The foundations of theWAY which were passed down by the ancient Sumerians were expertly composed. They summarized it in a series of short lines of concise sentences. theWAY teaching is very simple, but to deliver it in so few words, couched in mythological esoteric language, is masterful.
Ancient Wayist cosmology informs some problems that quantum physicists of today find fascinating; religious scholars find insightful, and Wayists find congruent with our teachings over many millennia.
Notice how the Sumerian text uses anthropomorphism and novel writing to convey sophisticated wisdom, helping people from all backgrounds to relate, commit to memory to retell, and grow in wisdom.
Soul-people find the text relatable because it has memorable stories about the interactions of metaphysical principles cast as anthropomorphized (human-like) deities. The Wayist learns the deeper meanings as she internalizes the wisdom and relates how it plays out in the soul’s transformation into a spiritual being.
The Sumerian Text
Before we look at the oldest surviving text that describe the ontology (the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being and origin of all that exist) of theWAY, lets remind ourselves how it was expressed 2,000 years later in the ancient Daodejing which was written in 500BCE, in China. Today, over 5,000 after it was first written, we still have it in our teaching as we see it in WAYISM: The Primary Teaching.
The Unfathomable One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things.
Let’s explain:
Behind All, is the origin of all that is, a principle no human mind can conceive of nor speak to. We call it the THAT, or the Absolute, and then we keep silence. Wayists in other cultures speak of the Great Void, the Great No-thing — then keep silence.
From the THAT proceeds the first principle which we can somewhat comprehend. In Sumerian it was called Nammu. We call it the One, or the Unfathomable One. The One is the Great Source of all energies. It is known to be like a great ocean of Divine Chaos of all energies.
Non-initiates to the esoteric meaning would believe ‘the great ocean of Divine Chaos of all energies’ was in fact an ocean of water — and they built religions based on that belief.
The Sumerian text says the first thing that the Nammu (the One, the Source) did for creation as we know it, was to create space, and then fill that space with what we would today call something like a quantum foam, structures of quantum strands, upon which all of creation is build.
To fill space with the framework, the scaffolds, upon which all energies would play and create, the Source (Nammu) sent forth the Two.
The Two is a stream of bi-polar energy (Yin and Yang) which would be the essence of all that would exist in the universes known to us. All that exist in our perspective is a permutation of combinations of Yin and Yang energies.
The first major act of creation we know of is the creation of an energy structure within which metaphysical Laws lay down the way, the manner, in which all energies operate. This is necessary to structure the Chaos of Divine Energies — to order, and lay down a plan, set the ways and means, the methods, in which the energies operate in the contained area.
This element of a way in which energies are used to create was brought about by the “loving play” of the cosmic male principle, the Yang, and the cosmic Female principle, the Yin. Therefore it is said the One motivated the Two to play, and from that play resulted the Three, the structure that organises The Way in which energies are ordered. We call the Three, The Way, because it is the Plan of our universe, the Method in which it flows, the Path of our universe and all who exist in it. As above, so below — all things follow a simple, humble, and considerate Path and pattern, a set Way.
When we refer to the Three as a cosmic principle, we write it as The Way. When we speak to the teachings of the awareness of The Way and the path of humans, we write it as theWAY. However, not all languages use the roman alphabet, few use the -ism and -ist, so not all can use these devices to communicate. In most older cultures we still speak of People of The Way because they cannot say Wayists. The Wayist following of Lord Jesus were called people of The Way and in the Acts of the Apostles there are many references to that, and the teachings The Way upon which a Jew named Paul founded his Christian movement, a Judaic religious reformation movement that incorporates the Hebrew scriptures and their idea of the gods of their religion.
In China of ~500BCE, far removed from the Sumerian culture of 3,500BCE, we see our tradition relayed in books like theWAY of the Soul Mirror and Daodejing, as follows:
From the One comes the Two. From the Two comes the Three. From the Three, the ten thousand things.
The most ancient text, written in Sumerian cuneiform, told the story of the birth of The Way, called EnLiL, in their language, in the following four lines:
In the beginning there was Nammu, the primeval sea.
Nammu gave birth to An (which expanded as space) and Ki (which expanded as the material energies to fill space).
An and Ki mated with each other,
Causing Ki to give birth to Enlil.
From the above it is clear: Nammu is the Source, An in Yang, Ki is Yin, and Enlil is The Way.
Interesting to note that in the name Enlil, the lil signifies the Intimate Divine Play of the energies. The* lil* is also at the root of the Sansktit word leela, play, which is said to be the play, the dance, of cosmic energies which create and uphold the universe. These philosophical concepts are as ancient as can be.
Religious people, however, cannot go with an impersonal creator principle, they must create Gods according to their image — so teachings of theWAY never did suit their needs and was very unsatisfying to them.
The Sumerian teaching, having already spelled out the ontology of teaching of theWAY, was not done. It went further.
Enlil, inheriting from his Father the An-nature, separated from An who took to himself all spirit space/sky.
With his An, and along with Ki, Enlil occupied his cosmos creating the Domains.
Enlil marries his mother, Ki, and from this union all material beings in the universe are born and have soul.
From the above we learn here that soul is fundamentally a Yin / Ki-dominant energy, as experience and observation also attest.
We also learn that spiritual space is fundamentally Yang / An-dominant energy.
We learn that material beings who are alive, all have soul.
We also learn that Enlil, The Way, created his Domains. These Domains are the Domain of Spiritual Energy, the Domain of Soul Energy, the Domain of Material Energy, and then there is the principle of the Domain of the Underworld which is more of a principle of the flow of energy, as we will illustrate.
Let’s dissect the basics of the original teaching in each line.
From the Sumerian triangle symbol of Enlil or theWAY, one would think it is the large Yang-energy triangle infused with the smaller Yin-energy triangle because that makes sense from the text. However, the ancients knew the full significance of The Way, is the SYSTEM which It embodies, within which all that exists, exists according to the Laws of metaphysics and physics that govern the way and method how things will play together.
Therefore, the System of theWAY is symbolized with the following, which is the topic of the following chapter:
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