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?



[1] Unhappening: The Law that Newton missed. Barr, W. (2017) Mindfulness, Now and Zen: The Sceptics Guide to Ultimate Reality. Lulu Press, p.133.

[2] Barr, W (2023) Mindfulness, Here and Now: How to Wake Up. pp.40-1.

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