Prologue
I cannot prevent myself from wondering about the new generations that shall sprout into this world millennia from now. What shall they think of us? Shall they see our accomplishments as simple and primitive? Shall they portray us as uneducated barbarians? Shall our beliefs seem to them just unsophisticated superstitions? Yet, are these things going to matter in the end? And, ultimately, is there any end at all? What if the flow of time is only an illusion generated by our minds?
Elessyos of Miletus
We are tempted to see our existence as composed of a single reality. This reality flows from the immutable past to the fluid future through a present thinner than a knife-edge. The general view is that only inside this almost infinitely thin slice of time we live, act, and are being acted on. However, our lives are operating in a more complicated physical world.
The space-time around us can be better described as a network of possible realities. These realities are entangled and intertwined like the threads of many yarn balls thrown away in random directions from the singularity that gave birth to our Universe. In some locations of this complex multidimensional maze, the notions of past and future lose their meaning and are sometimes interchangeable. Meanwhile, the almost infinitely thin present can expand significantly. In other words, one can say that when we are not happy with the future, we can change the past.
Kai Ishida — a precursor of the New Physics
Nothingness said to Somethingness: “There is no universe right now, no space no time, nothing to separate the whole from its parts or to distinguish between inside and outside. Even you don’t exist, except in my imagination. So, let’s change this state of things and build a beginning from where to spin a new story.”
Somethingness replied: “As soon as this thought came to your mind, you became me, and now it’s you who doesn’t exist anymore. No problem, I shall do what you have asked for, what I had asked for.”
Hence, non-action became action, and non-being became being. From being, a beginning was born.
♣
In the beginning was the sound, and the sound was without form, and the sound was reigning supreme over the endless water. The sound became louder, generated vibrations, and expanded until it reached the water’s surface. Its touch changed the water, bringing into existence tiny ripples of resonance that spread in all directions. Soon, these ripples multiplied, grew, and evolved. Their shapes became stable. With them arrived new concepts, such as structure, complexity, and thought.
In the beginning, space was the only thing alive. Unbounded, undefined, unmeasurable. Space stretched, bent, and twisted until it closed onto itself. It rendered discontinuities that brought matter into existence as mass and energy, its two complementary sides. Then, from the random vibrations of the matter manifested as energy, the sound came into being.
In the beginning, there was no beginning because there was no time and space. From the singularity that did not exist and cannot be described, time and space appeared. Then, from time and space, everything else came forth. Everything is one, and one is everything.
In the beginning that did not exist, beyond anything the thought can conceive, beyond any beyond, in that beginning with no beginning, He was. Hence, everything started from Him and with Him. Yet He is only a name but not the real Him. The finger that points at the Moon is not the Moon. It’s just a finger.
And so, the flow of a story commences, entangled between pasts and futures, twisted by ripples of reality and illusion, washed by the incessantly changing waves of space and time. This flow starts shyly, more like a whisper, like a tiny mountain stream hidden under deep layers of ice and snow. However, it soon grows and expands, turning into a wide river. Before long, its deep waters pour, unstoppable, into the sea.
The sea itself is full of life and in continuous transformation. Its restless surface is periodically pulled towards the sky by the heat from the Sun, becoming clouds and returning, as rain, to the source. When this happens, the cycle is complete. The story folds over itself, returning to the origin.
In the beginning was the end…
text & artwork by Marian C. Ghilea
