“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
This famous quote by Jefferson, the opening line of TheDeclaration of Independence, has long been the battle cry for freedom and equality.
Since the time I was a child, I felt chilled by the power and the wisdom in these words. I never doubted for a moment that these words were true because I wanted them to be true.
Is this really true?
Is it self-evident that all men are created equal? What if we substituted ‘gorillas’ instead of men. Are all gorillas created equal? Are all snakes created equal? What about women? Are all women created equal as well?
Ruby Bridges was the little girl accompanied by Federal Agents to the first day of integrated school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Norman Rockwell immortalized her in his illustration.
“She has a lot of potential,” someone said. That means that buried within her is a chance, a proclivity to succeed at a task. That potential is not something that exists in the present, but something that could come to exist in the future. Potential does not exist in the present except as a vision or concept but it is a chance of action in the future. She can either fill her potential or fail to do so.
Potentiality is the highway upon which evolution is built. From the appearance of the first bursts of energy to the choices we make on a moment-to-moment basis, we are guided and ruled by future potentiality. That is what brings the world to our senses.
I think it is quite important to find and relate a way that the physical world comes into being. Ontology is about the foundations of being itself.
If energy cannot be created, then all the energy that ever existed still exists, albeit in different forms. That in itself is quite humbling. We are not only made from stardust, but the very atoms in our bodies are ancient.
If the universe is a finite composite of existing things, then it too had a beginning––begging the question as to what was here before the universe.
If the universe is infinite and eternal, then we would not be here at all. Why? Because if energy cannot be created, the universe cannot forever expand into nothingness. Energy would be spread so thin that it could not interact in an eternity.
The other option, of course, is that energy can be created, but this runs counter to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics which declares it cannot be created.
SO WHAT HAPPENED?
We know now that it was primal energy that was present before the universe because it cannot be created. We do not know beyond doubt that mass of any kind was present. If mass were present, it would have been from a previous universe. However mass cannot travel at light speed, whereas energy can. It is easier to accept that there was no mass before the emergence of the universe, as matter is energy in a temporal form. The primal potential energy that existed before time and space, precipitated mass from the potential energy that has always existed.
Potentiality has no physical being. It is a property of a system, not of an individual body or particle. As such, it does not come into existence until it becomes kinetic energy. Energy is only manifest when it is released in time and space. Even space contains potential energy.
Potential energy need not have EXISTED before the universe, but being a property of a natural system, it comes into existence when movement occurs. Primal energy is timeless (immortal), because it cannot be created, and exists only when in motion. At rest, it is a potentiality that needs no measures of space or time until movement occurs. It is the movement that requires energy to materialize from the potential to the actionably manifest. The potential energy in its pure form requires no time or space. It is the perception of movement that actuates the chain of evolution.
That which is beyond the boundary of the universe is the void itself. It is not anything. It is not in time and space. Voidness can be infinite because there is nothing there at all. You cannot travel there because it is not there. You cannot see it because it is invisible. Voidness is not simply the stillness of quantum fields without movement. Voidness is the infinity of nothingness, the original state of non-existence.
But is there something that can be eternally held in the nothingness of the void? Can the void hold potentiality? Potentiality is not something real––not something that exists. It has no definite time and occupies no space. It is the seed of something that can possibly exist.
If the void is capable of holding potentiality (as must be the case), then it must have the ability to store both the potentiality of energy and the potentiality of awareness.
Potentiality is not actuality. It need not be in time and space. It can, like the void, be infinite. From the beginning, to begin the unveiling of a universe, potential energy must exist within the void. This potentiality of the void would take up no time or occupy any space because neither space nor time exists in the non-dimensional. Further, if the void can hold potential energy, then it can hold potential awareness and the potential intellect of the natural mind. The void’s potential information can serve as a two-dimensional blueprint for the unveiling of a universe.
We must then suspect that awareness and infinite energy have their origin in the void. They do not exist there, but the probability that they can exist must be harbored in the void.
The third fundamental for universe formation is information––energy, awareness, and information. These are the three fundamentals. All are invisible and all are infinite––without form or body.
