Long, long ago, before you were born, before your parents were born – before the society that you live in was born – there was a moment. Everything that is, was not. Everything that ever will will be was no more than a possibility. That moment consisted of nothing and yet it was everything. If all of your dreams, your desires, energy and ambition were combined with those of the entire human race inhabiting our planet today, and we included the legions of the dead from time immemorial, we would not be capable of perceiving this moment. Books could be written to fill all known libraries, bolstered by the long-lost secrets of ancient, destroyed or decayed libraries of yesteryear from civilisations only through myth and rumour, yet still the enormity of this quiet moment would be a distant echo of a vaguely remembered dream. You and i were born of the fruits of this moment yet it is a parentage untraceable and remote, like being told you share the ancestry of Ghengis Khan, while holding down a job at a fast food store in the hope of one day buying some inane icon of the post-modernity disposable utility culture.
Wars have been fought over the importance of this moment. Entire civilisations have been created and destroyed in the relentless pursuit of some hint of this moments’s meaning. And yet, for all of this, it was but a moment like any other in time. Except that there was no time. There was nothing at all, not even darkness, as there was not yet light. The universe as you and i know it did not exist. Laws of attraction and interraction were not only not present, they were incapable of existing.
If there was no time, how can there be a moment? If the lull before the storm was now, how do we recognise the import of the time – especially when there is no time?
And what if we, flush with the jubilation of having identified this moment, came to the realisation that we do not exist. Suddenly we are confronted with the ultimate ambiguity – if we have thought a thought yet do not exist, are we God?
