13 Questions that Woke Me Up

Most people are happy to go along with the status quo. Things are explained to be a particular way and any questioning or challenging of those explanations causes serious existential stress. That’s why there’s usually violent opposition or an apathetic disinterest to anything causing ripples on the surface of their understanding. But what if some questions can’t be ignored?

What if some questions, when contemplated seriously, cause you to wake up from your status quo sleepwalk?

That happened to me decades ago, and I’m so glad it did. Some questions I’ve read, others popped into my head as a consequence of learning science, the rest from philosophy and theology. Whatever the source, these questions grabbed and shook me to the core. Their effect? A stepping away from scientism as a religion of faith in its perceived priests (most scientists and authorities) as having all the answers (every age believes they know it all).

I realised no one knows as much or as deeply as they claim, especially scientists. They undoubtedly know how some things work, and use that information to build technology and predict natural phenomena. But as the saying goes, just because you know the alphabet and can write some words doesn’t make you a Shakespeare; neither does it mean you’ve read or understand his works.

Contemplate the following questions with sincerity. Take your time.

Hopefully, letting the consequence of these questions sink in may spark something within you; jolt you out of a slumber and make you see your existence and everything around you a little differently. The road to the depth of the spiritual life, after all, comes from the recognition of the shallowness in the material one.

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1. Why or how is there something rather than nothing?

This is a very old question. The most common response is, “because there just is.” While that is explicitly apparent, it avoids further contemplation.

The question nevertheless astounds me: why does existence exist at all?

We exist, as does everything else we can see and discover through our senses, and an infinity more that we don’t know about: the unknown unknowns. Yet, here I am! This body, other people, time, galaxies, vacuums, energy, animals, plants, colours, smells, tastes, sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings, music, cookie & cream ice cream, music, diseases, suffering, pleasure, inspiration, existential dread. . .it’s endless! Where did all this come from? Who, what and how am I and everything else too?

Am I in a simulation, a game, or a dream? Even if I am in any of these, how is anything like this possible? How or why does anything exist instead of pure nothingness, an existential void?

2. What is nothing, and how is that possible?

Another question that defies comprehension. When I mean nothing, I mean no thing whatsoever.

This is a natural extension to the last question, supposing that existence didn’t exist, then what would that seem like? If you’re thinking of an empty dark vacuum of space, then you also have to get rid of a vacuum to complete the concept. But I suppose being in the dark vacuum of space may be a good analogy. However, to complete it, you’d have to remove every atom in the universe: every star, planet, neutrino, dark energy, dark matter and moon. Without stars, there would be no light or heat or radiation. No up or down, no distance, no shape, sight or perception of any kind.

This idea of no-thingness is impossible for me to imagine because no thing can arise from nothing. Since there are things—material, energetic, mental and supposedly spiritual—in existence, then they’ve always had to come from something or someone.

Please spend time contemplating this one.

Even if you go back to an original cause, like God, then He must have always existed. Because even a God could not just appear out of nothingness. Neither could Consciousness, for that matter.

No matter what theory you have (cosmological, religious, philosophical) and the time frame (trillions or octillions of years), at some point, one has to imagine a no-thingness time. But how could that be, since something can’t ever come from nothing? There always has to be something to make something else happen!

Ahh, I need chamomile tea and a paper bag to breathe into.

3. If I was born without a nervous system, how would I know I was alive?

This question fried my noodle for a very long time when it popped into my head. Imagine being born without a sensory nervous system. You can’t see, hear, smell, taste and feel. You can’t feel pressure, pain, or even your position in space. In a way, this is similar to being in an empty vacuum of the last question. However, in the last question’s scenario, you know you’re alive. In this one, however, how could you know since there is no way for you to perceive any stimuli whatsoever? A doctor could slap you, cut you, burn you or destroy you in a thousand different ways, and you wouldn’t know any different.

4. Why or how is there life?

The observable universe is composed primarily of inorganic matter. Solids, liquids, gases, and plasma are different states of matter that, on their own, are lifeless. Yet, life exists. How can life originate from lifeless matter? Scientists’ claim of chance is a cheap cop-out (In fact, any mention of “chance” just reveals ignorance). Even if it was somehow a random event that intelligence through life arose spontaneously from dead, lifeless particles, how does universally uniform intelligence forming life cycles and processes arise from lifeless chaos? Isn’t greater intelligence required to form a base for further intelligence?

This is a similar problem to question 2 about nothingness. Just as no thing can arise from nothing, so too no life can arise from lifeless matter. Something always has to create something from nothing; likewise, something prior always has to animate matter to make it alive. This is why when a person dies, even if, say, from a head wound, no cell in that body continues living independently.

Think about that for a moment.

Single-celled organisms exist and can survive independently. But, a single cell from an animal cannot survive independent of its animated organism. Why should this be? If a cell lives and functions within an organism, what’s animating the molecules of that cell with life, to make it function as it should by following its genetic programming? If life arises out of lifeless matter, then how can’t live matter survive independently, thus returning to lifeless matter? If it can’t survive independently, then what is animating lifeless matter, to make lifeless matter alive?

Where did I put that paper bag to hyperventilate into?

