The biggest fear I had as a child was the infinite void. I’ve always had a strong appreciation for life and still do. The idea of no consciousness forever is something none of us can truly comprehend, and even if it happens, we’ll not be any the wiser. This thought wasn’t lost on me. Nonetheless, like it does to many of my sentient counterparts, it harrowed me to my core.
I could never refute science, and I was never raised religious. For whatever reason, I always felt like the two could never exist in harmony - science and religion. What I didn’t realise for a long time was that - the big bang may be what created the universe, but science cannot answer what caused the big bang.
I prescribed for a long time that it was some atheistic, crazy cosmic chance that we’ll never understand - nothing became something instantaneously. I always thought of various religions’ idea of God or Gods as more unlikely than that. I’d ask questions like “How do they know that this God exists, or that God, or that one?” and “How does one religion know that their religion is correct over the countless others?”
What I didn’t understand is that if God, whatever God may be, created this universe. Then God must be outside of this universe, outside of what our universe-based brains can comprehend. Humans create religion as a way of making God more accessible to us, where the actual God is totally beyond our comprehension.
From The Bhagavad Gita - Chapter 9, Verse 23:
Whatever a man may sacrifice to other gods, O son of Kunti, is really meant for Me alone, but it is offered without true understanding.
I really liked this from the Bhagavad Gita, and it’s mentioned a few other times too. It speaks about how even people who worship other Gods are still worshipping the one true God. We are bound to this universe and can never truly understand God, but any devotion aimed towards God, in whichever humanised form and for whatever reason, is a step towards God.
And a God like that is much more believable to me than something too humanised, such as a man striking an anvil to create lightning or anything similar. Then we ask the question: “What created the universe?” Did nothing become something, or was this incomprehensible God involved? It’s much easier for me to believe that something (God) created something, rather than nothing created something.
The other question that always plagued my mind was, “Well if God created this universe, what created God?” Either there is a paradoxically infinite chain of creators, or there was at some point one unmoved mover - the God of all Gods. I can only work with what I know, which is that this universe exists. The question of other universes, realms, Gods or dimensions is not something I can ever see or understand, at least not in this life. So I prescribe to what I know - this universe exists, something created this universe, and that something is God.
I read a book by Alan Watts called Out of Your Mind where he proposes his Dramatic Model. I also wrote an article about it. That is what I believe - our universe is at least part of God, the part we can see and feel - manifested for some unknown reason. We are all part of that God, experiencing our egos through our limited perception.
Another thought I had a while ago was on reincarnation, or at least the question of if there’s life before life or after death. My logic was quite simple, based on what I already know and can see.
We don’t know what being dead is like, so let’s just say that being dead is not being alive as we currently know it. We can split up consciousness into two states: we’re either dead - before birth and after death, or we’re alive.
The fact that I’m alive right now means, with great certainty, that it’s possible for me to go from the state of being dead (before my birth) to being alive (right now I am alive). Over infinite time, I miraculously was born into this life. Where previously I had been dead, I became alive. We know this is a possibility because it has happened, I am here right now to prove so.
When I die I will return to the state of being dead, whatever that is. And since we previously established it is possible to go from being dead (before birth) to being alive (now), over an infinite timeline of being dead, the eventuality of being alive again is guaranteed to occur. Even if it’s a minutely small chance, eventually it will happen. Because we can’t perceive being dead, it will be instantaneous.
So I’m sure that something came before this life, and something will come after. I’m not certain exactly what it will be, though my best guess is reincarnation indefinitely. But I now rest easy knowing this life isn’t everything there is and will be.
As Ram Dass said:
This incarnation infers other incarnations.
Death is another step towards home.
