Woo Woo Nothingness

I had intended to blog last night but the Community Shield--EPL's curtain raiser of the season--was on and my favourite team was playing. Even though Liverpool lost on penalties in the end, I thought their performance in the second half was pretty good. So weekends won't be quiet anymore for the season has begun!

I have a serious topic in mind today, which I am hesitating to put into words. I don't want to treat it too casually and it is along the lines of psychology and religion, which I am fond of writing about. I had a long work session in the office today, working quietly on my project, so I'm pretty exhausted now. I thought it would be fun to just write another post about...nothing!

OK, how does one start to write about nothing? I am immediately reminded of Lawrence Krauss's book which I read 2 years ago: A Universe From Nothing. When it comes to cosmology, the question is often asked: How did the universe began? Everyone knows the answer: The Big Bang. OK, but what caused the Big Bang? Some will say, it is an irrelevant question because, both space and time emerged from the Big Bang and it doesn't make sense to ask what caused it because, time did not exist and hence what happened 'before' the Big Bang is a nonsensical question.

That of course doesn't give much satisfaction to the average person. Krauss's book goes a bit further by saying that the universe of space and time emerges spontaneously from 'nothing' because in the sub-atomic realm it is natural for particles to pop into existence and then disappear. Everything is probabilistic. Universes can come into existence because 'nothingness' itself is unstable. Like fireflies in the night, an infinite number of universes are winking in and out of existence all the time.

It is a grand vision of the cosmos. Something which New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra like to latch onto to illustrate the impermanence and illusory nature of our reality. We can literally 'recreate' our own existence every moment because quantum mechanics suggest that is the nature of particles. It gives hope to the individual that he or she can change his world by tapping into a deeper 'intelligence' which presumably is where the universe springs from.

New Age gurus often over-stretch quantum mechanical concepts to suit their philosophy. Intuitively, they are appealing. That often is enough for one to use as a guiding philosophy for living. It's woo woo but the alternative is institutionalized religion, which arguably has done as much harm as good.

In my blog here, I am basically expounding my own woo woo most of the time, for my own amusement. That's one of the purpose of this blog--for me to see how well my own spiritual philosophy stands on its own when exposed starkly in writing. At least I'm not inflicting it on others and the act of writing actually helps me to gain further insights. OK, that's enough woo woo for the day. I've accomplished my goal of writing about nothing!