With these three fundamentals, the void has the ability to bring the universe into existence within a single point. Excitation in the potential eternal energy creates an eigenstate in the zero-dimension, a dimension similar to the void––in that it is outside space and time––but unlike the void in that the newly-released energy became kinetic instead of potential and was perceived by the potential for awareness in the void.
The zero-dimension is infinite in that it sprang from the void by actuating the void’s potentiality.
When I was very young, I did not know the world. The world made itself known to me quite gradually, in small steps that I can now only imagine. I cannot remember these steps. They happened before memory was born. I felt these steps.
Discomfort was a feeling that I learned quickly to correct. My first feelings were those untenable positions which caused me to turn away from irritation into a position of familiarity and contentment.
I kicked and moved to find my snugness, not knowing or caring that my attempt to find relief caused pain to another.
The experience of the world of the womb was lost to me. The world was making itself known, but I knew nothing of the world. I knew nothing about myself for I was not a self. I was as close to being nothing as I have ever been.
Yet in this nothing there was feeling. There was touch. There were senses. I could hear the world making music and the sounds of the body in which I was immersed. Because I did not breath, I could not smell. Because I had no smell, I could not taste. Because I had no eyes I could not see. But there was touch and there was sound and there was feeling. The rest would come later.
The world makes itself known to us slowly.
The distress that I felt at the moment of my birth was sudden and momentous. I left the familiar world of water and warmth, felt the pressure of extreme movement that I had never felt before. The world made me know of constriction and limits. I felt movement and the pressures of my movement, then release to an alien place that made me feel misery. I longed briefly to return to what I had forever known and felt the strange coldness that I had never felt before. Air replaced water. I opened my mouth and tasted of the air. The air forced its way into me and I smelled the horrid stench of it for the first time. I became so agonizingly uncomfortable that I cried.
Since that first forlorn cry that expressed both my surprise and extreme distress, the world has continued to make itself known to me.
That process has not changed much.
The instinct to recoil from aggravation and hurt and return to a known luxury has been retained, but the added senses produced a curiosity to know more about that which caused me displeasure.
In giant strides of courage, I accepted some irritation and began to realize that there was more to everything than I had learned.
Some learning produced not only pleasure but sensations that I welcomed with bright smiles. I knew nothing of time and little of space. I was immersed fully in the now. Then I opened my eyes and the world came roaring in.
It takes both awareness and information processing for dimensions to come into view. To see something in three dimensions, one has to view from outside and above the apparent dimensions. A circle on a plane—like a drawing on paper—does not appear as a sphere until viewed from above the plane. The added property of the height, added to the width and length, creates an object in space that becomes manifest in three dimensions, where height and width, and length are experienced.
The third-dimension requires conscious awareness in that it must be seen from above the plane to become an independent object. Two-dimensional objects are not distinguished from their background until they are observed from above the plane.
Duration is not only an element of time but an element of length. “Length” commonly refers to physical size, as in the length, width, and depth of an object. Duration measures the time period, but the term length is also used to define a period of time as in: “How long have you been waiting?”
ZERO DIMENSION
Being equals existence. Nothing cannot exist because nothing has no being. Nothing was always a human conception, not a natural fact. The Arabian people, Babylonians, and the Mayans all came up with the conception of zero.
The ideas of infinities and endless eternities are foreign to human thought. To believe that one can travel on forever and never see an edge of the universe feels intuitively preposterous. To believe that time goes on infinitely forward and eternally backward is an awkward conception. We all have a hard time coming to terms with infinity. The idea that space is infinite means that infinitely huge sections of space can never be seen. What would be the point in that? We always need a point on which to anchor.
The same holds true for the universe. All things in space and time have beginnings and ends. They are finite. Yet, because the finite exists, then there must be that which is not finite. It is called the infinite. The ‘undefined’ is an even better term.
The same is true of nothing. Nothing does not exist. It is the opposite of existence in its ‘non-existence’.
Yet, nothing exists. It also does not exist. Or is it in a ‘superposition’ where it is both?
The reason infinity can go on forever is that there is nothing there at all. Without time and space, there are no things… nothing.
If the infinite does not exist in time and space, does it exist at all? Is there a geometric plane above time and space where awareness can experience no time and no space and still be aware?
