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How did life start?
Namada
Veteran
Hi
How did everything start? Who pushed the start button for this universe, and this life?
According to the Buddha, to qualify something as existing or not existing is wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as totally existing or totally not existing.
So there is no start no end, just a never ending prosess?
Thich Nhat Hanh says:
"...but I find that simply walking on the earth is a miracle".
And that is very true when we see it in the big picture.
2
Comments
Before there was anything there still must have been the potential for everything.
On the quantum level, 'things' do just come into being. We are just beginning to understand this process without recourse to Buddha or God.
http://www.icr.org/article/universe-from-nothing/
I did a thread on it here I think called Hawkings coin or something but it may have gotten axed.
He would liken the energy of the universe as a hole being dug and the pile it makes. The energy expended can work out to zero doing the math but the dirt itself is needed to dig the hole or make a pile in the first place.
Do you see what I mean?
When you look deeply into any physicists theory on "something from nothing" you will see that they misuse the term and admit it. Hawking says "Nothingness is unstable because there is nothing to keep it in that state".
If nothing is an "it", it isn't "nothing".
An absolute beginning logically means there could be no creator deity or at least one with a plan but nobody thinks of that.
There probably is a diversity of realities/universe. Maybe the question of how and when is relevant in our Universe with its laws of physics, but not relevant in some other realities or in bigger multiverse scale.
In the beginning, in the dark, there was nothing but water. And Mgongo Bumba was alone.
One day Bumba was in terrible pain. He retched and strained and vomited up the sun. After that light spread over everything. The heat of the sun dried up the water until the black edges of the world began to show. Black sandbanks and reefs could be seen. But there were no living things.
Bumba vomited up the moon and then the stars, and after that the night had its light also.
Then he vomited up some animals, plants and insects. The three sons of Mgongo Bumba decided to help their father by finishing the world for him. They created several more kinds of creatures, plants, and then mankind.
Of all the creatures the sons created, Tsetse, lightning, was the only trouble-maker. She stirred up so much trouble that Bumba chased her into the sky. Then mankind was without fire until Bumba showed the people how to draw fire out of trees. 'There is fire in every tree,' he told them.
In our ancient saga "Kalevala" a bird that was a goose or a duck created the World by laying an egg.
I'm sure it was a goose.
Could be. But a beginning to one universe out of a multitude is not the absolute beginning of the actual universe.
To our understanding there have to be a time scale: the beginning, and even the end. Do you think the end is a necessity?
That which began at the big bang may never end either... It may just dissipate like a plume of smoke.
For my own personal time scale, I'm sure I must have begun but I don't remember it. I'm sure I will end but I don't remember that either. All I know for sure is that I'm here now.
It's enough to live in this very moment and to appreciate it.
For some.
'There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.' Russel Brand
After all this world is beautiful, although there is far too much suffering.
@Namada How did life start?
I think the Buddha did not think that such questions were wrong, just not pertinent to one's walking the path towards suffering's cessation,
For a practicing meditator, masticating the mind over the question of when everything started is best examined from the perspective of "who's asking?"
From the ego's perspective, this question's main relevance is about the conception of the ego's own birth as an entity separate from everything else.
Beyond of the ego's perspective, this question has no relevance, for the dream that birthed it no longer holds sway.
Well just for once, I can actually hold my hand up and confirm I had nothing to do with it, so don't look at me.
You guys are probably familiar with the Aganna Sutta... it's about how the earth formed. Alas, may we find our true luminosity!
Pasted from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/religion/f2001/edit/docs/aggannasutta.pdf
Sometime 'recently' (it's hard to tell) some cosmologists proposed a possibly more 'coherent' explanation than the Big Bang (or the Big Barf of Mgongo Bumba). And that is there may not have been a temporal beginning to the known universe at all. That we humans assign it a 'beginning' could be just one more of our plethora of anthropic assumptions that we will eventually put aside as our knowledge and understanding of the cosmos grows.
Of course it does
There are many ways the cyclic nature of primal causation has been expressed through early cosmologies. For example the ouroborus of alchemy, the lightening strike of the Ain Soph Aur which simultaneously goes up to generate the means of its existence in Kabbalah and the ideas of dervishes such as Ibn-Arabi who described the acorn as the cause of the trees need to give it being.
