I suggest that we may be living in a universe that was always there, that the body is the key and the solution to the Cartesian split (or so-called mind-matter dualism), and that the post-Heideggerian Western philosophical focus on Being has been an enormous mistake, for Being is a sterile intellectual concept without any bearing on reality. Instead, we should be looking toward what I call the unbound Sensing, of which Being is a limitation. I argue that anything rational is a chain holding back the irrational, that physical reality ought to be regarded as a limitation of the spiritual, and that “somethingness” is a limitation of “nothingness.” Sentient minds, in other words, invented the illusions they later fell for.
On the Beginnings
Have you noticed that the abiogenesis theory explaining the origins of life, the scientific “universe from nothing” also known as the Big Bang theory, and the Christian Genesis all presuppose a beginning? Once I realized this, I began to wonder about a universe without an origin and whether that was physically possible.
It is. The modern universe is said to be governed by the laws of thermodynamics (TD). However, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) theory offers a physical alternative: a universe that was always there. In this so-called Plasma Universe, pioneered and coined by Swedish physicist and Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén, time and space may have existed for all eternity, without a beginning and without a Big Bang.
But I’m not particularly interested in the physics of a possibly eternal universe. I’m interested in its practical implications. You see, a universe with a beginning can theoretically progress away from it. In the Darwinian sense, life can start with simple beings—single-celled organisms—that then evolve, through natural selection, into more complex beings such as humans. This is, in fact, the premise of modern materialist science: that the simple (an atom, a cell, an individual) can evolve into the complex (a molecule, an organism, a society). Moreover, this materialist conception posits that increased complexity is superior to simpler orders. Progress is a good thing. Utopia is near.
In an eternal universe, however, we are left wondering why Utopia hasn’t arrived yet. If the universe has always existed, why did anatomically modern humans allegedly arrive only 100,000 to 300,000 years ago? Why not far earlier? If the universe is infinitely old, we might suspect that progress either leads nowhere, doesn’t happen at all, or that its results are always erased, forcing development to start over. Aristotle, for example, believed animals evolved from humans who had failed in life and reincarnated as lesser beings.
So it matters whether we live in a universe with a simple beginning (the tiny singularity that became the Big Bang and then the universe), evolving toward greater complexity, or in a steady-state universe that was always there and is not progressing toward anything. My eternal universe may still display change, and some of that change may be experienced as progress from time to time. I might fantasize, for example, that human beings have always existed, that an infinite number of societies and civilizations have come and gone, and that—as we can observe—the socialist-Marxist utopian dream of equal material wealth for all hasn’t arrived yet, despite an eternity of waiting.
In my fantasy universe there will never be a utopia—only eternal struggle against the elements, against time, and against nothingness. One peculiar thought experiment is that an eternal universe without a beginning might still have been “created” or have “come from nothing,” namely with an eternal history pre-attached to it. As alien as it sounds, a philosopher should explore this possibility. I can imagine several bizarre scenarios: an eternal universe that came from nothing, springing to life on the eve of 1952, with everything pre-configured, set in motion, and supplied with an infinite history—including human belief in Christian Genesis or Lawrence Krauss’s “universe from nothing.”
Absurd! Yes, absurd—but not as absurd as one might think. For if we accept that universes can come from nothing, we must accept that time and space can come from nothing too. And if time can come from nothing, so can history. And if history can come from nothing, then we have no way of knowing whence anything came or when. The universe might be continuously recreated in the present moment, opening yet another array of bizarre possibilities, such as discontinuous time—i.e., the next present moment “stitched” to the previous one with a completely falsified history or a changed past that we, in the present, would never notice.
Indeed, such strangeness implies a force at work that science and theology happily deny, but with which the philosopher should not be satisfied. He or she should want to know all the possibilities in order to draw several truths from them:
We don’t know anything about the universe’s origins, for those origins may have come into being as a falsified history that we can neither prove nor disprove (for example, the cosmic microwave background radiation that allegedly proved the Big Bang may also be reinterpreted as a phenomenon unrelated to any such beginning);
We cannot prove or disprove the Big Bang, the origin of life, abiogenesis, the beginning of time and space, Christian Genesis, or any other historical beginning for the aforementioned reason (we weren’t there, and even if we had records, those records could have been falsified—e.g., a fossil record planted by a playful god);
As philosophers we can only assume the universe has a beginning, and when we do so we may likewise assume the possibility of progress (technological, biological, social, etc.);
We can also assume the universe is eternal and was always there, in which case we cannot assume the possibility of lasting progress (e.g., everything always reverts to a mean, though fluctuations above and below are possible);
The fact that we experience progress temporarily—technological progress since the Industrial Age, say, or Western philosophical progress since Heraclitus—does not prove that this type of progress will last forever, that its results will remain with us forever, or that the changes perceived as progress were actual progress;
Most importantly, why do all thinking men and women look for a beginning outside humanity itself? It sounds strange to believe that the universe was born of humanity rather than the other way around, but as a philosopher I want to entertain the freakish possibility that the human body is the only “real” universe and that the material world we experience around us was created as a backdrop to support our bodies.
