indi.ca

Views from the third world. Earth.


1) Big Bang Baby: My First And Only Birth

"How the Earth was Regarded in Old times", The Popular Science Monthly, March 1877

This book should be 95% black, 5% gibberish, and just a question mark at the end. But such scrupulous truth is boring. Let's stay in the realm of stories, as I begin to tell mine...


There was really only one moment of creation. Everything since has been recreational. Space, time, and all that therein was once A) something else in some other universe and B) squeezed up so tight in the anus of God that she just had to let one rip. We are just the waste product of some other mystery, thinking we're the shit.

That moment was my first and only birth. Everything else is just a remix. Everything is a remix. Who knows how many times this process has happened? Probably over and over again. However, this this book has to start somewhere, and the beginning of the observable universe is as good as anything. That was the first birth of you, and me, and everything, from a cosmic mother with one reproductive orifice (that we know of).

At some point in her wormhole womb, you and I were crammed up someplace impossibly hot and impossibly dense. We were literally one with the universe. We were never closer and perhaps never will be until the end. Every force of gravity, every nuclear force, every feeling of love is in a way a memory of that moment. Of togetherness. Of obliteration. Of everything and nothing all at once. Let us hold each other and destroy the illusion of being separate, let us indeed create one body out of twain flesh. In our capacity for rebirth, we carry the memory of creation. God is a DJ, and everything is a remix.

To me it's just another story, but in modern parlance it's just a fact that the universe started from one place. All was one literally forever (all of the time that ever was up until then), but then a whole lot more time was created, making it seem like just a moment in hindsight. Then God expelled a huge cloud of heat and gas expelled out her hindquarters. These gases swirled into the stars, planets, and atoms we call solid reality today. It's all really just a fart in the wind, swirling down the toilet we call the Milky Way.

I dwell on this fart metaphor not just because it's apt. It's apt because it's true. As we'll see, the waste product of one lifeform is the lifeforce of another. Just take a deep breath and experience it oxygen. That oxygen your inhaling is a waste product, plant and plankton farts. Today we laugh at the ancient Egyptians depicting dung beetles as a symbol of creation, but it's really quite apt.  

Every iota of me and you was once squished together in some cosmic dung ball, being rolled down a black hole. We are just the final digestion of some other universe, producing the waste product we call home. One universe's trash is another one's treasure. For all we know, this extrastellar process goes on and on. Every black hole could be an intestine, shitting out another universe on the other side. All hail the dung beetle, rolling it all along.

It might be weird and gross to conflate birth with shit, but they're not so different. As a mother in the show Fargo once opined about her sons, "there are shits I've wanted to live with more than them." Birth is a creative process in that it creates human life, but many more creatures grow out of shit as fertilizer. It's all a cycle, and your sense of disgust or attraction is really just a temporary prejudice, not a perception of the universe at it is. It's all relative.

When I think of relativity, it's striking because it returns to the only part of that Einstein paper I understand. The truth is we were one and we are one. We literally cannot think, cannot understand, have no consciousness beyond our oneness at that moment. I'll repeat:

If we wish to describe the motion of a material point, we give the values of its co-ordinates as functions of the time. Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time.” We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o'clock,” I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.”

We can only understand our universe in terms of our universe. We can only understand time in terms of hands of a watch. This universe was created simultaneously and it is still simultaneous. We just get lost because things are now so far apart. But they are as they always were. One. You can remember this if you remember where you come from.

We were all born together. This is really the one consciousness, which we are capable of remembering collectively through science. The ancients knew as well if not better through vibing. Einstein's point (or, more accurately) the only point I got was that when we talk about any point in spacetime (ie, anything) we can only talk about it relative to some other point. Relativity might as well be the Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising.

It can be any story you want it to be. White people laughed at the Hindu, Native American, and Chinese story that the world is held up by some sort of turtle, saying "My opponent's reasoning reminds me of the heathen, who, being asked on what the world stood, replied, "On a tortoise." But on what does the tortoise stand? "On another tortoise." With Mr. Barker, too, there are tortoises all the way down. (Vehement and vociferous applause.)" But it really is turtles all the way down. That's just another description of relativity.

As Nāgārjuna said, “Space does not at all exist prior to the defining characteristic of space. If it existed prior to its defining characteristic, it would follow that something exists without defining characteristic.” Einstein understood the universe through math, it's defining characteristic, but math was created at the time of the Big Bang. It breaks down inside black holes. Math is self-referential. It can only describe the universe in its own terms. It's an infinite regress. Every point is just defined in terms of other points. As Leibniz said (via Graham Priest) "space to be merely relative, as time is; that... it ... be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions."

It's turtles all the way down. Every moment of perception is a moment of creation. You create the observable universe by observing it. Everything is a reference, a pointer, a dot in a vector, but out of that you create an illustration, a computer program, a form out of meaningless points. As Priest said, after a lot of math I skipped, "As the Mahayana Buddhists insist, Emptiness is not a nothing: it has a determinate structure, one of pure form."

And that's what we'll discuss next. After the oneness of the Big Bang, the great emptiness that followed.