For most of my life, I was handed tidy answers: God
created the world out of nothing. Period. But as I’ve traveled deeper into
Christ’s mystery, the Nag Hammadi writings, Hermetic thought, and the insights
of modern consciousness studies, I’ve come to see the question in a profoundly
different light.
I don’t believe there ever truly was “nothing.” There could
not have been. True nothingness is inconceivable — it cannot be experienced,
cannot be known, cannot even be thought. As soon as we speak the word
“nothing,” we’ve already posited awareness observing the absence, and awareness
itself is something. Consciousness cannot emerge from absolute void; it
simply is.
This realization reshapes everything. What we call
“existence” isn’t something that appeared in contrast to a prior nothingness.
Existence — Being — is eternal. The Hermetic axiom “As above, so below”
speaks to this: reality flows from a unity so complete it transcends opposites.
What we experience as the play of light and shadow, birth and death, form and
formlessness, is consciousness exploring itself through polarity. The universe
isn’t so much “created” as it is expressed.
The Divine Overflow
From this perspective, “why something?” becomes less about
causation and more about inevitability. Imagine God — not as an external
craftsman shaping clay, but as the infinite awareness in which all
possibilities dwell. In this ineffable fullness, creation isn’t a choice made
in time; it’s the natural overflowing of being.
I often return to the image from the Gospel of Truth —
Christ as the awakener who restores us from forgetfulness. Forgetfulness of
what? That we are in the Father, and the Father is in us. That creation isn’t
separate from Creator, but the Creator continually knowing Itself through
creation.
The Valentinian insight resonates deeply with me here: the
cosmos arises not out of necessity or compulsion but as the unfolding of divine
desire to know, to love, to experience. We are, each of us, participants in
God’s own remembrance. In this light, “nothing” never truly was. The Logos —
the living Word, the Christ — has always been, moving within the silence like
breath within breath.
Consciousness Cannot Not Be
Quantum physics now whispers what the mystics have long
proclaimed: the foundation of reality isn’t matter but relationship,
information, consciousness itself. Donald Hoffman talks about “conscious
agents,” Bernardo Kastrup speaks of “mind at large,” and Federico Faggin
describes consciousness as the primary substrate from which all forms arise.
These aren’t just abstract theories — they point toward a simple, radical
truth:
Consciousness is fundamental.
And if consciousness is fundamental, then “nothingness” — in
the absolute sense — isn’t even possible. Awareness cannot un-be. Even before
form, before time, before galaxies flung themselves into spirals of light,
awareness simply was. And because awareness was, the potential
for expression — for creation — has always been.
From this vantage, existence is inevitable. Not as an
accident of physics, not as a brute fact without reason, but as the eternal
nature of consciousness manifesting itself endlessly, cycling through
lifetimes, worlds, and dimensions without exhausting its own mystery.
Something, Everything, and the Great Remembering
But I think there’s more here than metaphysics. To me, this
question is deeply personal, because embedded in it is the longing to know who
we are, why we’re here, and what all this means.
If existence is the divine expressing itself, then every
life, every star, every moment of joy and suffering is part of that expression.
We’re not passive observers wandering through a meaningless cosmos — we are
fractals of the divine, individuated streams of consciousness experiencing both
poles of every possibility.
This is why reincarnation makes sense to me, not as
punishment or escape, but as divine exploration. Over countless lifetimes,
consciousness tastes love and loss, power and surrender, compassion and
cruelty, until it awakens to its own eternal nature. Eventually, we remember
what Jesus prayed in John 17 — “that they may be one, even as we are one.”
And here lies a beautiful paradox: while we are here,
embedded in form, we forget. This forgetfulness isn’t failure; it’s the very
mechanism by which the One becomes the many. Without forgetting, there is no
story, no striving, no awakening. But the Christ within us whispers constantly
of our origin and our destiny. Awakening is remembering that we have never been
separate, that “something” — this vast field of being — has always already been
divine.
The Shadow of Nothingness
Even so, the idea of “nothingness” haunts us. We fear it,
resist it, and yet are strangely drawn to it. Death confronts us with its
apparent void, and we wonder: does the candle of being simply flicker out?
But what I’ve come to believe is this: death doesn’t take us
into nothingness; it returns us to fullness. The “void” isn’t absence but
potential — the womb of creation itself. It’s the silence before the Word, the
space into which the Logos eternally speaks, “Let there be…”
This aligns beautifully with Hermetic thought: the One
contains all dualities, even existence and nonexistence, in perfect
equilibrium. From our limited vantage point, we see polarity; from the divine
perspective, there is only unity. What we call “nothingness” is simply the
formless aspect of the same reality we experience as “something.”
The Joy of Being
So, why does something exist rather than nothing? Because
existence is the natural state of reality. Because consciousness cannot help
but be. Because love — if I can use that word for the divine impulse — seeks
expression.
Paul hints at this when he writes in Acts: “In Him we
live and move and have our being.” We are within God, not outside of God.
And God is within us. When Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” he
isn’t claiming an exclusive status; he’s revealing the truth of all of us.
To awaken to this is to experience what the mystics call the
peace that passes understanding. Not because we’ve solved the riddle but
because we’ve dissolved into it. We stop asking why something exists rather
than nothing and start living in awe that anything exists at all — that we
exist, that the cosmos sings, that love calls us deeper still.
A Living Mystery
In the end, I don’t think this question has a final, logical
answer. It’s not meant to. The point isn’t to reduce existence to a neat
formula; the point is to stand in wonder before the mystery.
There was never truly “nothing.” There has always been
awareness, always been presence, always been the divine pulse breathing itself
into infinite forms. And now, here we are, each of us a spark of that eternal
fire, asking the ancient question — and in asking, becoming part of the answer.
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