I believe the answer to that is, yes. There is the point… the universal point, the invisible center of every circle in the universe. That point is one-dimensional because it is all there is––just one single point that contains the entire universe. No matter how large or small this point is thought to be, it is still all there is and it is the center of everything everywhere.
We can only speculate about the original point and how the physical world emerges from this super-positioned point that is every place and at the center of everything. The infinite includes the finite, the indefinite, and all that all exists.
I think it is imperative to come to terms with infinity. We need to understand that which is beyond time and space. It is the obvious source of existence and the physical universe. We cannot get away from a first cause that came from nothing. For explanation, some turn to the idea of an eternal universe. Yet, that theory cannot take wing and fly as a conception in the temporal world where all begins and ends. Even if energy is fundamental, the question remains: “From what did it spring?” Is energy eternal? Did it come from nothing?
The zero-dimension must be indefinite. It cannot be more than a point or it would be two-dimensional. It cannot be less than a point or it would have no existence. As such, the indefinite holds everything within it, including the finite. The indefinite is not limited by dimensional views. The indefinite has no reason to distinguish between the realms of physical and mental being for they are molded as one.
Consciousness creates the idea of time, then measures the duration as well. We need to understand that the realization of our world is both a mental conception and a physical reality. The world around us has myriads of viewpoints that change as our consciousness moves through the now. The person I call myself is but a collection of memories, hereditary information, experiences, learning, emotions, and patterns of thinking. We are here in the now because this is the only place for us to be. We cannot be in the past or the future except in mental processes. The physicality of our existence changes as the mental universe changes. Being in the now is a conscious and continuous mental state.
Our self-consciousness creates the dichotomy between mental being and physical being. They are two separate states of awareness. Each is equally welcome and both have their own dimensional viewpoints, complete duplicates of one another except one is coded into the physical state and the other is informational and coded into the mental state. The informational data of the universe is coded in the mental aspect (2-D). It is a part of the infinite while simultaneously, through entanglement, the data is physically encoded in the temporal world of physicality.
We are always in the middle. We create the ideas of time and motion and eternity and project them into a timeless era where they do not belong. Timelessness must exist, though we can barely imagine it. Experience, we deduce, cannot be had without events in time. How, then, can timelessness be possible?
It is possible because the now is always present. To be present in the now requires no thought or action at all. It simply is. Physical change occurs in time but time is not the cause of the change. It is the movement of conscious awareness through the eternal line of the electric now that creates change. Change is a movement that when measured, becomes time. But it is the conscious awareness that is doing the movement. It is the awareness that creates the change we call movement. The physical counterpoint of awareness is pressure, the force responsible for all physical movement.
We can surmise that the tool called mathematics springs from a natural source because the universe exhibits mathematical precision and patterns from the very start. Perhaps human minds create mathematics, but the muse is Nature itself. Mathematics and equations are commonly used to define what physical changes can produce.
In order to be useful, knowledge and information must be stored. Genetics and the nervous system are where we store our personal data. I think that the totality of this information and experience is stored mentally in the second dimension and physically in the third. The infinite plane of the second-dimension is similar to a universal soft drive that records all reality perpetually. Alas, this can probably never be proved, but it makes for great hope. It would answer the question as to why the universe destroys and recreates its parts.
Knowledge and experience form our four-dimensional viewpoints. Modern viewpoints revolve around the physical aspects of the mind. These scientific interpretations often hold that the mind is roughly identical to the brain and is reducible to physical phenomena such as the firing of neurons and the chemical encodings of memory.
Yet, we did not always think in this manner. Throughout the age of human reasoning, the mind has been connected to the psyche. The term “soul” is often used synonymously with the psyche—which includes the totality of the human mind, both the conscious and unconscious elements. The soul has long been thought to be the immortal aspect of the human condition, a ghostly spirit where the personality and moral compass resides.
Carl Jung used the words ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ as they are the same word in the German language. Of this he wrote: “I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche, I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality”. (Jung, 1971: Def. 48 par. 797)
In a universe paired with a mental aspect and a physical aspect, would the realities in each pair be different? The first dimension of the one point would be the same in both, but the second dimension of the two points becoming connected to form a line would be different. It is through this difference that they come to be independent entities. If one point is infinite and the other is temporal, then the world line of the eternal second dimension would be a straight line to infinity in the mental state. Meanwhile, the world line of the finite point would curve and eventually return to its own starting point, creating an orbit—a geometric figure. It would be temporal and physical because it had a beginning and an ending.
