A friend was exploring her beliefs regarding the formation of the Universe and the potential of the existence of a Being – an Energy – that brought about Creation as we know it.

I was drinking my first cup of coffee when she posed that question and my mind is usually barely working until that first cup of black liquid has been inhaled, but this question (as my friend’s questions often do) tripped my mind into deeper thought.  This time, as to my beliefs on a much, much bigger picture than the one we look at everyday through human eyes. 

As a very young child, I could definitely believe in the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas; in Dragons and Elves, but I could never get my head around the thought of an old man with a long beard, sitting on a cloud, listening in on all the trillions of things happening in the world and then still having time to punish bad people and send them to hell.  Even as a very young child, that picture never raised fear.  It raised puzzlement and disbelief.  And I thought that this old guy with a beard probably couldn’t make himself a cup of tea, so how the heck could he build an entire universe?

If God, or some God-like Creator-being couldn’t have done it, how did the universe come into existence?  That was a question that cropped up from time to time over the next few years and as I got a little older, and discovered atoms, it suddenly all became clear.  I thought of us – humans – as being mere specks living on a single cell in the body of a much more giant being – who was a speck of dust living on a single cell in the body of an even greater being, who was also a speck of dust doing exactly the same thing.  Maybe that was God – the biggest being, beyond anything I could actually conceive of.  Maybe that was who had made everything.  I was sensing Infinity.  I was building my own form of Mandelbrot even as a child.  It was a daydream – a child’s way of explaining the unexplainable, but this explanation, this knowledge of Infinity, has hovered in the background of my beliefs for my entire life. 

It was a massive puzzle for a child to contemplate.  Many great minds throughout history have pondered on this question – without answer.  Ultimately, I was forced to recognise that I wasn’t ever going to find an answer, but that acceptance did raise another unasked question of my childhood: “Are we really as important as we think we are?”

If we are indeed merely fleas living on an electron zooming around the nucleus of a single atom in the body of a much greater being, why do we believe we are so important?  What is it that shouts so loudly to us, in the much greater Mandelbrot of existence, that WE ACTUALLY MATTER.

Maybe it’s because we sense, in that Mandelbrot-dream, that if we are merely aspects of something greater, could we possibly also be the ‘greater’ of an infinitesimally smaller universe of life?  If you’ve ever watched a Mandelbrot video and considered the mathematics of such a thing, you know that there really is no ‘end’ and that every step forward is dependent on the previous step.

Nowadays, when I ponder this question, my thoughts are, perhaps, a little more sophisticated than the younger me who questioned that an old man sitting on a cloud could be the creator of all that is.  I still think that Mandelbrot vision of existence holds possibilities – after all, who really knows the truth of this?  I think there is a continuum of existence that will never come to an end simply because the universe is eternal.  If I try to give a definition of an eternal universe, I refer to the continuous double-sided flow of a Mobius Strip.  From the point on that Mobius Strip where I may exist in Time and Space, there is no beginning and no ending.  The physical aspects might end.  I might end; Earth might end and so too might our galaxy.  These are all things that hold Space. 

For something physical to be created – for a universe to be created – there must, first, be Time.  Time defines Space.  Time is the boundary of Creation.  Is it possible for Time to end?  What would be beyond the end of Time? 

Could there have been existence before the start of Time?

Sometimes, especially when I try to wrap my mind around such questions, I start to think that the concept that everything is an illusion, that we don’t actually exist, that we are just players in a Game of Life, to be quite comforting. 

Until I ask who is playing that Game???

Aggghhhhh!   I’m off to find coffee…..

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Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind