WHAT
IT’S ALL ABOUT IN A (COSMIC) NUTSHELL
Maybe
the single most basic question any of us can ask is not ‘Is there a God?’
It’s
not even ‘Why are we here?’
To
me it seems there’s something even more basic than this.
Something
more like …
…
Why is there anything at all?
And
that’s where we’re coming from here. Both my books on this subject - Mindfulness,
Now and Zen: The Sceptics Guide to Ultimate Reality (2017) and Mindfulness
Here and Now: How to Wake Up (2023) - have dealt with our attempts to
answer this ‘Why is there anything at all?’ question. But while they have taken
note of the scientific, religious and philosophical arguments made over the
centuries, the position taken in the books has been to look more speculatively
into the nature of reality.
In
the next few paragraphs I’m going to give you some answers to the ‘Why is there
anything at all?’ question. And these don’t rely on faith, wishful thinking or
what someone else has believed. You’ll be able to think these through for
yourself at home.
So,
firstly, what’s been the position from a religious perspective?
Belief
in God as the supreme deity and first cause - what Aristotle referred to as the
‘Prime Mover’ - has pretty clearly been seen to be the start of it all. But
this itself raises the question ‘If there is a God, where did God come from?’
And so we’re back to the unanswered ‘Why anything?’ question. While many
religious people may be content to tolerate a degree of mystery at the core of
their belief system, you may not …
Turning
to science, we find that some answers to the basic questions of life are
demonstrated in theories that the universe emerged around 13.8 billion years
ago in a very Big Bang. The scientific view is that within this universe,
planet Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago and that simple life-forms
then appeared within a billion years of this. Science then tells us these life-forms
began to evolve into the enormous complexity we know today, and all this in the
absence of a design or designer and with no ultimate aim in mind. A stunning
and quite brilliant analysis.
However,
science too has its weaknesses - especially in its failure to explain why there
is anything at all. The thing is, scientific enquiry really begins with the singularity
known as the Big Bang, and mainstream scientific thought is currently that the
Big Bang itself was the product of a random event. The existence of randomness
is therefore presumed to be an underlying condition prior to the event of the
Big Bang. That’s fine, but it’s debateable whether true randomness actually
exists outside of our imaginations, and even if it does, it’s not at all clear
where this randomness came from. Nor is it clear where it was before the Big
Bang, since there was no ‘before’ before the Big Bang (which brought both space
and time into being).
There
are struggles too with the Theory of Evolution, which admittedly possesses beauty
in its conception of unfolding complexity without design. It’s undoubtedly a
persuasive theory, but our problem is that it only begins once the universe is
up and running. In other words, it still goes nowhere near to answering the
basic ‘Why anything?’ question.
Perhaps
a much more acceptable way forward than either religion or science can offer,
is going to be based on personal experience rather than belief. And if you’re
left wondering what on earth all this is about, in the rest of this brief
introduction I’ll explain how the entire universe and time itself could have come
into being with a Big Bang, but still need no design, no designer and no
creator. In other words, you’re about to see how the entirety of reality could
have arisen from nothing, could remain as nothing, and could be going nowhere.
So,
what’s it all about?
In Mindfulness,
Now and Zen I coined the expression For
everything that happens there is an equal and opposite Unhappening.[1] This pithy little
phrase is clearly borrowed from Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion (For every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction). However, it neatly summarises the idea of Unhappening. In Mindfulness, Here and Now I defined
Unhappening as a Latent Explanation. I said:
Unhappening can be thought
of as something that could have occurred at the very first moment of the Big Bang - in fact, at exactly the same
moment. Furthermore, it’s seen as something that continues to occur
moment-by-moment with the passage of time. In fact, it is the passage of time. I
suggest that at the moment of the Big Bang an equal and opposite Big Bang also
occurred and continues to occur alongside the continual moment-by-moment change
brought about by the regular Big Bang. This opposite Big Bang, however, is in
reverse and in this 'reverse universe', time is travelling backwards and thus
unravelling the universe that we conventionally assume to be arising from the
Big Bang. In other words, the universe is itself 'Unhappening' even as it
happens. And of course, at the point where the positive Big Bang meets the
negative Big Bang nothing is happening because they cancel each other out
perfectly. At this point there is no change and so no time: this is the present
moment.[2]
So,
that’s how it all could have come about. ‘Why is there anything at all?’ There
isn’t. The question is based on an illusion. Unhappening means nothing is
happening. It therefore needs no design; no creator; and no ultimate aim. It’s
like the simple mathematical concepts of +1 and –1. Together they’re equal to
nothing (as in the equation + 1 – 1 = 0). We can see from this that ‘nothing’
is much more than a passive absence; it’s far more dynamic than this and
involves an active absence. It’s this plus and minus idea that lies at the core
of duality.
Duality
We’re
always looking for something that has caused whatever lies at the root
of everything. It’s this way of thinking that seems to entrap us, and for that
matter, it’s this type of thinking that leads us to ask, ‘Why is there anything
at all?’
We
think that things must always be this or that, real or unreal, up or down. In
my books I’ve referred to this as dualistic thinking, and duality can be a very
tricky thing to spot, not because it’s very rare but because it’s not! In fact,
it’s so hard to see because it’s everywhere all the time. We’re like fish
swimming around in the sea, looking everywhere for the elusive thing we’ve
heard of that’s called ‘water’.
The
whole idea of Unhappening relies on duality of course - in fact it makes no
sense without it. And that’s the problem: we can come up with inventive ideas
like Unhappening that tell us how it could be that something has arisen from
nothing, why there is anything at all, but all these ideas rely on duality.
Without duality, words and explanations make no sense. If there is something
then we must also have the concept of nothing.
But
my argument is that we really need to look beyond Unhappening to find Ultimate
Reality. No amount of thinking will take us beyond duality because duality is
how we think. It’s the way we structure the thinking process. What we need is a
way out of this maze of forever thinking. And this is where meditation comes in.
Meditation offers us an opportunity to move beyond thinking.
The
Way Out
In
both books I have described how mindfulness meditation can allow each of us to
experience without experiencing something. To be conscious of
consciousness itself. Through mindfulness meditation I think we can see beyond
duality and awake to the transcendental unity and timelessness of Ultimate
Reality.
What
do you think?
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