The Oscillating Universe

THE QUESTION 'where did everything come from?' has always alarmed and fascinated humanity, and whenever it is posed the concept of nothingness has to arise. As early as 1,700 BC, in the Creation Hymn of the sacred Hindu text the Rigveda, it is clearly an issue: “There was neither non-existence nor existence then. There was neither the realm of space nor the sky that is beyond. What stirred? Where?”

The Greek philosophers debated the question endlessly. Around 600 BC, Thales was convinced that the Universe could not have come from nothing, but posed the question “Does thinking about nothing make it something?” The end result of Greek philosophical discourse ended up with the idea that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’, which became received wisdom up until the Middle Ages.

But modern-day scientists challenged this view and came to realize that ‘nothing’ must be somewhere. Here is how Frank Close, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford, describes the current scientific position at the end of his book, The Void: “… we started with the question, ‘Where did everything come from?’ Having surveyed over 2,000 years of ideas we have arrived at the modern answer: ‘Everything comes from nothing’. There could hardly be a more remarkable interconnection than this between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’.” Scientists, particularly physicists, know that nothing must exist but are at a loss as to how something could come from nothing. It is one thing to say it does but another to explain it. Philosophers go round in circles. Which leaves mystics: have they anything to say?

When mystics try to express in words what they know, they indicate that ultimate reality is not a physical thing; it’s some thing that isn’t something (because, if there’s something there, you have to say where it comes from). But where does that leave us? Basically, with this: there is something behind reality that is not a thing, so it follows that it must be a nothing, and yet how can you get something from nothing? This philosophical conundrum paralyses philosophers and scientists alike. But mystics, often cloaking what they have to say in the garb of the religious language of the culture they lived in, have said over and over again that the answer lies in experiences arising from specific states of mind that can be entered into in certain circumstances by anyone who has the innate capacity to do so and who is prepared to make the right effort. People from different times and cultures all over the world describe these experiences with such consistency that that alone should give us cause to give serious consideration to what they have said, which boils down to, ‘what is beyond the various levels of mind, the veils that one can penetrate, is the oscillation’.

In various traditions we can read precise descriptions of the three aspects of ultimate reality that make up the oscillating Universe. They are very clear. In Hindu terminology the three aspects are expressed as Satcitananda or Satchidananda, a compound of three Sanskrit words, sat, cit and nanda, meaning being, knowledge and bliss respectively. So there is the Godhead, the dimensionless point of being: pure awareness, referred to as ‘I am’. In physics, this is known as the singularity, as we have described. It oscillates with an energy field of knowledge that gives rise to the physical Universe. Because these two fields have to be connected, there is also the observer observing the ‘I am’ state of pure awareness and its alternative form, the energy field. The act of observing creates a feeling of ‘love’ or bliss, called in some traditions the Holy Spirit: the ultimate pattern-match.

In Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, a book that cannot be recommended too highly, the American academic and translator of classical Sufi texts William Chittick describes how Moslem cosmologists see the Universe as bi-directional, eternally coming forth from the real and eternally receding back into the real. It is at once centrifugal and centripetal. The real is absolute, infinite, and unchanging, and everything else is moving, altering, and transmuting. All movement is either towards the real or away from it. The direction of movement is judged in terms of the increasing or decreasing intensity of the signs and traces of the real that appear in things.

"In this Universe that is forever coming and going, there is no place for the stark dualisms that characterize so much of modern thought. In the more sophisticated cosmologies, reality is understood in terms of continuums, spectrums, complementarities, equilibriums, balances, and unities. Spirit and body, heaven and earth, past and future, local and nonlocal – all are understood as relative and complementary terms. Moreover, whenever a duality is discussed, there is typically a third factor, intermediate between the two, which plays the role of an ‘isthmus’ (barzakh), something that is neither the one nor the other but allows for interrelationship. There was no terminology to express the stark dichotomies that Western thought has seen between ‘natural and supernatural’ or ‘mind and body’ or ‘spirit and matter.’ Everything natural has supernatural dimensions, and everything bodily is permeated with spirit; on every level the Universe is infused with signs and intimations of unseen things. There can be no absolutes in any realm of observation – the only absolute is God, the One, who is Unseen and Unobserved by definition."

This is what we describe in the relaton theory, a projection of the same understanding stripped of the language of religiosity and more comprehensible to the literate, 21st century, scientifically inclined enquirer: a continual devolving and evolving process (arcs of descent and ascent) in the present moment projects and maintains the Universe.

People in a certain deep state of mystical connection to the relaton field become aware that whatever they look at, it is this universal process they are seeing. Within a moment, which they recognise is outside time itself, they connect back to the universal relaton field, back to a state that feels, and is so described, as pure awareness: being. And this is accompanied by a sense that this state has always been so and always will be. It is the eternal ground state of everything. Moreover, the Universe is continuing to go back to its ground state via the arc of descent. It’s as if it is breathing: awareness breathes out the energy to create the Universe, and breathes it back in to the point of nothingness again, then breathes it out again – and so on.

Here is how the 14th century Persian sage, Mahmud Shabistari, talked about this in answer to the question, ‘What is the atom greater than the whole that you talk about, and what is the path in space that that atom treads?’

There is one atom greater than the whole existence; for behold the Universe is, yet that Universe itself is being. Now being is various in outward form, but in its being bears inward unity. The Universe in semblance manifold is but a particle that wanders far through infinite unity; and as that whole is only in appearance manifold, ’tis less in truth than its own particle. Nor is that atom clothed with existence, itself essential, for existence holds it firm and subject to itself: nor doth the world exist in truth, save as a pageant shown to him who travels in the way of life. Single yet many is that Universe; its number is by numbers manifest; existence is complete in compound form, and tends towards nothingness, obedient to the messenger of fate; in every mote which vanishes, the Universe itself is not, for it is but ‘the possible’, and so the world is: in the twinkling of an eye it is not, and the ages pass away. Again the world is born, each moment sees a heaven and an earth; each hour knows a grey-haired elder, who but now was young. Ever ’tis gathered in and ever spread, nor for two hours does anything remain; for in the hour of death they rise again.

In his Secret Garden, Shabistari answered all the conundrums faced by physicists today.

So the dynamic of reality is this: the Universe oscillates from nothingness awareness to the manifest material Universe. In a real sense the Universe is being created every moment. And time as we experience it is illusory, a purely relative phenomenon, a way of seeing things rather than something that actually exists at the core of the Universe.