A droplet stimulates the waters of the Unconscious, agitating its surface out of static complacency; yet, within these depths, this primordial soup that gives birth to life is churning with the histories of two beginnings. In the center, the original unity of the Kosmos, is the great seed from which everything we know will spring forth. After the Big Bang, when our physical universe had barely sprouted, inflation began to exert its mighty force. Beginning with the very basic building blocks of nature, quarks, electrons and neutrinos, which eventually formed atoms and molecules, this phenomenally uniform energy continues to expand like mad even today, pushing our universe farther and farther apart.

Within this vast macrocosm of the budding external universe, another history was forming. By the time mankind had evolved, the universe was long formed. People had always credited a god as the one creator, whether he was the Prime Mover of Aristotle, the mysterious subjective experience of the mystic, the violent tribal cult of Yahweh, or the Sun God of the Egyptians. Yet through these cosmologies, creation myths and mythologies, people have invoked an Ultimate Essence with more than 5,000 years of collective spirituality. This Essence is the embodiment of the created ideas and faiths as a response to mankind’s sense of wonder to the mystery and significance of life. Simultaneously, it is the anthropomorphic amalgam of the rise and fall, death and birth, tragedy and miracle that people attributed to god. These ever-changing ideas about god have always reflected their relevance and usefulness in their time in society. Stated simply, the creature in the painting is the History of God.

These two together, the external history of the physical universe and the internal history of god in the metaphysical universe create an integral cosmology. Integral means to integrate, to bring together, but not uniformity as much as creating a sense of the unity in diversity. With this dual history, I show a Beginning. Just as the water lily and the lotus emerge from the murky waters, clean and pure, we can look back at these histories and emerge ourselves in a new beginning. My aim with this piece is just that: a beginning, not an end; the start of a discussion, not the conclusion.