Infinity is not one thing. Even infinity must be paired to its opposite, the finite. Infinity simply has no beginning nor end. There can be many infinities in a larger infinity because small infinities, like endless numbers, take up no space at all and are not in time.
Objects exist beyond my personal awareness—such as the place I dwell, the people I know, and the universe I inhabit. They too exist in the now. They are a product of consciousness, but they cannot be of my consciousness alone. They are in the consciousness of all.
We all have a similar basic vision of the world about us. A common sharing of conscious knowledge between existing entities and objects obviously occurs––though much of nature works through an unconscious mental process. Our conceptions reside in the mental state and deal directly with the infinite process of energy transformation and electrical connections. This mental state has to be of universal proportion—just as the physical state is of universal proportion.
When we realize that objective awareness is essential for the very existence of objects, we come to understand the unity of all. We are all objects. We are mental conceptions, dreams that are molded together in the one universe that provides adventure, knowledge, and experience for all from the interactions of its individual parts.
About 1,500 galaxies are visible in this deep view of the universe, taken by allowing the Hubble Space Telescope to stare at the same tiny patch of sky for 10 consecutive days in 1995. The image covers an area of sky only about the width of a dime viewed from 75 feet away.
“Who knows what is in the mind of God?”
People will tell us that “God knows all.
”The common conception of God is that of a divine being
that creates and governs the universe.
If God knows what everyone is thinking,
knows where everyone has been,
and knows what they all will be,
what a huge amount of information that would be.
We also must realize that the Earth
is a small speck of dust in a commonplace galaxy.
There are trillions of stars and billions of galaxies.
Try to imagine a mind that knows all this.What would it be like?
One thing is certain. It would not be like the human mind.
It would be more like universal consciousness.
But would God even have a self?
Is God self-aware?
What need would God have for self-awareness?
Self-awareness is a curse and a blessing.
It creates loneliness.
It creates unhappiness.
If God were self-aware, God would be lonely.
Does God get lonely?
The self can only be aware of its self by knowing
that something from the outside is not the self.
If God is everything, then what would exist outside God
for God to be self-aware?
If God isn’t everything then what is this thing outside
that is not God?
God does not need a brain.
If God is everything, then God is a brain.
An observer does not need to be self-aware.
A mouse observes the cheese with no sense of self.
The world existed before self-awareness.
So, as far as we can tell (and surely we know little),
the universe has only had self-awareness
for a minute fraction of an eternal epoch.
The universe has gotten along quite well
for billions of years without self-awareness.
Do we live in a fraction of an eon when the mud
stands up and sees that there are others?
Does that matter at all to the mind of God
that has no self and no need for a self?
After all, if God were present before anything existed,
then God will be present when everything has passed away.
Written by Sky Felker, Age 10; illustrations by Sky
It was a dark and stormy night when suddenly the phone rang at Harmony’s. Harmony is a smart girl with brown hair. She is 10 years old. She has a pet cat named Chilly. Harmony is a spy. Harmony anxiously ran down the stairs with her cat on her shoulder. Chilly has orange fur and black triangles on her face. Chilly has black paws and is also a spy, like Harmony.
Harmony picked up the phone. “Hello… who is this?” she asked.
“It is Martin,” he answered. Martin was Harmony’s boss. Martin is also a spy. He has red hair and his name is not really Martin. His name is CoSpy303. Martin is his code name.
“I have a mission for you,” said Martin. “There have been reports of animals and cheese disappearing.”
“Doctor McAfee,” said Harmony and Martin together.
Doctor McAfee is the worst villain of all.
Oh, by the way, Harmony was still wearing her pajamas.
“Who but Doctor McAfee,” she exclaimed. “He’s the only villain who steals pets and cheese.
“I’ll start looking at files in the morning,” said Harmony as she went upstairs to bed.
In the morning, she went downstairs to eat breakfast and get an early start on the files. When she was done with breakfast, she went up to her room.
Later, she walked around the block and talked to all of the victims. She stopped at Mrs. McRuddy’s house first.
