Look out at the stars sometime or the empty sky and try to imagine how something came from nothing. Of course, to say that it all came from God simply begs the question, since then the question becomes: Where did God come from? It's a tremendous mystery: Why does existence exist, with its flowers and animals and intelligences?
Okay, with your permission I'm going to go out on a limb and construct a fantasy. This fantasy has nothing whatsoever to back it up except that it kind of makes sense.
Here's the central premise: That the only way that something can come from nothing is for equal and opposites to arise. For example, an electron and a positron (anti-electron) arise together and go out of existence together. But this fantasy goes much deeper than that.
It posits that for every positive there must be a negative, and that that is true in all dimensions, in all areas and in all possible ways.
A simple example in physics is Newton's Third Law, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I would just extend that to all things, in other words, for any possible kind of action in the universe there will be an equal and opposite reaction, and that this will be just as true, for instance, in the emotional sphere as in the physical one.
Another example would be Hegel's theory of the dialectic, that each movement creates its own opposite reaction, that they then merge somehow creating a new movement which then creates its opposite and so on.
By this logic, for existence to exist at all there much be an anti-existence somewhere. Now this could take the form of a literal anti-universe somewhere, which came into existence at the same time as "existence". Possible.
But more likely is that there is an equal and opposite amount of anti-matter and anti-energy in existence as there is matter and energy, and that this anti-matter and anti-energy are hidden away somehow.
My own fancy is to imagine a sphere, and further imagine that the surface of the sphere is the vacuum. So then if something pops out of the void, let's say a particle/wave of matter/energy which pops up off the surface of the sphere, that there will be an equal particle/wave of anti-matter/anti-energy that pops down within the sphere.
I use this analogy because it suggests that negative dimensions will be discovered. Just as the particle/wave of matter/energy pops up into four space/time dimensions, so the anti-particle/anti-wave must pop down into four anti-space/anti-time dimensions, to satisfy the law of opposites, and lie hidden there within the negative dimensions.
We see the same effect in another way in the Law of Reverse Effect, which I've written about before and will have more to say about in further articles.
As a brief example of the Law of Reverse Effect we see that a drug such as a stimulant creates a Primary Effect—in this case, stimulation—while it also creates an opposite Secondary Effect of gradually exhausting the body.
Such musings suggest that the Law of Opposites must exist everywhere, because by its reasoning nothing at all can come into existence except along with its opposite.
Thus darkness and light must exist in equal amounts, separated only by the mind, and subsumed into a larger darkness/light that is indistinguishable from the Absolute. Or, as in Zen, we could call it the Void, emtiness, nothingness.
We can see our final example in the act of giving. When we give something to someone we often expect a "return", that hopefully we're going to get something back. And maybe we will. But the Law of Opposites suggests that we receive our own gift in the very moment that we give ours.
In this fantasy, when we give something we receive an equal gift back at that very moment, namely the gift of the recipient. And what is the gift of the recipient? That he or she received the gift. Their willingness to receive the gift is the gift of the recipient.
Thus when we give something it's over. There's no point in waiting for something to come back because it already did, at the very moment we gave.
At that very moment we received the return gift of our gift, so that existence could maintain its eternal balance of equal and opposite actions and states, all existing in the deep oneness of the emptiness.
—jim sloman, 9.15.06
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