At the Beginning

For centuries, and as long as we can trace the history of human being back to the paintings on caves, people have been looking up into the sky for an answer to a prominent question; who they are and how they landed on earth. Scientists are constantly finding historical evidence to their theories with regards to those questions. The premise is that there is a start for everything, and therefore, there was a time that our world began. By studying historical evidence and delving into the sciences of paleontology, geology, archeology, and biology, we can use the creative part of our brain and imagine just how it was at the beginning.  In order to do that, we need to answer the following questions. When, or how long ago was the beginning? How was the beginning perceived? Where did the beginning start from? Why can’t we think independently? Is there an organized way to know this phenomenon? And finally, is there a limit to our imagination? By answering the above questions, we can start our trend of thoughts towards a rational thinking, however imaginary, to picture the time which has been much polluted with myths and fairy tales throughout centuries.

Beginning is ground zero of our world, when this whole universe started its operation. From our present time with the mother earth congested with people, we can trace the history of the universe back to when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Heaven to this earth.  In this case, the earth was as we see it now, just less advanced and more primitive. The time before this earth was the Heaven which we already have a picture drawn for us by few centuries old manuscripts. We do not need much of imagination to picture the beginning in this scenario, as the world looked pretty much as it does today. Heaven sounds very much like today’s world as well, but everything was available to everyone and all people lived in peace, as if the whole earth was operating under a socialist system! There are people and animals and plants and things, as they are in present day, and of course everyone is happy and joyful, no matter what the standard of happiness was. Depending on which religion describes heaven, all the needs and wants of the tribe or society that religion came from was provided. This is the overall picture that defers in detail depending upon the ideology as well. That was the time before life, and the same condition will apply after life. Heaven will be the same to enter after death, with the exception of an additional place exactly opposite of this for those who do not subscribe to this fairytale, called Hell!

According to the theory of evolution, we can imagine a much less advanced universe. We must go all the way back to  the time of no human beings, back to the time of dinosaurs, back to the time of one celled beings,  back to the time when earth was filled with water, and back to the time of the Big Bang. Let us go even further back to where time did not exist, or as some would call it “before time”. We say “before time” because time had a different meaning and Einstein relativity did not necessarily apply to it. The best picture of this period is visualized by Stephen Hawking. Let us think of not our earth (since it did not exist anyway) but an unimaginable large space filled with gas. Universe to most of us is the sky or heavens. Can you imagine that you looked up there and there was no sun or moon or any stars and planets at all? Of course it would be dark. But, it would be dark with the definition of the darkness we are accustomed to. Would it be possible to see everything in darkness? In the pure absence of light, there isn’t such a thing as darkness. So, we are talking about when there is neither light nor darkness, or absolute nothing. This was the beginning.

We are not really used to thinking of nothing. Our first reaction to the question of nothing would be; nothing of what? For instance, for an accident or an event that happened before, when we tell the person involved in that accident to assume that nothing happened, the person starts thinking of that event or accident first. Then, s/he struggles to assume that the event never happened although that event is still prevalent in his/er mind. S/he cannot replace that event with some non-event. The person will go as far as replacing that event with some other event.  S/he would say: “well, if that did not happen, then the situation would be like this.” Meaning that, s/he is creating a new event to substitute the actual event. Therefore, it is easy to substitute an event with another event, while it is hard to imagine no event at all. That is why when we create heaven and hell, they are substantive and mimic our world.

We talked about the time when there was neither light nor darkness. What could we see in that atmosphere? We could say, not necessarily seeing but feeling, or not using any of our five senses at all, and perceiving it. We need to imagine we travel to “before time” for a moment. Then, we should try to perceive what is around us. In this premise, we might be able to travel thousand times the speed of light as well. It would be a totally different place. Just imagine what you would be seeing (or feeling or perceiving). To picture something means to see it, however, this sight is observed through inner eyes. For example, if you close your eyes you may picture a mass of tar is turning and waving, or some dark gray gases mixed with some light gray and blue gas are blown into a whirlwind, you are watching a three dimensional picture with your eyes closed. Knowing that some light can travel through our eyelids, this is not really experimenting total darkness, but close to it. We are so much used to using our senses that it seems ridiculous to ask someone to do anything at all without using his/er senses. However, we can be thinking through our senses without making a physical contact. There is nothing in the world that does not have a physical presence. If a ray cannot be seen, it can be felt, or its impact can be sensed. Therefore, everything in the world can be encountered with through our five senses. Everything at the beginning had a physical presence too. That is why we should be using our senses through our thoughts, not the way we use them in a daily basis.

Is there a limit to the depth of the universe we see? Or is it just a continuous, never ending black hole? Is it what some call a vacuum? Perhaps a born blind person can imagine it better, or it might have best been imagined by Helen Keller, or someone who experienced a coma.  When you ask a person what s/he remembered from the period s/he was in a coma, s/he would say nothing. A “nothing” that is not perceivable by our senses easily. Everybody will have this experience at the end of the line of life when all the senses fail. What we are trying to do is to train our thoughts to be able to have this experience through our imagination. Make sure not to confuse this with meditation. It cannot be reached through meditation since meditation is superficial, or at the highest stage it is just a concentration game. It helps to know the location of the beginning in order to picture it easier. We live between two nothings!  We do not have any experience of the second one, but we have passed through the first one. Everybody dreams when sleeping. But some people can never remember their dreams, even right after they wake up. Before we were born, and in our mother’s womb, and after our brain was developed, we were thinking and absorbing information. We had just passed the stage of nothingness.  Can we go back in time mentally and experience it again? Can a person who does not remember his/er dreams concentrate to remember the dream after s/he is awake?

