708 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
the Truth. Plato spoke of a time when “there was darkness.”
The Old Testament tells about darkness, that state of
primordial matter, or “Arche,” given form by God, the
Grand Architect, the primordial Builder of the universe.
When we think of the One who built things in the
beginning, we come into contact with Him, with God, in that
“arche” in the first sentence of the five verses we take for
meditation. In the next few words we come to the second
proposition: the Word. The term “Word” is mistranslated in
our present Bible, for it is not only “Word,” but it is also the
thought, the Greek word “Logos” used in that verse meaning
both the word and the logical thought back of it. Before
there can be a wor d, there must be a logical thought back of
it. Before the word could come into existence, there had to
be a thinker; therefore John used the words “in arche” and
“Logos.” They express what we wish to understand, that in
the beginning there was a homogeneous mass of matter, and
in that homogeneous matter was God; and God became the
“Word,” the rhythmic sound that goes out in the universe,
and that shapes all things.
Farther on in the five verses is the statement: “in that
was life.” In the first place there was darkness; no vibration
had been sent out into primordial matter, and there must of
necessity have been darkness. But the first thing that comes
into existence, we are told, is light, and light and sound are
synonymous from the higher point of view. Some people,
who are sensitive, never hear a sound without seeing a flash
of light, and never see a flash of light without at the same
time hearing a sound. So John writes mystically when he
says “in the beginning”—in the primordial matter—“was
God” and “God was the Word,” and in that “was life,” and
the life became “the light of men.”