Observations placeholder
Stapledon, Olaf - Starmaker - Meets his Creator
Identifier
007371
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Olaf Stapledon – Star Maker
I ….seemed …. to be confronted with the source and the goal of all finite things.
I did not, of course, sensuously perceive the infinite spirit.... but ..I was given a more inward perception. I felt the immediate presence of the Star Maker. Latterly, as I have said, I had already been powerfully seized by a sense of the veiled presence of some being other than myself ….. but now the veil trembled and grew half transparent to the mental vision. The source and goal of all, the Star Maker, was obscurely revealed to me as a being, ...other than my conscious self, objective to my vision, yet as in the depth of my own nature. It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects, as the spirit's particular creative mode that had given rise to me, ... and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit.
The fictitious deities of all races in all worlds once more crowded themselves upon me, symbols of majesty and tenderness, of ruthless power, of blind creativity and of all seeing wisdom. And though their images were but the fantasies of created minds, it seemed to me that one and all did indeed embody some true features of the Star Maker's impact.
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For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love but by a very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had not made me to be his bride nor yet his treasured child, but for some other end. It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work, calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognising at last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception and already lusting for fresh creation.
Suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the Creator is not the same as virtue in the Creation. For the Creator if he should love his creation would be loving only a part of himself, but the creation praising the creator praises an infinity beyond himself. The virtue of the creation was to love and to worship. The virtue of the Creator was to create and to be infinite, the unrealisable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.
It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit …. to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.