“Hello, Mrs. McRuddy. Can you tell me what happened? asked Harmony.
“Well, I was going to the grocery store and when I came back my sloth Fefe was gone and so was all my cheese.”
“Can you tell me what time it was?” asked Harmony.
“It was on Thursday at 3PM.” Mrs. McRuddy. replied.
“Thank you,” said Harmony. Then she went around and asked all the people about the crime, then she went home with the data,
“Hmmm, look, Chilly. “Mrs. McRuddy and Mr. Landry and Lilly all have something in common, but I can’t quite put my finger on it,” said Harmony.
“Meow,” said Chilly.
“I know. I’m hungry too,” said Harmony, so they went out to lunch and got ice cream.
“Oh, Chilly, I’ve got it. What they have in common is the date and the time. All of their pets and cheese went missing on the same day and at the same time,” exclaimed Harmony.
“Meow,” said Chilly.
“That means he will go to Mr. Zack’s house next on Thursday at 3:00.”
On Thursday they went to Mr. Zack’s house at three, but Doctor McAfee did not show up.
“Maybe we were wrong. Maybe that’s not the pattern,” said Harmony.
She went to Mrs. McRuddy’s house and asked. “What did your pet have to eat just before you left?”
“She got cheese, but that was strange cheese,” said Mrs. McRuddy.
“Can you tell me what it looked like?” asked Harmony.
“It looked like cheese, but with red flashy things,” explained Mrs. McRuddy.
“Very strange,” said Harmony, She decided to visit the other houses once more, then went home.
“I don’t see anything wrong with the cheeses,” Harmony said.
“Meow,” said Chilly.
“Don’t be silly, Chilly… wait a minute. They do look like robots… zoom in close and they ARE robots,” said Harmony. “We must run to Mr. Zack’s house.”
At Mr. Zack’s, they found Doctor McAfee switching the cheese so that Mr. Zack’s cat would go to Doctor McAfee.
“I hope you have fun in jail because that’s where you are headed,” said Harmony. Then she called the police and they were there in two minutes.
“Thank you, Harmony,” said the police.
“You’re welcome,” said Harmony.
And so, that is how Harmony defeated Doctor McAfee.
Dimensions are mental constructs. A dimension is a measurement of something. These measurements are in the mental world of conscious awareness. We can only measure things with our conscious intellect. When we become aware of a dimension, it is a viewpoint.
This parade of dimensions begins with the zero-dimension, a non-dimensional viewpoint without material content. For dimensions to come into view, both awareness and information processing is required. That is why the zero-dimension is a mental world of awareness. It precedes the existence of being. This non-material zero-dimension is without time, without space and is eternally present everywhere at once. The zero dimension is the source of the awareness that projects the universe into being.
This is where each of us came from before birth and possibly the same non-place that we dwell in when we die. We all remember this place. Since we have all experienced the place where our awareness of ourselves was united with everything before we began to exist in this time and space. Everyone has experienced an infinity of endlessness.
Timelessness can be pictured as a sleeping form of awareness that—when awakened—develops into the recognition of sensory touches and perceptions. In time, awareness births the subconsciousness and the self-consciousness.
As the universe is born from infinity, we are as well. Infinity is that which was before this life experience. The world about us is similar to a continuous dream that is made real by our consciousness awareness.
Because the zero dimension is static and unchanging, the first and second dimensional structures are also timeless in that they are everywhere at once.
To see something in three dimensions, one has to view from outside and above the apparent dimensions. A circle on a plane—like a drawing on paper—does not appear as a sphere until viewed from above the plane. The added dimensions of height, width, length, and duration create a space that becomes visible in three dimensions while height, width, and length are being experienced.
Duration is not only an element of time but it is also an element of length. “Length” commonly refers to physical size, as in the length, the width, and depth of an object. Duration measures the time period, but the term length is also used to define a period of time as in: “How long have you been waiting?”
When and space and time are molded into a common dimension, they become that fourth-dimensional viewpoint which Einstein called spacetime.
Scientists tell us that the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago. Through the eons that passed, our modern lives evolved from nothing into the complex situations that we find ourselves immersed in and call the present time. Everyone seems to have a theory of why this is so. Some ideas seem much better than others, yet all lead to that same demise that our emotional states want desperately to reject, the cessation of being itself.
