Spirituality

The first memory

The Moment When Nothingness Ends

Do you remember your first memory?

I remember mine: a vertical strip of light between closed shutters. I don’t know why it seems to me that there were shutters because it was the first glimmer of my consciousness, and there was nothing in it.

Perhaps subsequent memories have overlaid on this first one. It’s impossible to figure it out now.

Then I remembered one moment. I was 14 years old. I was walking from my grandmother’s house in the city center to where I lived. It was pretty far, about five kilometers. I remembered that moment. I told myself: you are 14 now, remember this point in time. Later you will return to it many times and look from your present into your past, where you exist simultaneously and where you don’t.

It seems that around the same time, I came to the logical conclusion that death does not exist. Yes, it was a logical inference. It was elegant, well-reasoned, and constructed on impeccable arguments (as it seemed to me then). Unfortunately, I did not memorize it, and since then, I have not been able to reconstruct it. It has somewhat overshadowed my life because I know that death exists.

The other thing is nonexistence. By the way, I admit that my proof concerned nonexistence, not death. Yes, most likely, that’s the case. Because the reality of death is obvious. The body dies and turns to dust.

But where does the soul go? No one knows, and that leaves endless room for speculation.

I say “soul” for lack of a more precise definition. Perhaps it would be better to say “individual essence,” but that doesn’t sound very good either — rather cumbersome and not very informative. But it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the universe exists all around us. It gave birth to life.

This can be recognized as a simple coincidence, but I think that even in this case, the emergence of life was predetermined. The universe contains the potential for life. It just takes some combination of circumstances for the chain to close and life to emerge from the inanimate material substance.

Thus, we have always existed. In the form of elementary particles of some kind. It doesn’t matter what kind; what matters is that our essence is one of the universe’s properties. For my “self” to emerge, for my first memory to arise, it just takes a particular set of circumstances.

It may take billions of years, but the universe has nowhere to hurry. Socrates proposed four arguments for the immortality of the soul. Frankly, I could not accept any of them, but that does not mean these arguments are wrong. Even before him, Parmenides had created a more sophisticated concept. True, it proved not quite the same thing — not the immortality of the soul, but the absence of death.

Two and a half thousand years later, Robert Lanza reproduced Parmenides’ idea, and he was certainly not the only eminent scientist whose thinking extended beyond the sterile materialism of people like Pinker or Dawkins.

Einstein wrote in a letter to the family of his close friend Michel Besso after his death:

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.

Perhaps people mean the same thing, but human language, even in the mouth of a great philosopher or scientist, is too poor to sufficiently express the essence of such phenomena. All this is too deep, disturbing, and inexplicable. Even Einstein did not dare to make assumptions about such things as the finiteness of human existence, apparently because he was smarter than others.

Perhaps the soul is mortal. Perhaps our mind is nothing more than a side effect of incredibly complex organized matter. And probably nonexistence is real, no matter how paradoxical this phrase may sound.

We simply do not know because “no one has returned from there.” But, if we believe Einstein, time is an illusion.

We all exist and do not exist simultaneously, depending on where the observer is in the universe (Stanley Kubrick brilliantly conveyed this feeling in the scene where David Bowman found himself in an alternative reality with his own older version).

We see the light of long-dead stars, but the fact that they are dead is an abstract conclusion from tangible reality.

In this same universe, Einstein exists somewhere “now,” and his closest friend, Michel Besso, does too.

And Socrates exists, and his disciples enjoy talking with him.

And Jesus and everyone who left their mark.

Everyone left their mark. Everything is written in the great book of the universe.

Everyone we loved still exists.

What we once lost never disappeared. It is still inside infinity. We see their light. We feel it. It illuminates our path and gives hope that every human soul is eternal.

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