The Big Bang of Now

Probably the most profound thing one can contemplate is the fact that there is something, anything, at all.  This one basic thing is so singular, so vertigo-inducing, so totally in-your-face, hiding-in-plain-sight extraordinary, that in pondering it with sufficient innocence, depth and clarity, a staggering recognition may dawn that is at once uniquely authoritative and supremely non-rational: the fact that something is is absolute proof of its own soleness,  its own ontological primacy, its own couldn’t-be-otherwiseness.  

The significance of the fact that there is anything at all cannot be overstated.  It is:

•   so obvious that it is continually overlooked; 

•   so uncanny that it simultaneously reveals and obscures itself; 

•   so inherently mind-blowing that, indeed, the egoic self might function almost entirely as

 a buffer to its full realization.  

And yet it is never not present, and it is never less than perfect in its allowance of any experience, as well as the falling away of all experience.  It doesn’t even matter what this something-rather-than-nothing is taken to be, what names or values or attributes are associated with it.  What matters is what’s always beyond question: it is.

Quite simply, this is it.  This is only ever it.  The idea that 13-point-whatever billion years ago there was a primordial nothing out of which something magically emerged is naïve.  In fact, the Big Bang of science is something one might regard as a contemporary secular creation myth.  It’s so amusingly fantastic that to take it as literal truth seems no different from religious fundamentalists believing that a big old guy with a white beard — a Mr. God character out beyond the stars somewhere — created the universe in a few days.  But as a poetic expression of metaphysical phenomenology, it’s closer to the mark: each timeless moment is an explosion of apparent multiplicity from the void, as the void.