We try to contemplate the nature of the world—develop ideas about the building blocks of nature that create this world around us—by looking into the atoms that make our physical universe searching for the smallest particles.
Is there such a thing as the smallest particles? How could there be? Something would always be smaller than the smallest until it disappeared into infinity—which is exactly what matter seems to do.
Matter seems to be made of vibrating wave frequencies. Electrons have different states of energy. We see solidity in our immediate world, but the micro world seems to be a sea of informational energy that creates the appearance of solidity, while most of the manifest universe is a vacuum in space. We do not live in the micro-world. We know that if we crash into these solid mountains of elemental rocks, it will injure or destroy us.
Donald Hoffman—professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine—wrote: “On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them—whether we are conscious humans or inanimate measuring devices. Experiment after experiment has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
Hoffman continues: “Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers—spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”
In other words, Hoffman thinks that the universe itself if a mental conception composed of independent conscious agents with varying degrees of complexity, all of which are but informational viewpoints that communicate with one another. From the smallest to the largest, all are composed of the same non-material—awareness and consciousness. Communicating conscious agents can merge to form other conscious agents.
DOES IT MATTER?
Does it matter much if the universe is a mental conception or a physical reality? Are the results not the same? Both lead to the same questions and dilemmas either way. Saying that nothing really exists does not change anything because it still exists. Notions that awareness can sleep, wake, be unaware, and dream again through infinity is the most interesting mythos.
Can an understanding of the cosmos as a mental conception be an emotional solace to existential anxiety?
Life becomes one riddle after another for the thinking person. Solving one riddle creates many more to take their place. Debunking one myth leads to another, as the world is both mystic and mythic.
We peer into the universe with our telescopes and our probes and find awe-inspiring beauty of all kinds. Who can object to the beauty of Saturn’s rings set in the blackness of the sky or the wonderful things that nature provides for our eyes and ears to hear and see? At the same time, we wonder why these things even exist for us to see. Why should the beauty of the world go unseen and unappreciated for billions of years, waiting to be seen and appreciated for billions of years while intelligent life on Earth evolves enough to care about it? Who or what experienced these wonders before the dawn of time or the emergence of living things? What was the observer that brought our universe into view?
This is where the idea of a mental conception of the world is most convincing. In order for there to have been an evolutionary past through the birthing of elements in stars, there had to be an observer.
Many believe that God is the creator of the universe and experienced the void of the universe alone long before the world came into being, but everyone has their own conception of what this God might be. The Abrahamic religions give God a male gender, a father figure—though giving birth to the universe seems to be a female attribute. Cultures create their own myths to explain their existence.
In the long run, does it matter whether God created the universe (as some religions claim) or physicality came into being and evolved into the present (as some scientists believe)? Either point of view is obsolete with quantum mechanics. Yet, both views point to an event from an undefinable zero dimension. Whether we call it Creation or the Big Bang, we refer to the same event that came from beyond time and space.
Some assume our universe came from the remnants of a previous universe. Some think it came from nothing at all, and some say something cannot come from nothing.
I, for one, find it much easier to visualize timelessness than to envision the beginnings and endings of time. I also find it easy to visualize timelessness as having no concept of duration yet is focused on experience instead. The timelessness of the dimensions above our own experience seems to perfectly balance our mortal experiences with the immortal potential of our existence. Duration is a concept stamped upon experience by intellectual branders. Someone dreamed up the idea of measuring time but did not really comprehend the nature of timelessness and pure experience. How long the experience is felt is not nearly as important as the experience itself.
Where did our consciousness reside before we came to be born? Is it possibly the same non-place in which we dwell when we die? We have all experienced the place where our awareness of ourselves was blank and united with everything. Before we began to exist in this time and space, we all experienced a blank infinity of time and memory. On a personal level, eternity is that which your consciousness was before this life experience. Eternity can be pictured as a sleeping form of awareness that—when awakened—develops sensory experiences such as touch and perceptions. In time, the subconscious and the self-conscious carry out the business of life and survival. As the universe is born from infinity, we are as well. Infinity is that which was before this life experience. The world about us is similar to a continuous dream that is made real by our conscious awareness.
