Hiranyagarbha: the Golden Egg

"On mighty waters floated the universal egg of the Golden Womb, Hiranyagarbha, which gave birth to the flame of life, the One Spirit of all the Gods." ~Rig Veda (X.121)

And now I tell you this: the golden egg is the center of your soul.

As the Vedic scriptures speak of Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Egg, so many of the world's creation myths contain the image of a primal egg floating on the waters of absolute Being, floating on the waters of consciousness prior to the creation of matter. Yet this Golden Egg is floating inside you now.

The image is even embedded in the Bible's creation story. In Genesis 1, "the Spirit-Breath of God was stirring the deep." The word for "stirring" is a Hebrew root, "rakaf," describing the ruffling movement of a mother bird sitting on its egg in the nest: a very feminine image of the Biblical Creator.

The Golden Egg is a very real experience in deep meditation. Hiranyagarbha is made of pure ineffable Light: the Light that witnesses its Self, and by witnessing its Self generates two where is only One, and in the space between the Self and its own Self-awareness is born the possiblity of all worlds and all creation. This is how the non-local field of Self-reference creates a space for localized particles to bubble up from the spaceless timeless singularity of the quantum vacuum.

On the shell of the egg are runes and letters, scriptures made of the same golden Light as the egg they dance upon. Light writes on Light in vibrant pulsations of its own purity. This is the pregnancy of the egg, the fertility of light, the sheer exuberance of the void, yearning to express itself. And this script contains all the names of Allah, all the mantras of the Veda, all the letters of the Torah, all the songs of the Forest: the silent hieroglyphs of uncreated Light before creation.

The egg floats as upon a sea of onyx, the divine blackness of the womb void. The music of the Light will not be contained. It shines out in the darkness, singing golden rays into the silence of no-thing. As these streams of the light song shine out of the Golden Egg, their infinite vibration of oneness slows down, becomes increasingly opaque, and mingles with the dark, eventually condensing into atoms of matter. First as sub-nuclear nutrinos and quarks, their energy is so subtle that these virtual particles exist only in vergency, on the verge of creation, still songs in the heart of Light. They are both wave and particle, both consciousness and matter. And these vibrations are the seeds of the Veda: they are both sacred language and physical science. In the luminous aura emanating from the Golden Egg, heaven and earth, subject and object, spirituality and science, are as yet undivided.

As this Music of Light continues to stream forth, its rays coalesce into the elements, the elements into the dust of galaxies and stars, dragon-fly wings, sand, mist, flowers. This is how every plant in the forest contains a song. For the indigenous peoples of the earth need no written scriptures. They can hear the Music of Light in the trees and herbs around them. Walk in the woods, listen to the singing of a seed as you hold it your hand. Hear the voice of a leaf, even when there is no breeze. Nestle the curves of your flesh among the roots of an old cedar. The singing of forest silence is green energy: what St.Hildegard of Bingen called "the greening power of the Spirit in creation."

Hearing the Music of Light in silence is meditation. To the physical senses, the chanting of mantra may seem like a mere physical vibration against the ear drum. But this sound is but the material pole of a living spectrum, a beam of energy that extends inward, through subtler fields of creation, toward the Golden Egg at creation's source. And this source is nowhere else but in the center of your heart.

Let the sound of the mantra carry you effortlessly within, by the grace of the Creator who loves you and draws you to Herself. To follow this golden beam of sound inward is the Word of creation in reverse. In Biblical terms, this practice is Tshuva, "Returning." Follow the golden song down into sweet brilliant darkness. Touch the egg, where the Mother is always stirring, warming, and bringing your radiance to birth.

Painting: St. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th C.