The potential for a new beginning

In the beginning there was nothing, but not in the sense we think of that word. There was a potential more powerful than anyone can yet imagine.

There were no things, no air, no eyes or ears.

There was no time. Nothing might have lasted a billion years, an hour and 42 minutes or no time at all. Any of these concepts are equally meaningless. For how can you count a day when there is no sun and no earth to turn. Time would come into being when being became something rather than nothing.

Most religions today, including science, believe this to be true - although they would all describe this instant differently.

In the beginning there was a void, a darkness. Science is largely silent on this because time, math and measure have no bearing there. Religions as a rule speak of God being all there was. The faithful tend to get itchy if we say God was nothing, or that he didn’t or worse doesn’t exist. But He is not a thing - not a paperclip or even a planet - so in a way, saying he existed before existence is just as foolish as saying he didn’t. Early religions spoke of murky gods that rose up from the depths of the void - they got more specific once the ooze had begun to take shape. The Buddha spoke very little about it what happened at the beginning at all - for there was nothing to be said. We used to say nothing happened in the small town I grew up in. In that small town this was a tedious half-truth, but saying nothing happened before the dawn of time is both meaningless and profound.

And then, for some uncertain reason, being began to be something. And at that meant that something had happened.
And here everyone disagrees.

First, with things, came time. So how long did things take? Billions of years? Seven days? Did things unfold into a grand plan of a sentient Being? Did matter just fling willy-nilly into the depths of this new thing called space. How, really, could you tell the difference?

At some point this particular rolling ball of molten rock, on which I now sit typing, cooled into a grand globe covered mostly with water and collected an atmosphere made of a certain magical blend of gasses. Here again disagreement on how and why things on this rock began to live and grow and reproduce. Disagreement seems to be integral to what was happening. It wasn’t long before these new living things began to eat each other.

Eventually, some of these living on this cooling ball of molten rock beings began to speak, picked up smaller rocks and killed others of their own kind.

Rocks were only the beginning. Eventually these warm, living things would start wars that would cover this new grand globe. In these wars, beings having the ability to speak to each other devised secret codes so that their enemies could not understand them. It would be harder to kill the others if they knew what thier enemies were talking about. Before those world wars ended, millions and millions were dead.

Eventually, I arrived here this evening. A warm room, a cold glass of water, corn chips that everyone likes to eat but nobody wants to. Far from nothingness, matter has become something that likes to hang on to people’s hips.

I am typing on a small machine more powerful than computers that broke the unbreakable codes used by foreign powers in one of those great wars. That great war is already sinking into the forgetfulness of human history and becoming the stuff of legend. There is disagreement on what happened, on who died and who profited.

No wonder there is so much disagreement today about the very beginning. There are still people alive who were here for the Wars, although few. But who was here at the beginning? Well who can we all agree was here?

Nothing, in the most profound sense of the Word.

I don’t care what you call it. That Nothingness is still here under all this somethingness. And when we are all gone - even if the entire universe is consumed in a great rain of fire - it still will be.

And so will be the same infinite potential for anything to happen will be there in the end - as it was in the beginning and is now - the potential for a new beginning.