Because the zero dimension is static and unchanging, the first and second dimensional structures are also timeless in that they are everywhere at once. That there is structure in the lower dimensions has some experimental evidence.
“So far, there may already be one piece of experimental evidence for the existence of a lower-dimensional structure at a higher energy scale. When observing families of cosmic ray particles in space, scientists found that, at energies higher than 1 TeV, the main energy fluxes appear to align in a two-dimensional plane. This means that, above a certain energy level, particles propagate in two dimensions rather than three dimensions.” (https://phys.org/news/2011-03-physicists-dimensions-universe.html#jCp)
The appearance of first and second dimensions begin the structure of our physical universe. Time is of no concern in these dimensions. The second-dimension creates space where energies can move and react, physical fields can form universally in this dimension. The third dimension ads depth and height and the fourth expands space by creating the duration that we know as time.
Everything in the universe is projected in three dimensions from its zero dimensional source. It has been called the Void, God, Infinity, First Cause, The Great Spirit, Universal Mind, or many other such name devised to express the idea of an unknowable non-thing that is beyond existence, being and conception.
Infinity, since it contains all things and all events began from within it, must be the source of the physical laws that we discover in nature. The finite is contained within infinity.
INFINITY AND THE UNIVERSE
There are those who cannot accept that there is such a thing as infinity. They consider infinity a simple conception or a mathematical symbol. For some people, the dogmatic religious world hurt them emotionally when they came realize that that the dogma the world fed them is false.
But it is not that easy to dismiss infinity. If something is finite, then there must be something that is not finite. That would be the infinite.
1 a: the quality of being infinite. b: unlimited extent of time, space, or quantity: boundlessness. 2: an indefinitely great number or amount such as an infinity of stars.
When we think about how the world about us came to be, we have only two choices. It has a beginning or it is endless and has no beginning. Having no beginning leaves us in a quandary, as the universe should have run out of energy and depleted itself long, long ago. There would have to be a continual creation of new energy to replace that which was lost to the entropy of dissipation for a universe to be eternal.
If no universe existed before the Big Bang, then what was there? What was in its place when there was no place? Nothing? But nothing cannot exist because it has no being. The ‘it’ we seek cannot be anything but infinite and boundless nothingness that cannot have existence.
The world, it is said, cannot come from nothing. ‘Nothingness’ may not operate under the same laws of physics by which ‘somethingness’ operates. We cannot assume anything about the physics within nothingness. We cannot really say anything about what nothing is.
However, there are potentially satisfactory answers to the puzzle of eternity, infinity, and first causes. These answers are simple to understand by any person that is able to shed his or her preconceptions that have been fostered by the cultural experience.
That answer is that physical reality is built in dimensional layers. The first dimension is infinite and eternal—no beginning nor endings—no particular spot in space nor place in time.
The first dimension is an infinite point that contains all that is possible to exist within it because it is all that exists. It is much like the singularity that the Big Bang theorists posit as the infinity dense point from which all came. The universe always exists within this eternal first-dimension, but not in physical form.
The second-dimension is a flat plane that spreads in all directions from the infinite point. Being infinite as well, this dimension has no beginnings and endings. This second-dimension is without the perception of time but originates all further dimensional experience. It is the foundation for the concept of space.
Ultimately, dimensions are viewpoints. Viewpoints are mental constructions. Each dimension contains all the information from the previous dimension while adding important new perceptions.
The two-dimensional line, for example, is the point replicating itself over and over, appearing to travel in a straight line, a vector from the original infinite point. The universal lines that form the universal field is the repetition of the infinite point throughout space. The point is endless and timelessly recurrent. By the expansion of its being, the point fuses with those primal copies of itself to form space and a second dimension.That fusion releases vast amounts of virtual energy that radiates from the original point to form myriads of universal fields. As this radiation spreads there is an expansion of space in the second-dimension.
It is the second dimension that contains the blueprint for the three-dimensional world we see with height, length, and width. The two-dimensional universe is flat, like a blueprint. The beginning of the universe is easily comprehended if we hold the view that the physical laws which determine the mathematics, probabilities, and shapes essential to universal existence exists in the second dimension. We do not create these laws and principles. We discover them.
