Cosmogenesis

2. Alpha + Omega = OM

Background image: Axwell Music

Some people who attain a high degree of enlightenment tell us that the ultimate reality is nothing ~ a kind of blissful non-being, Nirvana. Others say that this big blankness is merely a door or barrier to an incredible realm beyond: a stateless state, an implacable place, of infinite magnitude and absolute perfection. This is the unthinkable, unspeakable Thing-In-Itself which is designated by the ineffable mantra OM. Within this OM is All and Everything, seamlessly conjoined with Nil and Nothing ~ so Nirvana is only the next-to-last stop before OM.

If OM is the Truth, then the real riddle of the cosmos ~ the first eternal question that must be answered ~ is why it ever emerges from its sublime self-containment, so that you and me and the rest of the universe can one day come to be. The answer is given in the Prelude: it doesn’t. We’re still there right now, but we don’t know it because our awareness of OM as the only reality is clouded by the many veils that overlay it and create the mirrored images that we perceive as the world around us.

Of course this answer just pushes the riddle to the next layer of perplexity ~ the skeptical mind can’t accept that it’s all done with mirrors, just as it can no longer believe in the miracle of “Let there be light”. So I offer the next best answer, favored by many enlightened minds: the OM, which is to say the whole of reality, breathes in and out. This makes perfect sense, since it’s one big living thing. From our perspective as small living things occupying only parts of reality, the breathing rhythm of the OM is incredibly long. In terms of modern cosmology, each out-breath lasts from the first nanosecond of the Big Bang all the way until the universe reaches its point of maximum expansion, perhaps twenty-five billion years. Then the in-breath is the cosmic contraction, lasting just as long and ending in the Big Gulp, the fusion of all matter and energy back into one. Older cosmologies had more accurate details, and I draw upon some of them as I write my story.

OM is a hermetic melding of all opposites: being and non-being, light and dark, yang and yin, I and thou, in a perfect all-encompassing whole. OM is absolute consciousness, but does not know itself, because self-awareness would be a flaw in its perfection ~ there is no need to know, for OM has no need of anything. In OM there is absolute satisfaction, profound balance and repose, not inclining in any direction. There is utterly adamant indifference ~ not the jaded, dispirited state which humans call by this word, but its opposite: a state of grandeur beyond imagination, beyond even the glory of God. OM is the true Alpha and Omega, the end and the beginning united in divine stasis ~ unborn and therefore deathless.

3. Womb of the Universe