5. Why or how is there consciousness?

A more perplexing problem is how or why consciousness arises from dead, lifeless matter. Let’s pretend that life is no more than blind, mechanical machinations as some materialist scientists propose; why or how can such a “machine” suddenly develop consciousness, let alone self-awareness? We both know there’s no way that no machine or computer program would ever spontaneously gain awareness in a trillion years. Even Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer code had to be initially conceptualised and programmed by someone—a pre-existing intelligence.

If life isn’t capable of arising out of dead matter without some pre-existing intelligence, then perhaps that intelligence is a consciousness that drives life. Perhaps consciousness is ubiquitous throughout the cosmos. Perhaps life is the inevitable consequence of consciousness within matter. Perhaps personal consciousness is a drop in the ocean of Cosmic Consciousness.

An innate consciousness permeating the cosmos seems the only rational explanation for embodied consciousness and life arising out of lifeless particles and molecules.

For any intelligent effect, there must be an intelligent cause.

6. What are infinity and eternity?

Infinity and eternity are familiar terms, but I just can’t envision the concept, even though I have to somehow, in order to explain something always existing (See Q1 and Q2). My understanding is limited to whatever exists having a beginning and an end, particularly space and time. But infinity means no beginning and no end. That’s an irrational concept because no matter how far back you propose the beginning of the universe, you can always ask: “What was before that?” It’s what’s called the problem of infinite regress. However, physicists state that time is only a property of space; that’s why it’s called space-time. Also, space-time seems to be strictly a property of our 3D reality.

Interestingly, people who’ve had Near-death experiences report a timeless “spaceless” space that they have difficulty describing here, but which made perfect sense there. Perhaps infinity and eternity can only be understood once we leave 3D reality.

7. The Afterlife exists?

I’ve always had a spiritual interest. However, after my seemingly random ALS diagnosis, I lost confidence in spirituality and essentially subscribed to the materialist, atheist view. That view states there is no God, and the only thing that exists is what can be detected with sensory experience. Of course, this was an emotional overreaction (tantrum) to a perceived injustice under the laws of cause and effect. But when reading science and philosophy, many more inconvenient problems arose, challenging the comfort of scientism. One of those is the overwhelming evidence of people’s consciousness separating from their physical bodies.

Out of Body Experiences (OBE), remote viewing, and Near-death experiences (NDE) demonstrate that the mind isn’t in the brain. Instead, it proves, together with other research, that the brain acts more like a filter of mental phenomena rather than a producer of it. There’s increasing research pointing to this. Yet, the most convincing experiences are those of NDEs.

After they’ve died and with no brain activity registering on an EEG, they find themselves outside their body, looking at their lifeless physical corpse and anyone else in the area. They then unwittingly travel at the speed of thought to various places and observe their live family, friends and other people as they think of them. They also meet discarnate beings, including family or friends who’d died.

After they’re resuscitated, they can describe conversations, event sequences and the actions of those they visited, even if hundreds of miles away. Some NDEs met and named previously deceased relatives they never knew existed but have their experience confirmed by current living relatives.

There are hundreds of thousands of recorded and investigated NDEs giving evidence that there is an afterlife. In essence, this 3D reality appears to be no more than an incarnated simulation for spiritual training, evolution and karmic recompense. With this view of reality as a kind of spiritual simulation, this world makes a lot more sense regarding its suffering (trials). Furthermore, a simulation theory isn’t as far-fetched as one may assume. Physicists are now proposing that very notion because there’s just too much evidence in the cosmos and through mathematics to ignore.

8. How can colourless photons create colour?

I understand the concept of the visible light spectrum, colour radiation, reflection and absorption from objects, light entering the eyes and stimulating rods and cones, and the neural impulse travelling along the optic nerve and being received and interpreted by the visual cortex. What I don’t understand is how colourless light particles (photons) hitting colourless molecules and atoms (matter) along with colourless nerve impulses to a colourless brain cell mass creates colour, let alone an image. We take a lot of this stuff for granted, and scientific explanations for effects as givens. That’s fine for a rudimentary level of comprehension to function in the world. However, when we go deeper and ask these obvious questions, science is silent.

Science can’t explain the intrinsic information and phenomena that produce these effects. In fact, when we look at the brain and its cells, we have to admit we have no idea how they do anything. We can see what they do, and we can then predict what they do, but we have no idea of why or how. Everything is working independently of our input. There’s a life force, an intelligence running the show that we have no comprehension to explain. When it comes to understanding the true origin and underlying intelligence in anything, we’re babies playing in the mud.

How in the world do we get life from lifeless molecules or colour from colourless photons hitting colourless atoms?

Okay, I’m in the fetal position now. But I’m good. It’s aaall gooood!

9. If evolution is true, what set the initial laws?

Charles Darwin famously postulated the theory of evolution via natural selection as an explanation for biological adaptation over time. However, even Darwin didn’t think evolution explained life nor its origins or its intrinsic intelligence. His evolutionary theory explained small adaptive changes over time as a response to environmental survival needs. His doubt that evolution was the answer to life was expressed in a private letter to a colleague. Which leaves the question: What intelligence started life and drives the evolutionary blueprint? For something to adapt and yearn for survival, it requires an intelligence driving it; otherwise, how does the survival instinct even exist?