Now, we should polish our minds off all the layers of misinformation it has received for centuries. One thing that always holds people’s imagination back is convention. We are used to thinking a certain way and it is more comfortable to keep thinking that way than revolutionizing our thoughts.  All the old and contemporary thinkers such as Galilee, Farabi, Dickens, Khayyam, De Vinci, Descartes, Plato, Franklin, Morrison, Sagan, Hawking, are the ones who broke the convention and the habit. They thought of something new that did not exist before, in order to make it easier to deal with the nature, and bring about a new wave of thoughts not accepted traditionally. Some have even put their lives on it. Newton’s laws of gravity might have sounded useless at the time. However, many inventions are resulted from the laws of gravity, aircraft being the best example. Thus, it is important to realize that all perceptions of our surroundings received throughout years should be discarded and a new way of thinking ought to be established. We need to detach ourselves from the dogma of life around us. For instance, how would you explain a television set or a computer to someone who lived hundred years ago? If you are over fifty years old, could you imagine when you were ten or twenty that sometimes in the future you would be able to talk to and see the picture of someone across from the globe? What gadget can you think of, that would be invented and used in a daily basis by most of the people hundred years hence? One more thing we should remember is that we cannot limit our thoughts to a certain method of analysis. Because those laws invented by the scientists do not inherently exist in the nature. It was so different at the beginning that only our imagination can understand it, as it is so difficult to understand quantum physics or black hole. As human beings, we are adventurous and boldly fly into the future. However, our beginning can only be understood through our knowledge and imagination.

Those thinkers mentioned earlier, and other such thinkers have tried to reorganize the environment by manipulating substances of nature to their advantage and in order to receive maximum satisfaction in life. Newton’s laws of gravity are not laws of the nature but laws invented by Newton in order to use our environment with ease. Nature is in random, by nature!  Everything about us is in random too; from the time of conceiving an egg to the time of the last beat of the heart. Even “time” does not mean anything to universe (or multiverse). We create concept of time so we can categorize our historical experience and look far ahead, as far as we can.  In addition to creating comfort in our life, science is constantly trying to delve into “telling our future”. Astronomy is checking what happened millions of years ago, to be able to foresee our future. Although it is even hard to tell the condition of some of the stars now, since the star that we see now is what it looked like years ago because of its distance from us of many light years. Medical science is trying to extend peoples’ lives which is actually fortune telling, by expanding our future, while they are giving us relieve medications to subside our pains. Geology is trying to predict our future earthquakes, by learning from the earth’s historical changes. Even accounting is a science of future, by means of categorizing historical data in order to use this data to “budget and plan” the future. Most of these sciences have a mission to answer our original question as well as creating or inventing laws. These are not laws of the nature as they are commonly assumed, but the laws of human in dealing with the nature. Nature, per se, does not have any laws, since everything is in random. We know that the whole universe is constantly changing, or more precisely, expanding. These changes happen in random, as far as we have the knowledge of, although we are trying to find a systematic way of change or rate of expansion. In another words, we are trying to create a law for that. We need to know all the laws in order to create our picture, with the understanding that these laws are invented by people. Looking back at the history of our world, we will realize that if any event was changed for a split second, we could have had a different history. For example, would there be a Second World War if Adolph Hitler’s parents did not get together the very split second that he was conceived? Would there be a country called Israel? There is not a systematic answer to examples like this. Nothing on earth and universe has a categorized and predicted reason except the reason of randomness.

Whenever science fails to come up with an answer, science fiction steps in. Fiction is the finest way of imagining something that is not possibly the true science or a fact. Shakespeare’s novels are nothing but fiction. However, he was using elements of facts in a way, and he was intertwining them with imagination so profoundly, that he could transfer his images to us in a format that we can picture it as a factual event. There is a fine line between fact and non-fact, between astronomy and astrology, between science and science fiction, between sagacity and imagination. We should step over this fine line but stay very close to the line. This is the limit to our imagination.  We must keep our thoughts close to all the facts and do not let it go wild!  Compare a fictional film which uses a powerful story, or as some call “a message film”, with a Disney cartoon. The first one makes us think and it stays in our mind for a long period of time. The second one brings as much joy, but as soon as the movie is over, it escapes out of our minds too. Most of the inventions started as a dream or imagination in someone’s mind, however not too far from the imagination. A dream of going back through a time tunnel, for example, can never happen. One reason is that with our present scientific knowledge it is not conceivable. Another reason is that if such a thing is possible, why we haven’t ever met anybody coming back from a future time! The same logic goes for being contacted by outer space aliens. When we can expand our imagination first, and then our knowledge to the level to use all the scientific data, we will be able to build our imagination towards thinking about nothing that is the essence of the beginning. And the last words are that we should try to prevent ourselves from sticking to the rules and laws created for us (while staying close to the boundary) since everything happens haphazardly.