In the beginning, there was nothing. And the universe was at peace. Then, in a tiny little planet, the first speck of life dared to rise.
It was a microscopic tit-bit,
floating in a volcanic ocean that itself floated inside a universal void. It
was the first time the universe created something different from itself. The
first time “self” stood apart from the infinite. Until then, there had only
been an endless oneness – a vastness with no boundary, and no need for a definition.
But with that first trembling speck, a boundary was drawn – organic from
inorganic, self from other, life from death. And with that line began the
greatest journey of all – the journey away from the universe, or back to
itself?
The Rise of the Self
As life evolved, it perfected
the art of separation. The smallest microscopic life had the beginnings of
“senses”, but no real free will.
Trees arose, rooted deeply into
the earth, connected to each other through hidden mycelial webs – but still a
part of the universe, each other, and the soil. It was impossible to tell where
the roots ended and the soil began.
Animals tore away from the
soil. They became mobile, hungry, and alert, their sense of ego sharpened. The
need to preserve the “self” grew, even if it meant killing another. Senses
directed action. There was independent thought, and independent life.
Loneliness arose for the first time.
And then came humans, the greatest
masters of separation. We did not just eat or move – we named, owned, enslaved,
created, passed on, immortalized. We built layers and layers of meaning,
identity, and culture. The “self” swelled into something monumental, at time
even monstrous.
What began as a single boundary
between organism and universe became a fortress of ego. Life was separated from
the universe, and learnt to exist in isolation.
Entropy
The same story played out at
the cosmic scale. The universe began with unity. In the singularity of the Big
Bang, there was no space, no time, no matter. A pure point of nothingness, and
everything. Then expansion came, and with it, structure. Galaxies, stars,
planets, and eventually life. Order emerged – but so did disorder. Entropy, the
measure of chaos, became the law of the cosmos.
But entropy has only one
conclusion: return.
After the last stars burn out,
when the last black hole radiates disintegrates into the last photon, the
universe will dissolve into a flat, silent void. No gradients, no forces, no
distinctions. No space, no time. Just like the moment before the Big Bang. The
beginning and the end are mirrors. Entropy, in its final maturity, is not chaos
but peace. The heat death of the universe is nothing less than liberation into
nothingness – moksha.
The Greatest Sin
Religion confirms. In the
Garden of Eden, when all was innocent, humanity’s fall comes through knowledge.
Eating the fruit of knowledge separated man from God, and the self from the
universe. Awareness was exile. From that moment, humanity had to labor through
suffering, history, and civilization in order to earn the way back. The arc of
the Bible is not one of progress, but of return – from paradise, through
alienation, back to paradise.
Eastern traditions echo the
same rhythm. Buddhism sees ignorance not as a lack of knowledge, but as
clinging to it. Enlightenment is not accumulation but cessation. The Upanishads
insist: you are not this body, nor this mind, nor even the knowledge you think
you hold. “Neti, neti” – not this, not this – until all that remains is
the silent whole – the atma.
Christianity calls it God,
Buddhism calls it nirvana, Vedanta calls it Brahman, Physics calls it the void
– all point to the same: the loss of self, the loss of knowledge, the return to
the universe.
Mathematics
Mathematics, too, encodes this
riddle. Zero and infinity are opposites, yet they reflect each other. Divide by
zero, and the result is infinity. Push infinity down into infinitesimals, and
you arrive at zero. The circle closes.
Calculus thrives on this
paradox: the infinite steps that converge into nothingness, the infinitesimal
fragments that sum to infinity. In both directions, the human mind meets a
wall. Beyond that wall, there is silence.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
whispers the same truth: a system can never explain itself fully. Knowledge can
never complete itself. The supreme knowledge is the recognition of its own
impossibility – which is to say, the supreme knowledge is surrender.
Language
If knowledge is exile, then
language is its first weapon. To name is to divide: this from that, me from
you, sacred from profane. Language lifted humanity out of the ocean of being
and gave us history, philosophy, and law. But it also tore us away.
And yet, in its deepest wisdom,
language knows its limits. The Upanishads fall into silence at the highest
truths. Zen teachers use paradox and nonsense to unhook the mind from words.
The Tao Te Ching begins: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.”
At the summit, language bows out.
Technology – our latest
flowering of language and logic – carries the same irony. Algorithms divide us
into ever-narrower selves, yet they also weave us into one global
consciousness. The cloud is a strange prototype of the cosmic mind. We are
building the machinery of separation, only to find that it mirrors the unity we
lost.
Psychology
Individually, the story
repeats. The infant begins without separation – no sense of self, just raw
immersion. Slowly, the ego develops, boundaries harden. The child learns to say
“I,” and exile begins. The adult becomes a fortress of memory, desire,
identity. But through meditation, through surrender, the layers can be peeled
away. Enlightenment is not discovery but return – a child’s innocence regained,
but now conscious.
Even in modern science,
psychedelics and neuroscience show us that the sense of self is not permanent.
It can dissolve. People feel most “alive” when they loose a sense of self – in
art, in work, in love. And when it does, people report the same thing sages
have always said: oneness, unity, peace.
The Paradox
Here is the paradox. To return
to nothing, we must strive. To dissolve knowledge, we must use knowledge. To
lose the self, the self must make the effort. Scriptures, philosophies, even
this essay, are ladders. They are meant to be climbed, only to be discarded.
Zen calls this the finger
pointing at the moon. Useful, but not the moon itself. The Bhagavad Gita calls
it nishkama karma – action without clinging to the fruit. One must build
the self in order to let it go.
The entire story of life, of
civilization, of the universe, is one great detour – a spiralling journey away
from the whole, so that the reunion may be conscious. Without separation, no
return. Without exile, no homecoming. Without knowledge, no surrender of
knowledge.
The End is the Beginning
The first speck of life arose
as a division. The last breath of the universe will dissolve that division. The
alpha and the omega, the aadi and the anadi, are one and the
same.
Everything we call history,
knowledge, civilization, progress, is nothing but the journey back to nothing.
The trees knew it by remaining still. The animals forgot it in their hunger.
Humanity complicated it into philosophies and scriptures. But in the end, all
paths lead back to the same ocean.