If it were just a chance occurrence, no survival or adaptive survival would occur. Survival and extinction would be random across the board. Observable intelligence and order are not congruent with chance and chaos.

10. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

When I learned of the Big Bang Theory or scientists’ theory about the origin of the universe, I honestly thought it sounded silly. Then, one goes through the blind faith period that some men with degrees must know what they’re talking about. However, at some point, after reading and thinking through scientific explanations and philosophical questions, I began to wonder if half of the science’s theories were just guesses. And wouldn’t you know it, some are. And the Big Bang Theory is a massive guess.

However, the big glaring questions that no scientist can or wants to address are: How can something come from nothing; and what is the universe expanding into, exactly? Since there wasn’t spacetime before the universe, and it’s expanding as space-time, then what is it expanding into?

11. How can I look at a star that no longer exists?

Considering light travels at 300,000 km per second, did you know that the light of the sun takes seven minutes to reach us? When you look at our sun, you look at the sun from seven minutes ago. You are looking at the sun as it existed. You are looking at an Astral ghost. What’s even creepier to think about is something like a sunset.

Let’s say you’re watching the sun lower into the horizon, and in two minutes, it will have completely disappeared. Guess what, since you’re seeing a seven-minute old memory of the sun, and there are two minutes before it disappears behind the horizon, you’ll be glad to know in actuality, the real sunset happened over five minutes ago. All you’re seeing are the last bits of light reaching you. That gorgeous red sun isn’t even there in front of you.

It’s even worse when you consider the night stars millions of light-years away. A light-year is a measure of distance, not time. A light-year measures how far light would travel in a year at 300,000 km/s. As you can imagine, quite far. In fact, light travels 9.7 trillion kilometres in a year!

Now, consider the light of some stars takes a hundred, a thousand or a million years to reach our eyes. It means what we see in the night sky now is how that star was a hundred, a thousand or a million years ago. We’re surrounded by astral ghosts. Many of those stars don’t even exist anymore. And many more may have been born and shining above us, but we can’t see them because their light hasn’t reached us yet.

12. Is DNA like computer code?

Our genetic code is the blueprint within every cell’s nucleus that instructs our body’s formation, function and development. But wait, code is a language, and language requires order; order insinuates an organising intelligence. If our genome is like computer code, who wrote the initial letters used to write the sentences of our genomic structure?

Who organised the amino acids into their individual components?

Moreover, how do 3 billion nucleotide pairs organise themselves into the correct sequence out of random initial chance?

Evolution isn’t an answer. Even if there were originally one nucleotide, who arranged its 34 atoms into the correct formula and make it function like a nucleotide and not something else? More importantly, however:

How does a structure of 204 billion atoms inform what to do? How does it contain information, and how do other atom structures “know” to read it?

Seriously!

How can this not wake and convince “scientists” of intelligence pervading all matter? How can anyone take materialism and atheism seriously?

13. How do the atoms know how to organise and hold themselves into that code?

But wait!

Even if you believe 6 billion nucleotides randomly organised themselves as the blueprint for intelligent life, you still have to account for the individual atoms comprising each nucleotide. There are 34 atoms per nucleotide; therefore, we must explain how 204 billion atoms in one cell’s DNA organised themselves into the right formation.

As an analogy for perspective, let’s imagine I gave you 204 billion zeroes and ones (the binary code comprising all computer language), and I told you that the perfected, organised language operating your software on your computer happened by chance. That is, those 204 billion zeroes and ones organised themselves into the exact order to create an application on your phone or computer. Would that be rational to you? If not, how can we believe the atomic and genomic organisation happened by chance?

But that’s just the tip of this dark iceberg.

How does any atomic structure hold its order and function?

For example, why does a body’s eight octillion atoms and molecules hold their form while we move in so many ways and speeds without atoms flying off? Why don’t the atoms forming your heart just disintegrate into disorder or morph into something else? They’re lifeless atoms, after all. Your heart may be alive, but its atoms aren’t, according to science. So, how does that work, exactly?

Yet, as soon as I “die”, those atoms start losing their structure, form and function in decay and decomposition. Don’t give me some shallow, glib biological answer. I’m not talking about biology. This is much deeper than that. In death, something has stopped organising the legos that are your atoms. Elvis has left the building!

I’m talking about your 8 Octillion atoms held in a functional and varied structure that is you. It’s held there regardless of how you move. What intelligence tells those 8 Octillion atoms where and how to be through time? Why aren’t you falling apart? Why do you only do so when dead? Even if dead, shouldn’t your body’s structure remain intact? What’s the difference between a live and a dead person’s 8 octillion atomic structure?

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

Max Planck (1885– 1947), the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory and who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atom.

It seems it’s Consciousness. Some extrinsic intelligence.

Perhaps this is indeed the logical and empirical evidence of a soul, a divine supreme intelligence running the show.

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I sincerely hope these questions awaken something within you as they did in me. Let me know your thoughts below. Share with someone you think may enjoy this kind of thing.

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Also published on Medium.