In the beginning there was only Void, what Taoists call The Supreme Ultimate. A place of nothing but the pure potential of everything that can, or could ever be. Science tells us that before the Big Bang, there wasn’t any such thing as Time or Space, only potential, perhaps similar to the infinite potential that quantum physics tells us lives inside the nucleus of every atom.
Then with the Big Bang God(dess) separated Heaven and Earth from Him/Herself. For before, they were formless and void; just the spirit of God(dess) moving on the infinite. The Void was God(dess). And He/She said, ‘Let there be Yin and Yang’ and split Her/Himself into two. And God(dess) saw that it was good and continued to divide into more dynamic properties; Heaven/Earth, light/darkness, hot/cold, day/night, waking/sleeping, summer/winter, living/dying, and thing/no-thingness.
Thus the heavens and the Earth were created. But God(dess) was not yet satisfied, so He/She said, ‘Let Us make people in our image.’ And like holographic shards, each piece was a microcosm of the whole, She/He formed humanity’s genetic-code: a complex spiral chain of binary-code – on/yang/expressed and off/yin/regulated. And God(dess) filled the nucleus of all humanity’s atoms with the same Void the Earth, and She Himself were made up of. Filled with almost nothing but the pure potential of Quantum Mechanics. And out of that ground, and various mixtures of the two principle elements, God(dess) formed every beast of the field, bird of the sky, and creature of the sea. All made from, and entangled with, the stardust created from the Big Bang. But for the human, who She/He called Atom, there was not found a companion suitable. So God(dess) anesthetized him and from his side took a rib and fashioned another creature, alchemically continuing the refining process. As man was converted from the baser earth, so this creation was more refined (for she could reproduce) from that which she was made, Atom. And together man and wo-man were like God(dess) and naked and unashamed.
When our plane-of-existence was big-banged into existence 13.7 billion years ago, ‘reality’ began to expand into the Void, an expansion that science tells us is still continuing at this moment – like a wave of EveryThing spreading out and creating space-time and infinity as it does. Expanding into what? Why, pure potential of course.
Taoists believe that everything moves in cycles. And the way I was taught it was that the Supreme Ultimate Void first split into Yin/Yang and from those two ‘elements’ comes the myriad of things that we call Any/EveryThing. And it all will continue to divide into more, and more, and more things, breaking down like fractals into more, and more things, until the complexities of life on the edge of chaos get as vast and splintered as it possibly can. Then it’ll all begin to recede back to center, and coalesce, until everything is just two, and then all will be One again. Back into Void. The size and potential of the nucleus of an atom. And then rebirth all over. Just another Singularity.
Of course no one really knows how it’s gonna end, but some scientists believe that the universe is still in it’s expanding (Yang) phase and that eventually there will be a (Yin) phase of contraction all the way back into a Big-Crunch. And then BANG! Genesis all over again. An endless cycle rolling around much the way the Earth-ball keeps spinning away its days and nights and going around the sun, year after year after year. No beginning and no end. Just cycles of transition, like a spectrum on a Mobius strip.
Nowadays it seems that everything that we own and do is being converted into bits and bytes of binary code – on (yang), off (yin). We used to play instruments, then we listened to it analog, now it’s only 1s/on and 0s/off. We used to paint with lots of materials, then we snap-shot with film, now 1s and 0s. So who knows, maybe our wave has broke and is beginning to roll back. Maybe we’re headed home back to the Void. To nothingness. But that thought doesn’t have to be disheartening. One should never underestimate no-thing; it’s full of the most potential. If we could harness the energy from the ‘empty space’ of just one hydrogen atom, it would yield a trillion times as much energy as all the mass from all the stars and all the planets out to twenty billion light-years away. And besides, the idea of an eternal renewal is a lot cheerier than how many scientists think the universe will meet its end.
