The Ecphorizer

The Something-From-Nothing World
Ed Rehmus

Issue #70 (September 1987)


We're all teachers in the school in which we're aU pupils.

There was a most interesting creation hypothesis that Scott Bernard developed in Mensa International last year — FTL velocities notwithstanding. Pagel's book ...Nothingness is composed of various kinds of Nothingness.

italic;">Perfect Symmetry
discusses, with a good deal less clarity, similar ex nihilo theories.

[quoteright]I would point out, with some amusement, that in his desire to avoid the taint of metaphysics, Bernard had to introduce a lot of sand (Nothingness) into the gears. Things, sitting around unguarded, often pretend to trail off into Nothingness, but all they really do is to slip quietly into invisibility, where they're harder to deal with. Bernard's "eddies of nothingness" remind me of one of my own theories, years ago, which goes just one tiny step further into the abyss. I postulated that Nothingness is composed of various kinds of Nothingness:

Pure Nothingness
Mere absence of being
Simple non-being
Impossibility of being
Improbability of being
Anti-being Potential being
etc.

It is from the imbalance of these (negative?) forces that a lump, or bubble is produced, resulting in reality as we know and love it. But such a theory lacks elegance and strikes a false note. What we're trying to say, I think, is that Infinite Nothingness is the same Infinite Fullness. In Infinite Fullness exist all possibilities — Including the possibility that some possibilities are more probable than others. Once that possibility arises, creation has no choice but
to birth itself.

Intriguing though they are, I had to abandon these lines of thought because they don't explain how such a "flaw" could possibly arise in the Perfect, Primeval (Buddhistic, if you will) Void. Regardless of the logic, they don't "mean" anything. And if there is one thing that is becoming increasingly obvious in today's information explosion: knowledge without meaning or understanding is merely another aspect of ignorance. So it is clear to me now that being and non-being have to be one and the same thing — as the metaphysicians have always insisted despite our yawns. Science is just now coming to the realization that the flip side of being is knowledge. Therefore, whatever is, is a counter-chaotic emblem of meaning. Mind, let us go so far as to say, is the origin of matter: as the result of its seeking to know itself.

Therefore, the question of origins doesn't begin with mysterious hydrogen atoms popping spontaneously into existence, or with the cornucopia outpourings of a White Hole as the reverse of another dimension's Black Hole, or with negative forces rolling around inside Nothingness, or with some weird Creator-God or Demiurge, least of all with any "Big Bang." It begins with the first faint stirrings of mind.

No, that's wrong too. It is truer to say that mind and matter occur simultaneously, the two being aspects of one phenomenon. That means, believe it or not, that Mind cannot exist before or without Matter. 

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Ed Rehmus

Ed Rehmus was well-known within San Francisco Regional Mensa in the 70s through the 80s as the "weird" cover artist of the newsletter Intelligencer. He later created an irregular comic stric called "The Clonies." Ed also wrote the occational story for the Intelligencer.