From The Book of the Suns of the Word
In the
beginning was the void, a profound and enormous emptiness. Nothing and yet
everything. Each civilization’s story of creation essentially starts the same
way. The Greeks and the Romans called the universe’s original state “Chaos”;
they thought of it as the gap separating the heavens and earth. Jewish,
Christian, and Islamic tradition believe that a darkness existed until their
God created light on the first day. The Aztecs believed in Ometeotl, a god who
created himself out of the vast nothingness. In a similar vein, the Mayans in
their Popol Vu believed in a lack,
for their was nothing, no one to worship their gods until Kukulkan created
them. The existence of voids in stories featuring a creator only makes sense,
for he or she would not be a creator if there was nothing to create. Even
science, probably the most interesting religion to come out of the common era,
acknowledges the existence of a nothingness until the “big bang” marked the
beginning of all that is.
Other
cultures have more enlightenment centered philosophies, such as Buddhism, that
tell its followers not to focus on stories of creation and afterlife, but
rather to focus on living a virtuous life, and yet even they acknowledge the
void. Buddha taught “all is emptiness” and “there is no self.” Once someone
truly grasps these ideas, once they truly understand and know these truths,
they can enter Nirvana, the void, the emptiness.
Hinduism
argues that life is a struggle to understand, to attain the Ultimate Reality.
And what is the Ultimate Reality? It is
the unchanging reality amidst and beyond the world, which cannot be exactly
defined. It is the ultimate essence of material phenomena that cannot be seen
or heard, a nothingness.
Even secular philosophers who regarded
these religions and philosophies as utter garbage still arrive at similar
conclusions. Friedrich Nietzsche is probably the earliest, the most adamant,
and the most outspoken of these philosophers. As a nihilist he believed that
emptiness pervades every aspect of life, for all is without meaning, morality
contrived, life without purpose. Nietzsche also meditated for years on one of
his most controversial doctrines, the eternal recurrence, through which he
believed that time and space is cyclical, constantly being destroyed, being
recreated, and panning out under similar circumstances. Essentially
philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer believed that the universe would end
and then be birthed back into existence endlessly into eternity; the universe
would return back to the void from whence it came before starting all over
again. It is interesting that men who were so dogmatically atheist eventually
arrive at something similar to the eastern concept of reincarnation.
The influence of The Suns is evident in
each of these religions and philosophies; they are derivations,
misinterpretations, and in some cases abominations of the one tautology, the
truth of the Void.
