Tangled stories-Chapter Two: On the origin of the universe

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”- John 1:1.

The question of the origin of the universe is a philosophical question and not simply a scientific one. The origin of the universe is an ontological problem rather than a physical one. It’s an existential question too because when we’re looking at the origin of the universe, we’re looking at the reason for existence. Out of a desire for scientific accuracy, being attached to the positivist ideals of a Western society, I tried to read about all the progress science has made regarding this matter. But this is a theological issue rather than a scientific one and, more importantly, it’s an existential issue. The Vedic philosophy says that in a drop of water you can see the universe; we can therefore compare the universe to a family: matter and anti-matter don’t annihilate each other; they form new life: the same as a man and a woman form new life at the expense of their own vital energy.

The main problem with scientific theories is that they are reliant on mathematics. Mathematics is a great science that has allowed us to achieve great technological advances and feats of engineering, but it’s useless to derive the meaning of things from the contemplation of our environment. Therefore, all the theories that confine the universe to a mathematical determinism are leaving aside the most important element in life: soul. And this term does not apply only to human beings but to everything that exists. Because there are only two possible options: either we believe that human beings don’t have a soul and therefore they’re determined by physical laws, like everything else in the universe, which implies that our spiritual and moral inquisitiveness is just pure entertainment while we wait for physical laws to dispose of us, or we believe that humans do have souls, which must come from somewhere and this somewhere is the whole universe. Therefore, all things that exist have Soul in them; everything is alive and conscious, from rocks to atoms, and the level of consciousness is the only thing that differentiates us from animals and plants. But what is the soul? And here is where we differ from religious conceptions; the soul is simply: consciousness. The only difference is that we’re supposed to “lose consciousness” when we faint, when we sleep or when we die, while the soul lasts forever. However, there’s no such distinction; because consciousness exists eternally, although in different states. When we die, it exists in a latent state until it’s reembodied.

Here we see an ontological dualism between matter and consciousness. There are different levels of consciousness in the world, and they’re embodied in correspondingly evolved forms. Therefore, every conscious being is a galaxy. Why do I say we’re galaxies and not universes? Because as galaxies, we’re in contact with other galaxies and sometimes we can interact with them. If we were universes, we wouldn’t feel the presence of things other than our own bodies. That’s why I refuse to believe the idea of various universes. That’s a mathematical shortcut scientists have chosen to take to obviate perceptional problems they found in their theories. There’s just one universe; that’s our determinism. That means that everything we do affects other people, our environment and, more importantly, determines our destiny.

Darwin has shown that we evolve, and this seems to be our nature. As a civilization, we’re born brutes and we learn and enlighten ourselves; it doesn’t happen the other way round: that we’re first enlightened and then we become brutes. The problem is that our science collapses from time to time; there are moments in which we give up and there’s a process of brutalization or regression. However, we never return to the previous point; civilizations evolve, even though insignificantly. Thus, we can say that we’re more evolved than the Greeks in moral and spiritual matters, although insignificantly. A clear example is the family, where two enlightened people give birth to a brute, that needs to be enlightened also, but who, by the laws of spiritual evolution, will be slightly more evolved than the more evolved of the consciousnesses that coupled.

The Universe

Universe means, literally, that which is turned together, but – more importantly – it means a whole. Even if there were multiverses, which turned and behaved as separate entities, there would still need to be a correlation between them or no correlation at all; in the former case, we still would be talking of a universe, formed by different multiverses, and in the latter case, our universe would be totally independent from the other ones and therefore their existence would be meaningless to us.

Simple intuition leads me posit the idea of a single universe first. Enshrined in the concept of universality is the idea that a universe is independent, which means that the only point of contact it may have with other universes is in its genesis. Therefore, the key question is the origin of all existence, be it one single universe or multiple multiverses; from there we can derive a whole theory of universality or multiversality, whatsoever may be the case.

In the Rig Veda’s cosmology, the god Vaak created the universe. Vaak is a Sanskrit word that means word or speech and it’s the origin of our word “voice”. Vaak is the god that “utters the Word of Truth” and therefore can be equalled to the Christian god: “God said, ‘Let there be light’; He willed it, and at once there was light.” Genesis 1:3-5. Because both Word and light are creators, both are generators of existence.

However, no religious text gives a satisfactory answer to the creationist question. The Christian and Muslim religions attribute it all to God or Allah, but the descriptions of the creation fail to explain everything science has discovered, as they are anthropomorphic theologies. The Rig Veda theology is more honest in its approach:

Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation’s day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or, perhaps, not even He.

— Rig Veda 10.129.1-7

We can see here a slightly less anthropomorphic theology, where there is the “suggestion” that there’s a superior form of consciousness: “He”, who may or may not have created the universe and may or may not have done it deliberately. All three theologies, as well as other ones that I haven’t mentioned only for practical reasons, share the idea of a “superior consciousness”. That’s an intuition the most important religions and spiritual movements have had. However, no theology can be totally trusted, as they’re man-made interpretations of existence and they were developed before most important scientific discoveries were made. The problem with religions is that they’re generally moral constitutions on which societies are built and therefore amendments are difficult to make. They don’t work like scientific movements, which are always subjected to changes of paradigms. Therefore, I took the sound ideas of every theology I came across and dismissed all the ideas that weren’t sufficiently intuitive to me; for instance, the idea of Brahma as a creator in the Vedic cosmology, or the Christian idea of God as a creator, which would mean the universe is a trialism of God, matter and our consciousnesses or souls.