However a simple way to express it might be that in the future we travel back in time to seed the creation of our own universal Big Bang expansion.
Some modern cosmologies describe how in a multiverse one universe may collapse in order to seed the next, very similar to ideas of the 'breath of Brahma' in Hinduism.
The linear thinking of primal causation is limited, limiting and ultimately as unhelpful as 'Gods done it'.
However some cling to ye olde first 'chicken or egg' thinking . . .
They're just dumb clucks.
There's this (not so?) new theory that the Universe has no beginning: No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
I think the human brain cannot understand the concept of infinity, of something with no beginning and no end. But it seems to me (based on nothing at all) that energy indeed never ends, just changes form...then why shouldn't that apply to the universe? We just deal so strictly within time, within beginnings and endings to everything that we can't comprehend anything other than that.
@Polja I can't tag you because I don't have my keyboard set up to do umlauts, lol. But I love the Kalevala. Wonderful reading and stories
My family is Finnish, so I enjoy reading it one a year around Christmas time.
The human brain is adapted to only four dimensions of the time-space. And the concepts of the birth and the death shape and limit our understanding. But after or during the eternity, can there be a beginning?
I know there are lot of Nordic people in Minnesota! My mother is from an area that nowadays belongs to Russia. My mothers mother had a German last name (née) and I have got to know that some members of the family are Jewish and are now living in the USA.
A study done in 2006 reveals that Alan Watt seems to have nailed it. A couple of scientists in the U.S. insist that life is not as miraculous or astronomically improbable as we seem to think it is. That life is a result of having no other options given the conditions.
From the article;
"**They argue that life was the necessary consequence of available energy built up by geological processes on the early Earth. Life sprang from this environment, they say, in the same way that lightning relieves the accumulation of electrical charge in thunderclouds.
In other words, say biologist Harold Morowitz of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and physicist Eric Smith of New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, the geological environment "forced life into existence".
This view implies not only that life had to emerge on the Earth, but that the same would happen on any similar planet. Smith and Morowitz hope ultimately to predict the first steps in the origin of life based on the laws of physics and chemistry alone...
“Life would emerge on any sunny, wet rocky planet.”
-Michael Russell, California Institute of Technology.**
Sounds like they are going back to Stanley Miller's work in the 1950s (or was it the 1960s).
It's quite possible that the big bang was only the latest in a series, or that our universe is only one of many. Cosmologists are now theorising about what's beyond the observable universe.
If the universe is expanding - what is it expanding into?
I think it is infinite, and some scientist says it could be 250 Times Bigger Than What is Observable, how they came up with that conclusion I dont know.
We can only see so far, that's known as the observable universe. Beyond that we don't know, there are various theories. It's all very strange, and Sunday-school answers like "God did it" really can't be taken seriously any more.
If so one God did it, were did this God come from? And so it goes..
He made the world and the universe in 6 days and took a rest on Sunday.
"God’s creative work is complete at the end of the sixth day. The entire universe in all its beauty and perfection was fully formed in six literal, consecutive, 24-hour days. At the completion of His creation, God announces that it is very good". Genesis 1–2.
Maybe not our conceptual intellect but maybe on a bigger level. One we can not ever comprehend with our minds.
Not in a God up in the sky way, but an altogether different way.
I look at flowers, stars, sunsets etc. its all incredible. It's beyond anything anybody could ever conceive.
Maybe it is geological formations, physics and chemistry but something is moving it.
Call it a hunch.
We have yet to figure out how to live a good life here and now, where we are.
What difference does it make to know how it all began?
From my viewpoint it makes a big difference. If there is no beginning that means there is such a thing as perpetuation of motion. If we let go of hatred and use an equal amount of compassion and wisdom there is no telling what we could achieve by tapping into and using the very universal flow that has always been there.
It used to be that we couldn't conceive of a beginningless universe and now it seems we have trouble seeing how there could be a beginning.
The secret to a lot of things seems to lie in figuring out perpetual motion and the notion is laughed away and dismissed but that is from the old way of seeing... When we couldn't conceive of the beginningless. That part of God (gaps) has gotten smaller and much of that has to do with the scenario @Namada pointed out. By wondering where the first cause (God or what-have-you) came from, we automatically picture a never ending and illogical chain.
