I can say that I came into this life with a bang, a Big Bang; in other words, I emerged from the soft, close darkness of my mother’s womb into glaring hospital overhead lights.

I can say that I “cause” a Big Bang anytime I suddenly do or say something that shifts the entire perceptual field.

I can say that anytime anyone shoots to kill with a gun without a silencer, that the effect is that of a Big Bang. Or blows up with a bomb . . . on and on.

In other words, a Big Bang signals near-instantaneous shift from one “reality” to another with no, or hardly any, liminality.

Look closer at any of these scenes, however, slow any of them down, and what appeared as sudden melts into gradual. The more perception slows, the more subtle and smooth the transition.

In other words, so much depends on the nature of Time, how we experience Time.

 

Okay, now let’s go to the Big Guy, the main BIG BANG, which, despite all sorts of more or less recent cosmological attempts to undo it, still “sits at the bottom” of western cosmological conceptualizing.

Searching, searching . . . “Is the Big Bang real” . . .

How about this?

Among the many comments under this youtube video, this one:

Yes: “my brain breaks with the infinite regress.” If there is any philosophical no-no in the western tradition, it’s this: we simply cannot fathom falling through space forever, which is what this comment appears to portend. Though we sometimes dream that we are falling through space, it’s inevitably nightmarish.

The eastern tradition (Buddhism, Taoism, and so on) tends to soften the Big Bang blow, or eliminate it altogether, which may account for why westerners, when they immerse themselves in eastern ways, inevitably find themselves changed.

For example, I remember being utterly thrilled to discover the Buddhist philosophical notion of “co-dependent arising,” in which the notion of “first cause” (i.e., usually, Big Bang)? simply doesn’t arise. Instead, co-dependent arising indicates the interdependence and interpenetration of everything with everything else. In other words, everything arises through multiple causes and has multiple effects. Our stubbornly locked in western 3D linear chain of cause and effect dissolves into this larger, more spacious way of thinking.

Re: parsing multifaceted eastern ways of thinking, a reddit post (from 11 years ago) offered, among other things, this:

 

Why do I persist in asking unanswerable questions? Likely because I was totally traumatized by my early childhood expectation of the (nuclear) Big Bang that would end the world any day now, before I even got a chance to grow up!

All through my psychically crippled growing years, even in high school, this overriding dread persisted, to the point where, when it came time to apply for college as a high school senior, I wondered out loud what is the point? The world will likely end before I leave home. My Dad had to insist that I apply.

I was the only one in our large family who was so traumatized, the only one who sat on her mother’s lap when Hiroshima was announced over the radio, to her and my aunts’ and grandparents’ relieved cheers. (It meant we would not invade Japan, and therefore Dad would come home from where he was stationed in the Phillipines.) But to me it meant, “the world is going to end in my lifetime, and apparently nobody cares! I PERSONALLY MUST STOP IT!”

Imagine a 2.5 year old, coming to this conclusion.

I’ve posted on this fact about my life before. This time I want to concentrate on the Big Bang aspect, not of the world’s termination, but of it’s so-called origin story. Because I do think that since we in the west still largely, even if unconsciously, depend on a cosmology that relies on linear 3D, billiard-ball causality, that the Big Bang is necessary. “It all has to start somewhere, right?” My response: well maybe; or maybe the universe has been ongoing forever, as a radiant mysterious Presence.

This latter way of thinking is decidedly not western; it is eastern, supposedly, closer to Buddhism and Taoism.

But what is important here is that the Big Bang conceptual framework still informs our lives in all sorts of ways.

The Big Bang as supposedly what started it all “in the beginning;” which unconsciously implies, assuming symmetry, the Big (nuclear?) Bang that will end it all.

Got it?

No fun.

By the way, what got me going on this post was a substack offering by Unbekoming which energized me immensely.

https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/an-end-to-the-upside-down-cosmos