The End of Ego

Ask yourself this, “Did I exist before I was born?”

Everything that has a beginning has an end.

Not everything has a beginning.

We only assume that everything must have a beginning because we live in a causational world. We are captivated by the arrow of time; before and after. Our relatively limited human existence begins with birth and ends with death.

This is how our ego experiences the world and so it is how we start to define our idea of reality.

Uncertainty is certain

The real nature of reality may well elude us but our ego tries to resist this uncertainty which is why general relativity and quantum mechanics seem so hard for us to understand. Nature shows them to be much more accurate models of reality than our preconceived Newtonian ideas.

What most of us have difficulty understanding is that time and space are not just the stage for mass and energy to perform. Time and space are ultimately defined by mass and energy. Without them, space and time cease to exist.

In his book, Cycles of Time, Roger Penrose stipulates the theory (conformal cyclic cosmology, CCC) where the eventual heat death of the universe leads to the final particles of mass disappearing amongst a background of massless photons. The dimensions of space and time will cease to exist. The space that previously made up the entire cosmos is no longer defined and space and time are compacted into a sizeless and timeless singularity setting the stage for a new Big Bang.

So what is left that has no beginning? On a quantum level, physicists adhere to the idea of the conservation of information. Once a quantum decision is made, its information cannot be created or destroyed. This leads to Vahe Gurzadyan’s idea of information panspermia — our story is written in the sky, just as many of our ancestors believed. Nature, the realm of mathematics is not something that can be destroyed because it has no beginning, no end and no physical form. Information, the realm of ideas is our story that flows like an endless river.

Our preconceived understanding of causality and the nature of reality are bound within our relativistic speed and mass. The speeds at which we move about the Earth, the speed at which the Earth revolves around the Sun combined with our respective masses mean that we have a generally limited view of the phenomena of space and time. All these things are moving relatively slowly to each other and we only observe them at the meso-level. If you take a different point of view; if you could sit on a photon of light as it zooms through the Universe at 3 x 10⁸ metres per second you would experience time as both eternal and instantaneous, seeing the entire history of the Universe in an instant. Physicists allude to this in the holographic principle.

William Blake seems to have beaten Roger to it by about 200 years:

To see a World in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

We are all authors of our own book. Our books sit on the shelves forever in the eternal library.