The Learning God

In the Mayan creation myth the Popul Vuh God very much wanted to create human beings.
He was lonely. The animals – jaguars, pumas, and brightly feathered birds – were delightful to behold, but they could not say any of God’s names, or love him the way he needed to be loved.

So he tried his hand at making human beings. He made some men out of mud. They could talk, but none of the things they said made any sense. They were soft, could not stand, and melted in the rain.  He tried again, this time out of wood. They were much better than the mud men. They built nice houses, had many children, and didn’t dissolve in wet weather. But something was wrong. They were dull and expressionless because they had no minds, souls, or hearts. They beat their dogs and burned the bottoms of their cooking pots. Worst of all, they could not remember any of God’s names. God sent a great flood to destroy them.

Then God tried a third time to make humanity. He shaped corn meal into four men, and infused them with strengths and energies made from nine kinds of corn liquor. The men were very strong and handsome. While they slept, God made four women. When the men awoke and saw their beautiful wives lying beside them they were very happy.

“How does it feel to be alive?” God asked. “What do you see?”

“We see and know everything!” And they sang songs of praise and gratitude to their Creator for having made them.

But God was troubled. They saw and knew too much. God needed humans, not gods. So he blew mist into their eyes. Now they only saw what was right in front of them.

As mythology scholar Joseph Campbell reminds us, the primary function of creation stories is not to answer questions like, “Who made the world and how?” but “Who are we, and what is the nature of the cosmos?” It’s self-knowledge we’re after. If we knew where we came from, we might understand our essence and purpose, and how we fit into this mysterious universe.

The Popul Vuh teaches us that we were made to live in loving relationship with the sacred source – that both we and God are defined by love.

But we also learn that God isn’t perfect, that he’s learning on the job, and that frankly, the universe is an ongoing experiment littered with wreckage. This stands in stark contrast to traditional Western theology where is God understood as changeless, perfect, and all-knowing. But is he? In the book of Genesis God made Adam and Eve only to, five chapters later, kill everyone on earth for their irreparable wickedness. Does that sound like the work of a perfect, all-knowing creator to you? And if God is growing, learning, and evolving into higher consciousness, maybe we should too.

And that it’s o.k. to make mistakes.

The study of world mythology makes clear that creation myths tell us much more about the people who wrote them than they do about the origin and nature of the cosmos. When we read the Popul Vuh, or Genesis for that matter, we hold a mirror up to our own longing for love, meaning, and the hope that someday we might understand this long, rough road of being human. Until then, with full voice, we will sing songs of gratitude that we were ever born at all. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2021 edition of Unity Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]