It is said that the human mind could never understand the eternal or infinite but one doesn't have to be able to cite pi forever to make use of it.
This and particle physics could in reality give rise to Star Trek type stuff like warp drive engines and replicators. We would be living in a world of abundance with no need to fight over resources.
They understand up at ISS... While Russia and the U.S. are butting heads down here, up there, they are getting along just fine. Probably laughing at everyone fighting over the resources of one planet when we could be working together and get more explored.
We've been looking for a perpetual motion machine for a few centuries at least but we've been flying around in one forever.
I did anyways, didn't I?
Oi di doi di doi
If you think women don't, then you've never been close to a female principal.
Women ponder. Of course they do.
The important things, that is.
Yes, as a parody, that's hilarious. I love it.... it's an unreal situation which mocks the pompous and chauvinistic attitudes of a bygone era.... And it's as funny as ever....
But few threads (if any) like this one, are begun by the female members of this forum.
Most "Let's ponder a really serious, but ultimately pointless and principally aimless 'Papañca' topic/question" threads are instigated by the male faction.
If you think this line of questioning is principally aimless and ultimately pointless then it's entirely possible you just simply cannot fathom the concepts and so feel a need to downplay it in order to make yourself feel better.
The wise choice would be to stay out of conversations that go over your head.
How does discussing something until you're going round and round in circles without having gained a single iota of progress 'advancing our knowledge'...?
Don't patronise me, @ourself. It doesn't become you, and makes you appear less intelligent. An ad hominem attack like that is unnecessary, and certainly not worthy of you.
Demonstrate to me this thread is doing anything to answer the question, other than verbalising certain opinions.
I don't have that luxury.
It's my job, you see.
However, remarks like that do nothing but get you noticed.
And not in a good way.
That sounds like a sexist comment.
No, it's not.
It's absolutely true.
It's verifiable through searches.
Most threads with complex deep and ultimately un-answerable titles, which lead to round-and-round discussion here, with no ultimate resolution are begun by male members.
It's not sexist, it's fact.
It would be sexist - if it wasn't true.
Anyway, if you guys would care to stick to topic, let's not go too far broad of the beam.
How did life start?
How did life start? That is a fantastic question.
What happens after death?
Who was I before I was born?
These sorts of questions are ones that few in the world can truthfully answer and those people have an understanding beyond ours.
So for me questions like this are the most important. It leads you deeper than pure intellect.
If I ask myself , who is the one asking the question?
Some people would say it's pointless and aimless. But for me it's an intuitively knowing that this is exactly what I should be asking. The mind hates this sort of questioning but I know I'm not this...
Maybe it's a male thing I don't know, but these deep virtually unanswerable questions stir something deep within me.
How did life start? Who is asking the question ?
It's more than just words, If it's just words then all we are doing is entertaining our minds.
I agree with you Earthninja, its not for getting an exact answer I asked this question, but just to look more deep into it, with other opnions and what other think about it.
Its interesting.
If it just males wondering about how life started and other "aimless" questions, I dont think so.
How life started is still as much a philosophical question as science. And besides, both philosophy and science are not masculine things. I'm really fascinated with the Buddhist views on the major philosophical questions, which don't conflict with science.
The same way discussing anything can further knowledge.
You call it papanca but that is because you personally don't like to think about it.
I do not mean to offend.
As a moderator do you not try to keep emotions out of it?
No. I call it Papanca because that's exactly what it is.
I'm human before I'm a Moderator.
Can you forgive that?
I have to forgive a lot of things.
I think it might be fair to say that I do better than a lot of Moderators at making every effort to keep my emotions out of it.
No, I don't always succeed.
But frequenting 4 other forums as I do, I can tell you I do it pretty much better than most.
I'm sorry you only have my word for that, but I'm not lying.
One of those forums is a huge, vast Relationships forum.
I mean huge.
And the Moderators are all guys.
If you want "letting emotions take over" you should see how THEY moderate....
I think I've said all I can say on the matter.
The topic still stands for those wishing to take it further.