I say this, indeed, because I saw it on TikTok. Let me explain: having browsed TikTok videos for several hours a week for several years (to my embarrassment), my pattern-seeking brain found a pattern. The vast majority of TikTok videos I ever consumed featured one or more prominent human bodies moving before a backdrop called “the world.” What we commonly call the world—its etymology coming from wer-ald, meaning “man-age” or the age through which human souls pass—is described as a physical place (when the word actually suggests time): the planet Earth, the galaxies around it, buildings, architecture, infrastructure, and all living or reproducing nature. Yet TikTok videos suggest that all of this “world” is merely backdrop to present the human body. The majority of media content people consume is about other people.
Of course, people are most interested in themselves—but the suggestion remains that the world is a time rather than a place. If the material world is mere backdrop, then humanity—especially our bodies—is its center. This brings me to the question of incarnation. How exactly did human beings receive a soul, free will, consciousness, the ability to move, etc.? Science denies many of these things, but even science must admit that (human) beings can move around in the world. What is the source of that motion?
On Being
Philosophers talk a lot about Being—after Parmenides, and especially after Martin Heidegger, who famously rebooted the question of what Being is (die Frage nach dem Seyn). Heidegger said we had forgotten Being in favor of beings (Seiendes). But I’m not really interested in talking much about Being, other than to say that I think the philosophers have got it all wrong. “Being” is a sterile intellectual concept with no bearing on reality, like a mathematical idea without application. The fact that we can think it does not make it real—not without incarnation, not without birth into flesh.
I emphasize the flesh because, as I’ve said, the body is the key and the solution to mind-matter dualism. The world is neither purely real nor purely ideal. Both realist materialism and German idealism got it wrong. The world is neither only physical nor only mental in origin. Though I believe it came from a mental origin, it is now materially real. It was materialized—but not without the help of flesh. I do not believe that human beings, or any beings of flesh and motion, evolved within the world; rather, the world around us evolved as a backdrop for the flesh. The world is not pure will nor pure matter. Not all matter is conscious or panpsychic. Rather, the human body localizes the spiritual (the mind) at a certain place in the world, while the world offers the body possibilities.
Many Western thinkers conceived of God (in their view, pure Being) as an unchanging, immutable, purely rational entity (see Philo of Alexandria), but these are merely the desires of overly intellectual men who hated their bodies—likely because most philosophers were physically inept men forced to think because they couldn’t get laid. In fact, I know exactly what sort of men most philosophers have been: untouched children who grew up without bodily affection. Heidegger was different; he famously slept around with many women, which is why we find some appreciation of the body in his work—the man who told his students to bring their skis on trips around the Schwarzwald.
Being-in-the-world requires a body. That’s what it’s for. That’s why the eternal bachelor Schopenhauer believed the world was purely immaterial—as though he had to rely on sexual fantasies to get the women he wanted, because he was physically unable to attract any. The character of the philosopher matters; it informs his thinking.
If there is a God, he is not just “out there” or above us but within us. God is the ebullient Sensing and Sensation from which everything flows. What material scientists call nothingness is concentrated desire, emotion, and feeling. Out of this desire and feeling the nothingness created something more: the physical. Notice how our skin delimits our bodies, demarcating us from the rest of the world and from other bodies. Does this not look like a budding-off from the central source of all things? The same with the mind—trapped in a brain wired throughout the body yet hidden inside the skull. The brain that sees everything is itself the hardest thing to see. Our faces and skulls hide what is there. It is the nothingness itself peering into the world it first created.
As I wrote in my book The Ignorant God, “God does not know He is God.” God is rather the sensing that senses the world through our senses—seeing with our eyes, smelling with our noses, touching with our skin, hearing with our ears, tasting with our tongues. The nothingness, so desperate to be something more, accepted imprisonment in the physical world as the price for existence—the price for Being-there, Being-for-itself, Being-in-itself, and whatever other qualities of Being philosophers invent.
