Even though none of us is ever separate from the Origin of the Universe for a moment, the etymology of genesis indicates the difficulties that humans have faced over the years to understand our origin as a species.
To overcome these difficulties, as a Panosopher, I can best denote the apocalyptic epiphany I experienced in the spring of 1980 as Genesis. For this eureka moment has led Life to create a coherent conceptual model of the Totality of Existence by starting afresh at the very beginning, at the Alpha Point of evolution in the vertical dimension of time.
Genesis entered the English language before 1000, as the title of the first book of the Old Testament in the Greek translation (the Septuagint), hence in the Latin translation (the Vulgate), centuries before the Bible was translated into English. Genesis rendered Hebrew bereshith, literally ‘in the beginning’, which was the first word of the text, taken as its title.
Even though Genesis contains an account of the creation of the Universe, as this was imagined at the time by the authors of this book, in Latin, genesis meant ‘birth; horoscope, the constellation that presides over one’s birth’, from Greek genesis ‘origin, birth; generation, coming into being; a being, creature; creation, i.e. all created things; race, descent’, from gignesthai ‘to be born’, related to genos ‘race, stock, kin, descent’, from PIE base *genə- ‘give birth, beget’.
The general meaning of ‘origin, creation, inception, beginning; coming into being of something’ is first recorded in 1604.