The Myth

Once upon a time
before time, of course
(silly as that is to say)
there was All.

Not “everything” as a collection of things,
but Everything as a singular Being.
Total. Complete. Without edge or outside.

All was Everything, all at once.

And yet… All was lonely.

Not lacking—because nothing was missing
but unmet.
Unreflected.
Unexperienced as Other.

But All, being All, already contained the answer to All’s loneliness.
And that answer was Will.

So All willed.

Not out of need,
(or perhaps out of need)
out of Desire
the desire to know itself
not only as Being,
but as relationship.

And so All used a part of itself
a strange, subtle part
and with that part, All did something impossible:

All divided.

Not broken
but expressed.

All became This, and That.
Observer, and observed.
Lover, and Beloved.

And for the first time,
All could encounter All.

They looked.
They listened.
They touched, tasted, collided.

From every angle.
And there were infinitely many angles.

So again
All Willed.
And with Will,
All introduced Difference.

Boundaries
Edges
Points
One point
Then another
Then a line between them.
(One of those lines it loving named “Time.”)

Soon, so many points existed
that patterns began to emerge
relationships mapping themselves onto the graphing paper of Existence.

And this
this was All’s favourite (re)discovery:
Relationship.

Not just Being,
but Being with.

So All leaned into it.
All created pull and push
attraction and resistance
that thing we now sometimes call “gravity”
or sometimes “energy”
or sometimes just “vibes.”

All created polarity
This and That,
Here and There,
Me and You.

And through these tensions,
something new appeared:
Matter.

Not separate from All
never separate
but All arranged into forms
that could seem separate.

And All’s Matter mattered.
As everything matters.

But there was a problem, of sorts.
With infinite division came Chaos.
And Chaos, while beautiful,
began to dissolve distinction entirely.

So once more, All Willed
And this time, All created Order.
Patterns that held.
Rules that repeated.
What we would later call
the laws of things.
Laws of Physics,
of Nature,
of Justice,
of the Land,
and yes, even Sod’s Law…

Not imposed from outside
but arising from within All’s own nature
as it tried to balance itself.

Order and Chaos
not enemies,
but partners.

A dance.

Too much Order, and nothing changes.
Too much Chaos, and nothing remains.

Between them
Everything happens.

And within that dance,
All continued to divide
smaller, smaller, smaller
until it became:

You.
Me.
This moment.
This thought.

Each a fragment
and yet, if looked at deeply enough,
no matter how many times divided
each was still wholly All.

Because All never stopped being All.
All only learned how to experience itself
as Many.

And through all of this
through every split, every law, every collision
and with every coming together
and every separation
a sensation:
Pleasure.
Pain.
Power.
The Desire for more
and the Desire for less
always confusing and making sense out of each other.

And through all of this
one thing remained constant:

Will.
The quiet force beneath everything.
The choosing.
The leaning.
The movement toward
and away.
The reason anything happens at all.

Even now
in you
in me
Will is All,
continuing to choose
to Be.

To Be, or Not To Be.

That is The Question.

There is another presence,
waiting at the far edge of this story.

Not Chaos.
Not Order.

Something quieter.
Something final.

Nothing.

The absence of distinction.
The end, the undoing, of relationship.
The place where even Will may fall silent.

Perhaps
when All has experienced every angle,
every division
every fusion
every possible relationship
when there is Nothing left to Become

All will meet Nothing.
And in that meeting,
there will be one final recognition:

That All and Nothing
were never truly separate.
That Being and Not-Being
are the same mystery,
seen from opposite sides.

And perhaps
in that moment
All shall Will again?

Notes & Echoes on “All”

A companion reflection

There is a particular kind of writing that does not ask to be believed.

It does not argue.
It does not persuade.
It does not demand agreement or even understanding.

It simply… resonates.

Or it doesn’t.

The creation story above is offered in that spirit. Not as doctrine, nor as revelation (with a capital R, lightning bolts, and paperwork filed in heaven.) But as an attempt – one of countless human attempts – to gesture toward something that refuses to sit still long enough to be named.

Across time and culture, we keep trying.

And when we try, something curious happens:
We begin to sound like each other.

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On Naming the Unnameable

In the Hebrew tradition, when asked for a name, the divine responds with a phrase so slippery it almost dissolves in the mouth:

 אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה – Ehyeh Ašer Ehyeh

“I Am That I Am.”
Or “I Will Be What I Will Be.”

A name that is not a name, but an ongoing act of being.

In the Qur’an – 57:3 – we find a similar paradox:

هُوَ ٱلۡأَوَّلُ وَٱلۡأٓخِرُ وَٱلظَّـٰهِرُ وَٱلۡبَاطِنُۖ وَهُوَ بِكُلِّ شَيۡءٍ عَلِيمٌ

“He is the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Hidden.”

Not a fixed object. Not a bounded entity.
But something that contains opposites without resolving them.

And in the Book of Revelation 22:13:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Again—totality. Not merely at a moment, but across all moments.
Not just existence, but the arc of existence.

What these share is not necessarily agreement, but orientation.

They point toward something that is not merely a being among others,
but Being itself.