Human beings are incarnations not merely of rational minds but, even more, of bodily feelings. When I prepare for sleep at night I return to the nothingness. I do my nightly rituals, lie down, rest my body, close my eyes. Slowly my senses fade, and I no longer attend to the outside world. My room is dark and quiet; I retreat within myself. My thoughts become my focus until I fall asleep and am no longer aware of them. For a while it can be said that I do not exist at all—until REM sleep produces dreams I may partially remember upon waking.
We should care to know why human beings spend about one-third of their lives retreating into nothingness. Physiologically we do it for replenishment, rest, bodily cleaning, and mental maintenance. I say we also do it to release the soul trapped inside our bodies back into nothingness—for the same reason we cannot sit in airplane seats longer than about 16 hours. Prolonged immobility gives us cramps. Imagine, then, an immaterial soul trapped and localized inside a physical body. Would it not also need a “stretch”? Whether you believe this or not, sleep gives the soul the opportunity to escape.
Bodily feelings are commonly ignored by intellectual men precisely because they are invisible, subjective, and hard to put into words. I might feel angry yet be unable to explain why. I may desire revenge without knowing why or against whom. Moreover, intellectual men find feelings disturbing. Rational thought is like writing computer code or doing mathematics; these processes are interrupted by the body’s needs for food, exercise, sleep, and maintenance. This is why upper-class people call lower-class people “emotional”: the upper classes have become society’s limiters. They control and coerce common people toward economic activity, war, and (sometimes orchestrated) famine and death—“in an orderly fashion” that benefits the elite. The elite are society’s prison wardens; they control the military and police, and the people are in many ways their prisoners—often because the common people do, indeed, lack self-control. One needs self-control to control others.
I would say that elites function as society’s skin the way our skin keeps our organs in place. Yet this ordering principle is a limitation that does not exist in sleep. And yet I rarely, if ever, dream of my organs falling out—as though my sleeping soul has no concept of the internal body anyway. The academic philosopher, like the material scientist, logician, and mathematician, deeply hates and despises bodies for this reason. They wish they could die and think rationally forever. Medieval Christian scholars thought that is exactly what they would do after death: all think the same “correct” thoughts. It worried some of them about their individuality! Luckily, I know the purpose of thinking is not to be correct. It is to be wrong a million times.
Being is a sterile intellectual concept that means nothing. I get it: I see a red apple. The apple “is” red. Then I want to know what “is” means. What does it mean to be? What is Being itself? This Being is an intellectual concept that does not exist in the world. Heidegger was quite wrong to speak of “Seynsvergessenheit,” for nothing was forgotten. Something that is nothing cannot be forgotten. Yet he did ask the right question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” There is something because it serves the body. The world is the backdrop—remember, TikTok proves this. People and their bodies largely exist for each other; everything else serves to make the experience more interesting.
The eternal nothingness that desired to feel was incarnated into our bodies so that, through our flesh, it could experience touch. Imagine how mad you would be if you couldn’t feel anything. That is the state of nothingness—forever. I would transform myself into a Big Bang too if I were that nothingness. I would willingly accept imprisonment in a body of flesh so that, at least, I could feel and express myself.
God is not the unchanging but the changing, not the rational but the irrational. Of course, intellectual men disagree; their minds cannot classify or make sense of the irrational. They cannot contain it in formulae or facts. They cannot analyze the invisible and unlocalized. They cannot master what they cannot understand. So they turn away from it. The Western materialist tradition since Democritus and the atomists was a big joke: intellectual men running from their senses, bodies, and feelings because feelings interrupted their holy thinking.
“Being” is an empty fiction. The real God is the Ektropic—the overflowing, self-regenerative source of everything, wild and unrestricted. The moment you introduce order, logic, and reason you have already diminished God, for these are the chains people cling to in the physical realm. God is not Unbeing nor Nothingness but pure Unrealized Potential whose first act was Incarnation: pouring itself into flesh. God no longer exists separately but is here with us, hidden inside our bodies. This Ignorant God does not know He is God. Our senses are God’s senses; through us, God lives. It is not atoms or thought-particles that govern the universe but a continuous feeling, a restless desire driving us toward an infinite array of impossible experience.
To live is to experience. The rational, logical, and mathematical are tools for the economic maintenance of the materialized Ektropic—to give it ability, to allow it to grow, and to prevent abuse and collapse. Rational thought is not the highest form of thought but merely a tool in the service of the Ektropic. The infinite Potential, the pure Ektropic Force, had to pay for its physical appearance with physical restrictions.