A Chinese friend of mine once said that the universe is like a baby inside the Great Mother.
Before birth there is the darkness of the womb - as a primordeal state. That must not be regarded as negative although it tends to be light that we yearn for in both everyday life and questions of ethics. For the unborn there are no choices to be made, none that could lead to an ill outcome. However, this leaves us with the problem of evil: is is not then, concidering the nature of things, dependent on circumstances or one's actions?
Let us think of a fetus as the universe in its state right after the very origin. In that case the Big Bang would be the conception and the birth the beginning of the cosmos as we know it, following the furnace of chaos during the first few moments of existence. And like the human being, the universe also grows, ages, changes and ultimately dies. Through the process of corrosion there will be nothing left of the body/matter except atoms, which too will decompose into energy as aeons pass. The theory suggests that the universe will have its end in a void of complete blackness (I for my part find this only being partially correct).
Stephen Hawking has pointed out that before the Big Bang time itself cannot have existed, which should mean that there has been no time for anything else to exist either. The time-dimension on the other hand is merely one part of the universe's continuity as another direction in it. So the mistake Hawking makes is that he looks at the world from the human point of view whereas the universe, or the forces behind it, have a perspective of their own (very much so). The cosmos, huge as it is, does remain relative for there are boundaries for it, and beyond those lies what we call nothingness, or wuji. The absolute can only be found in zero, yet its true nature lies beyond comprehension. We may know of it the way we gain knowledge about black holes: by making conclusions based on the phenomena we are able to observe. Thinking of the fetus metafore again me could say that the womb was there before the conception.
Mathematics really is a code of symbols descibing reality. There is an endless amount of numbers on both sides of zero, going all the way to infinity. But no measure of greatness counts when compared to what really is the core: any numerical value, infinity included, times zero is same as nothing. Zero marks the absolute.
We know by now that good and bad as concepts are relative, and thus come to understand the meaning of yin/yang. The two as words used to stand for hillsides, one set in the sunlight while the shadow is cast upon the other. With the sun moving the "yin" would of course become the "yang" and vice versa. This is the relativity that works in all reality, and speaking of ethics we must remember that sometimes there are no "good" choices; one just has to pick what he or she finds likely to be "less bad". Then again the difference between right and wrong stays clear in every case, at least as long as we have the strength to be honest to ourselves - there is always the path we should tread upon and not stray.
So should the concepts of right and wrong be seen as two opposite poles equal to each other? It's most easy to answer once we've studied the relation between true and false: there can certainly be truth without any existence of falsity, but at the same time falsity only emerges from absence of truth. This is exactly the same as the power ratio of God and Satan, the latter being a (distorted) mirror image of the whole - no more than a reflection. Therefore I dare to say that, dispite of any circumstances or what things may appear to be like, justice will prevail - over the course of billions and billions of years the corrosion is only for the false. What is True keeps growing from every little bud of it instead, infinitely.
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| Buddha, mankind and the cosmos - not the same, but similar. |
