description of the creation of your own spiritual nature. God created heaven within you and each of you, at the very beginning of your existence, as well as earth. It is not said that He created the earth and the heaven but "the heaven and the earth," because the heavenly element is developed first, and then the earthly heredity manifests itself. Were the earthly developed first, the heavenly were strangled in its very possibilities, before it had even a chance to gain a foothold.
Next we are told that the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This expression, "without form and void," literally translated from the Hebrew, would be rendered "voidness and emptiness." How perfectly this describes us in the beginning of our individual careers, before regeneration has set in. As the earth denotes the natural mind, this expression presents it as, previous to the beginning of the new and spiritual birth, void of all real goodness and empty of all genuine conceptions of spiritual truth. And here let us observe also that before one knows a thing, no matter what it is, he is in darkness with regard to it. Before he understands it, the carpenter is in darkness as to his trade, the artist as to the ideas and methods required to produce a perfect picture, the musician as to the laws of harmony and the means of evoking melody. Mental darkness
