All that was everything

“All that was everything” is the culminating refrain through which Rong Jinzhen makes sense of a reality that contains opposites at once. The phrase gathers a sequence of paired conditions into a single totality: happiness and pain, hope and despair, heaven and hell, good and evil, brightness and darkness. Its significance lies not in resolving those contrasts, but in insisting that none can be separated from the whole. When Rong believes PURPLE and BLACK have shown him the nature of everything, this inclusive expression gives form to his acceptance—an acceptance the dream that follows will put under pressure.

The Refrain and Its Oppositions

The expression grows out of a vision of a “thing” that appears to Rong as both brightness and darkness, a rainbow and menacing clouds. What he had circled around for years now presents its reverse as well as its “proper” side. The refrain’s logic matches that reversal: its paired terms do not describe separate worlds, one good and one evil, but contrary aspects bound together within the same reality.

The sequence makes that totality concrete. It moves through happiness and pain, hope and despair, heaven and hell, what is glorious and what is in ruin, what is honourable and dishonourable, exultation and grief, good and evil, day and night, and bright and dark. It continues through “proper” and “improper,” yin and yang, above and below, inside and out, and “this and that.” Each pair enlarges the field of what the “thing” contains. The refrain does not select a final opposite or rank one above another; it arrives at “everything” as the encompassing term.

Rong’s Interpretation

Rong identifies the mysterious “thing” with God, whom he understands as the omnipotent Holy Spirit. His former teacher, Mr Auslander, had influenced his heart through the teachings of Jesus, and that religious inheritance shapes how he reads the vision. Because Rong believes the “thing” must be God, he understands it as complicated but absolute: beautiful and evil, benevolent and malevolent, apparently spiritual yet immensely powerful. The image of being made to revolve around it gives the vision a force beyond a set of abstract oppositions; it is a power that compels him to see across the full range of experience.

The refrain’s culmination accompanies a moment of calm. Seeing God appear in grandeur puts Rong’s heart at ease, and he concludes that the events are part of a divine plan he cannot oppose. He reasons that God will not alter the laws of existence to satisfy any one person’s aspirations, and that the ultimate purpose is to reveal the beauty of creation. In this moment, “all that was everything” expresses not merely comprehensiveness but surrender: if every contrary condition belongs to the whole, Rong believes, then resistance to that whole is futile.

The Refrain Put to the Test

The expression returns as the paired slogans sound from deep within Rong. He turns his eyes away from the downpour, whose sound no longer seems unbearable. Lying down, he finds the rain gentle and pure, feels himself dissolving into it, and falls asleep. This shift from the vision’s grand oppositions to the rain’s ordinary sound gives the refrain a bodily and immediate consequence: for a time, Rong’s new interpretation quiets his distress.

That calm does not settle the question of whether God’s laws are just. In a dream, a distant voice challenges Rong’s faith, calling God a coward and objecting that God never gave Klaus Johannes a perfect life. The voice insists that God’s laws are unjust; that last judgment repeats in Rong’s mind, grows louder, and finally wakes him. The expression’s all-embracing certainty is thus answered by a specific moral protest. The passage does not erase Rong’s vision, but it ends with its assurance contested: the refrain gathers everything into a whole, while the repeated accusation makes the suffering within that whole impossible to dismiss.