mover. 

From the limited perspective with which you view All That Is, you see yourself as separate and apart, not one unmovable being, but many, many beings, constantly in motion.

Both observations are accurate. Both realities are “real.” 

FROM NEALE:  And when I “die,” I don’t die at all, but simply shift into awareness of the macrocosm—where there is no “time” or “space,” now and then, before and after.

DIALOGUE: Precisely. You’ve got it.

FROM NEALE: Let me see if I can say it back to You. Let me see if I can describe it. 

DIALOGUE: Go ahead. 

FROM NEALE: From a macro perspective, there is no separateness, and from “way back there” all the particles of everything merely look like the Whole.

 As you look at the rock at your feet, you see the rock, right then and there, as whole, complete, and perfect. Yet even in the fraction of a moment that you hold that rock in your awareness, there is a lot going on within that rock—there is incredible movement, at incredible speed, of the particles of that rock. And what are those particles doing? They are making that rock what it is.

As you look at this rock, you do not see this process. Even if you are conceptually aware of it, to you it is all happening “now.” The rock isn’t becoming a rock; it is a rock, right here—right now.

Yet if you were the consciousness of one of the sub-molecular particles inside that rock, you would experience yourself moving at insane speed, first “here,” then “there.” And if some voice outside the rock said to you, “It is all happening at once,” you would call it a liar or a charlatan.

Still, from the perspective of a distance from the rock, the idea that any part of the rock is separate from any other part, and, further, is moving around at insane speed, would appear to be the lie. From that distance could be seen what could not be seen up close—that all is One, and that all the movement hasn’t moved anything.

WORDS OF THE DIALOGUE: You have it. You have a grasp of it. What you are saying—and you are correct—is that life is all a matter of perspective. If you continue to see this truth, you will begin to understand the macro reality of God. And you will have unlocked a secret of the whole universe: All of it is the same thing. 

FROM NEALE: The universe is a molecule in the body of God!

THE DIALOGUE: That’s actually not so very far off.

By Neale Donald Walsch