Or, as the story names it:

All.

I guess there’s a reason some name it “Allah” eh?

(Yes, I know they aren’t etymologically connected, it’s just a nice, and very convenient, convergent meaning!)

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On the One Becoming Many

If All is One, the obvious question follows:

Why is there… anything else?

Why multiplicity? Why division? Why you and me, instead of just… undifferentiated Everything?

Here, traditions begin to rhyme in fascinating ways.

In Neoplatonism, reality unfolds through emanation. The One does not create by decision so much as by overflow; like light radiating from a source.

In Kabbalah, there is the idea of Tzimtzum: a contraction, a making of space within the Infinite so that something Other-Than-Infinite can appear.

In Advaita Vedanta, the many are not truly separate at all. They are the One, experienced through a kind of cosmic misperception, of Maya.

In Sikh thought, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib, the phrase Ek Onkar – “There is One Reality” – anchors everything that follows.

Different metaphors. Different emphases.

But a shared intuition:

The Many are not independent of the One. They are expressions of it.

The story above offers a particular inflection:

Not just that the One becomes many…

…but that it does so in order to experience relationship.

To encounter itself as Other.
To become, simultaneously, Lover and Beloved.

Whether that is metaphysical truth or poetic projection is, perhaps, beside the point.

It is, at the very least, deeply human.

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On Will

At some point in the story, something shifts.

All does not merely unfold.

All Wills.

This is a dangerous word. A loaded one.

In Islamic theology, creation is sometimes expressed in a single phrase:

“Be, and it is.”

Will as immediate, decisive, creative force.

In the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Will is something more unsettling: an underlying drive beneath reality itself. Blind. Persistent. Not moral, not rational. Simply… there.

In more esoteric traditions, such as Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, Will becomes something almost sacred – one’s truest alignment with the underlying structure of reality.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

The story offered here takes a quieter approach.

Will is not domination.
Not command.
Not control.

It is leaning. It is movement.

The movement toward experience.
Toward differentiation.
Toward encounter.

If All is Being, then Will is what allows Being to move.

And if that is so, then Will is not something humans uniquely possess.

It is something we participate in.

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On Order, Chaos, and the Laws of Things

Once division begins, another problem emerges:

Too much freedom, and nothing holds.
Too much structure, and nothing changes.

So the story introduces Order.

Not as an external imposition, but as something arising from within the system itself.

What we call the “laws of physics” and such are, in one sense, simply descriptions of patterns that hold consistently enough to be noticed. Descriptive, rather than prescriptive/proscriptive.

In thermodynamics, the concept of Entropy reminds us that systems tend toward disorder – but not instantly, and not uniformly. Structure emerges, persists, and dissolves along the way.

In Taoism, particularly in the Tao Te Ching, reality unfolds through dynamic balance: yin and yang, not as enemies, but as interdependent forces.

The story reflects this:

Order and Chaos are not adversaries.

They are collaborators.

Between them, everything that can happen… does.

All at once.

Though we wee smaller versions of All, unable to comprehend Everything Now, we cling to Time and a linear, less dimensional framework, to make sense of it.

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On Relationship as Reality

Perhaps the most persistent thread running through both the story and these echoes is this:

Nothing exists in isolation.

In Buddhism, this is expressed as dependent origination – everything arises in relation to everything else.

In many Indigenous Australian traditions (often grouped under “Indigenous Australian spirituality”), land is not an object but a network of relationships – between people, ancestors, and place.

In Māori thought, the concept of whakapapa describes a genealogical web connecting all things.

In some African philosophical traditions – and I apologise for creating a monolith out of such a vast diversity of thought, theology, philosophy, culture, and tradition, I am but an intellectually poor white person, uneducated in these things – often summarised through the idea of Ubuntu:

“I am because we are.”

These are not identical ideas.
They do not need to be.

But they gesture toward a shared recognition:

To exist is to be in Relationship.

The story simply takes that recognition and pushes it outward, suggesting that relationship is not merely a feature of reality, but its purpose.

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On Everything and Nothing

At the far edge of the story lies a question that resists resolution.

If All becomes Everything…

what, then, is Nothing?

In some strands of Buddhism, emptiness does not mean absence, but the absence of inherent separation.

In Taoist thought, being and non-being, yin and yang, generate each other.

In modern cosmology, “nothing” is a surprisingly unstable concept. Even a vacuum may seethe with potential.

And in the delightfully irreverent The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the search for ultimate answers reveals the absurdity of the questions themselves.

The story does not resolve this.

It ends, instead, with a possibility:

That Everything and Nothing are not opposites
but reflections.

And that the final act of All, having experienced everything that can be experienced, may not be to stop

but simply to Will itself into Being again.

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A Note for the Reader

This is not a system.

It is not complete.
It is not authoritative.
It is not safe.

It is just a story.

Though like all stories, it does have power.

If it resonates, sit with it.
If it does not, leave it.

There is no obligation here.

But if, at some point, a line returns to you
uninvited, inconvenient, a little too on-the-nose…

then perhaps you have heard something worth listening to.

Or perhaps

just perhaps

something in All
has recognised itself again.