As a picture of the natural world can be recorded on flat surfaces like paper and film from the artist’s perspective, the second dimension can hold our three-dimensional viewpoint in an encoded series of digital bits.
The third and fourth dimensions limit the space of the second, changing its physicality to a closed, temporal space where duration, height, volume, and depth become apparent. The process can be visualized as similar to the Japanese art of origami where three dimensional space is unfolded from the two dimensional patterns. By the folding of space, volume, height, and width emerge in a three-dimensional universe, but some space is lost in the process, the same way that some paper is lost on origamic folds. The three-dimensional universe is finite.
The step to physical reality comes through events in four-dimensional space.
Four-dimensional space combines time and duration with three dimensional space. It is the basis for the theory of relativity. Time and space are fused and affect one another as the fourth-dimension emerges and posits another aspect to the third dimensional viewpoint.
In this simple explanation of dimensions, there is a missing ingredient of vital importance to the universe—the mental component of the observation.
THE MENTAL UNIVERSE
Awareness precedes physical existence in quantum mechanics. Awareness is invisible. It cannot be touched or measured, yet it is ever-present even when we are not conscious of it. Awareness builds consciousness through the fusion of random information into organized information.
The cosmos is projected into being from a non-dimensional and timeless zero dimension. Even if the remains of previous universes should form the present incarnation, those first universes have to start somewhere. That somewhere is beyond time. It has to come from the non-dimensional.
What we experience comes from our personal consciousness—our awareness of being in the moment. What is this awareness? Is it a sense that arises from our human brains and nervous systems? If so, then awareness dies when we die. Are plants are aware? Are microbes aware? If you think they are not, perhaps you have the wrong conception of what awareness is.
Many people think that awareness emerges late in evolutionary history. To some, it is unthinkable that awareness should precede evolutionary development. Consider an unthinking rock or an ignorant chemical reaction. Where is this awareness in primal nature? What causes awareness to rise in the first place? Is it inherent in the natural order? Are reactions awareness, or are we mincing words? Are interactions aware?
In quantum physics an observer and an interaction is the same thing. Only objects interact. Even a particle colliding with another particle is an interaction and therefore an observation as well. Observations and interactions do not need to have to have concepts to produce effects and events. They are the events.
Our awareness uses the tools of perception to identity itself and the outer world. Were dinosaurs unaware? Are single-celled life forms unaware? A better question is to ask if they have any form of perception. Obviously, if they react to stimuli they have some form of perception. If they have perception, they have awareness—not on the grand scale that mammals have developed, but their reaction to observation and touch shows that they have awareness built into their systems.
Quantum mechanics posits that the universe is a connected unit, each part having an effect upon another. Everything in space and time has a cause and an effect. If it has no cause and effect, it is not in space and time. Quantum mechanics also posits that events must have an observer/interaction to be an event. The event itself would not happen unless and until it is observed. The interaction itself is an observation.
This is another clue that the world might be a mental system with a physical component. Observers are generally thought of as being people, but they can also be a system. An observer is a person or a system that observes. In other words, before we can have a world, we need events. To have events we need an observer. To have an observation we need awareness of an object or an event.
The essential quality for an observation or an interaction is to have awareness of an object. Awareness, then, is the first cause for the existence of time and space. All things are not only produced by awareness in its myriads of localized forms, but all things are formed from the eternal and non-material awareness which has always been present in the eternal now.
Something has to be a first cause for the parade of time and space to exist. This first cause cannot be material, yet the material world was produced from it. Our dreams are not material nor real, but the fields involved in neural synapses produce what appear as images in our minds. This is similar to the construction of the universe as well.
Awareness is invisible. It is not something that we can touch or measure, yet it is ever present even when we are not consciously aware of anything.
Awareness is the observer that is awakened by reactions to objects from within and outside ourselves. These reactions to our inner and outer worlds create information that eventually organizes itself and becomes experience.
Awareness does not need the concept of time and space. It creates time and space when it awakens to stimulus from another.
Awareness is all that is necessary for the building of a universe.
Awareness is the proper name for the concept of the mind of God.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 
Kenneth Harper Finton 