Nothing Else But God...

The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy. That is but a distant adumbration of the reason why the Franciscan, ragged, penniless, homeless and apparently hopeless, did indeed come forth singing such songs as might come from the stars of morning; and shouting, a son of God.

--G. K. Chesterton, in his book Saint Francis of Assisi

What does it mean to be All? God is the sole Reality. God is the Source of all things and their Substance. There is no thing or feeling or thought that is not from God, even the idea that there is no God! For this is what it is to be All: God must embrace even God's own negation.

Listen again: God is the Source and Substance of everything and its opposite. There is nothing outside of God. Thus we read: "I am God and there is none else" (Isaiah 45:5). Not simply that there is no other god but God, as our Moslem cousins say, but that there is nothing else but God, which is what their Sufi masters whisper to the initiated.

--Rabbi Rami Shapiro, in his book Open Secrets, excerpted in the current issue of Light of Consciousness