How do you define the word "creation"? I understand it to mean something that is created, thus is has a beginning. Something that has no beginning cannot be created. As you said, it just is. So it seems an oxymoron to me to say that "Creation is Eternal."
Namaste Grace Seeker,
I agree with you 100% the statement that creation is eternal is an oxymoron. I was responding to a question about who created the Universe and all that exists. Thanks for catching me in my inaccuracy, and giving me an opportunity to explain further.
What I should have said was that the Universe and everything that exists are eternal. I was thinking of the word creation in the way Christians use it, to mean all of the material world. (Being a former Christian, I still have vestiges of the Christian vernacular that pop up from time to time).
Hindus see God (Ishwar) as everything. The Universe is God, the tree is God, the stones are God, the insects, the animals, you, me, everything is God. So, if God is eternal, then the physical world in one sense is also eternal. In one sense only, because matter can be transformed into energy and vice versa. The potential for the existence of the physical world is eternal. But it is itself always changing, always transforming.
However, now we are getting into metaphysics a little, because we Hindus also believe that the material world, (because things change, caterpillars hatch form eggs, then become butterflies, plants and animals decay and die, rocks erode, etc. )is an illusion that we call Maya. We are spiritual beings inside a physical body, and therefore we act in a physical world. But the Ultimate Reality is God, eternal, infinite, transcendent, without beginning or end yet, seemingly paradoxically, Ishwar is also immanent because everything is in God.
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