The depth of our human existence is the gulf between us and the big bang. Unlike all other creatures, we have peered into the abyss of time and retraced the sequence of events that brought us here.
Is it possible to overemphasize this fact? Among the 8.7 million species currently on the planet (as well as the four billion species that evolved and went extinct), sapiens alone has sought out and discovered our origins.
As of this writing, we can’t quite grasp what we’re looking at 13.8 billion years ago: an object with zero dimensions and infinite mass. Really? Maybe not. After all, time hasn’t even begun at this point.
A Planck instant later, when time does begin, it arrives with twenty-five additional dimensions. Two of them provide the boundary surface on which the others materialize as spin vortices. They interact and create volume through an enigmatic force: inflation, which expands space at many times the speed of light.
For a fleeting moment at the core of this dark expanse, the entire energy of our universe is a quantum event. What does it look like? Like nothing we’d ever encounter in our everyday world.
The universe exists at the beginning of time as a wave state, a probability pattern, similar to an electron orbital. It has a specific shape consisting of several components, likely a torus that has a lobe appearing above the donut-hole and another below.
For that one original instant, everything that will ever be is a harmonic standing wave! Everything is light, a quantum configuration of energy that will cool into matter/antimatter and explode, scattering galaxies.
Now, for the first time in human history, we know what to make of that instant of light that has made us. We don’t yet fathom the source of the big bang’s prodigious energy or why we are here, flung into the accelerating dark.
But we are not orphans of the light. We recognize our origin and have seen that the fire of creation has a shape. We are shadows holding the shape of that cosmic radiance. And whether we call it entelechy, Dao, or the Force, that shape holds us, too.