The human factor: consciousness

In the working of our brains, we see a feature that can be called selective memory or rather selective oblivion, which is more clearly seen in prodigious savants. Savants have extraordinary mental abilities which are the product of an arbitrary concentration of consciousness in a limited area of reality. A malfunction in their brains makes them remember things that normal brains are programmed to forget or leads them to develop specific mental abilities, generally related to mathematics. However, we all know that the most powerful mental abilities are reasoning and creativity and that all other mental functions can be computerized. Therefore, we may conclude that our brains are programmed to enhance these capacities, deliberately getting rid of useless information or abilities.

There’s a part of our brains that selectively forgets irrelevant events and that hampers the development of some mental abilities that are ultimately useless to our spiritual development. If that’s true for us in the course of our lives, it must also be true in the course of our eternity. That means that when we die, the information and abilities that are useless to our spiritual development are deliberately forgotten as we are reborn into the world.

Speed of light

The speed of light is absolute: 671 million miles an hour. That means that light cannot travel faster; it can’t be influenced by the physical laws of relativity. Everything has a frequency; thus, everything can convey the idea of time, but when we move faster than the speed of light, then time stops. All matter stops moving and we’ll live eternally as pure consciousness, without matter: that would be the nearest approximation to the Christian idea of Heaven or rather closer to the concept of Nirvana. However, there’s a small flaw in the Christian conception. Consciousness does not like eternity; consciousness seeks an object to concentrate its energy on. Thus, consciousness will take up matter and be reborn again into its material existence. The key point here is that all consciousnesses will be united in one single consciousness because there’s no barrier to divide them. Every consciousness will be omniscient and therefore omnipresent, and the only way to do this is to be one single mass of consciousness. However, there will be as many consciousnesses as there are particles in the universe. This number won’t be infinite, but it will be unmeasurable. Because the time someone would take to measure this number at the speed of light wouldn’t be long enough to count it all before a new universe would be created. Therefore, the conundrum of eternity is solved by a simple technical question: the inability to count to a certain number. Because if we’re saying that time stopped, it’s because we’ve reached an “infinite speed” which allows us to defeat the laws of matter which create time. The infinite speed is just a little above the speed of light. A single consciousness won’t need to traverse the universe to be present everywhere, but it will be connected to the other consciousnesses and it will therefore feel what they feel and be wherever they are.

After an eternal time, which will actually be no time at all, all these consciousnesses will decide in unison to take up matter, which will bring about a new Big Bang. As every consciousness takes up a particle of matter, time will resume its course. However, consciousness will be annihilated as a whole because it’s been divided into individual parts; it has been trapped in matter. Therefore, the force of matter, which is a contraction force and may be equalled to the gravitational force, will outbalance the force of consciousness, which is an expansion force and will not exist at this moment. In an infinitesimal moment, the universe will contract. This moment will not be infinite because the laws of matter will already apply; it will therefore be a moment equivalent to the phenomenon called the Inflation of the Universe. The universe will therefore “deflate”, contract or have a big crunch, in whatever way we may call it, until the point where the laws of matter won’t allow for further contraction. Then and only then, when matter has fused into a single particle, consciousness will wake up. Because, if we compare the universal consciousness to our own individual consciousness, we know that although we may hear sounds while we sleep, although we may sleepwalk or even talk and move, we aren’t fully conscious until all the senses of our body are. Thus works the universal consciousness. Only when all the particles have been reunited, the consciousness as a whole can wake up. The consciousness is, however, formed by innumerable consciousnesses which have lost their memory of what has just happened and they seek to expand, as it’s their nature. Thus, some consciousnesses will mingle together, which will actually annihilate the potential of the whole, but it’s a natural process of evolution. They tend towards entropy, which means simply that consciousnesses tend towards “devolution” or “coupling” with other consciousnesses if they are not making a deliberate effort towards evolution. This is just a natural tendency of every being, and it’s called the instinct of reproduction when applied to living beings. However, this characteristic is also seen in inanimate things as well as in basic elements. In human beings, it’s sometimes channeled into activities such as teaching, writing or even simply speaking, where our ideas are reproduced. This process of devolution, which consists of sharing our spiritual knowledge, is more evident in sexual reproduction, which brings forth one or many new consciousnesses, which by the laws of spiritual evolution will be slightly more evolved than the more evolved of the consciousnesses which coupled. Thus, the partial neutralization of our consciousnesses, which is necessary to submit to the physiological act of reproduction, and the paternal instinct give rise to more evolved consciousnesses than ours. Then, when we die, we’re “summoned” by the physical union of two consciousnesses slightly less evolved than ours and therefore we continue the cycle. In the hypothetical case that there weren’t any couplings of two consciousnesses at our spiritual level, we would have to wait to be reborn into the world. Thus, we would exist only in latent form, because consciousnesses can’t evolve without being intertwined with matter.

soyjuanma86

I'm a writer born in Argentina, but currently living in Poland. I work as an English and French teacher, translator and copywriter.

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