024 It Was Nothing, Really

IT WAS NOTHING, REALLY!

December 11, 2006

When I was a young teenager, I came across a book by Science Fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, "Sturgeon is alive and well," a collection of some pretty farout sci-fi stories - not the space travel kind, but fairly down-to-earth ones, such as the story about an inventor who discovers the power of nothing while sitting on the toilet, entitled, "It was nothing, really." The inventor in the story develops a powerful force field out of the very substance of nothing, which sounds very much like what the new physics tells us: We used to think all the energy was in the particles of the atom; now it seems that the energy is, in fact, in the space between the particles! I used to think that air was pretty much like nothing: I took it for granted, since I couldn't really touch it or see it or feel it, and I'm sure many of us are not really aware of the miracle that's happening with every breath we take. Yet, when a space craft re-enters the atmosphere, the astronauts encounter the fact that air isn't nothing at all, but fairly solid, compared to the nothingness they just came from, in outer space. It starts to dawn on one then, why, when God created the sky, He called it firmament (Genesis 1:6,7), indicating that the stuff He made it of was firm and relatively solid, compared to all the nothing, that empty space between the planets, the 'particles' of the universe... Some bright guys, like Mark McCutcheon (I mentioned him before), are finding out that maybe the forces we knew in physics aren't really separate forces at all... maybe there's more to all that nothing, all that empty space between the particles of the atoms and the universe, than we know.... Maybe it hasn't even dawned on us yet how little, how nothing we know... One of the best Christians songs ever written, from a time way before Christian music ever became as huge as it is now, is "Oxygen" by Richard Page, in which he describes the Lord as being our oxygen. How fitting and appropriate, because with every breath we take, God proves His love for us, or, as Richard Rohr puts it in "Everything Belongs" (a book I can whole-heartedly recommend to any truth seeker, which has not only triggered the inspiration for this blog, but also quite a few of my forth-coming songs): "We're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now..." He also says that God is hiding in the physical world, which is something David Berg, founder of The Family International, also taught, and I was able to confirm by personal experience many times. I personally suspect that the place God chooses to hide specially - perhaps His favorite 'hiding place,' is nothingness, that empty space between the particles, where all the energy lies, just as He chooses the little, humble and 'invisible' people, the 'nothings' and 'nobodies' in this world to do the great works that nobody else wants to do.

I don't know who said it first, David Berg or Eric Idle, or yet another inspired thinker: "God made the world out of nothing and He hung it on nothing. Hangs pretty good, doesn't it?" So, nothing seems to be a pretty trustworthy substance, because God seems to be in it. After all, if everything is made from nothing, and nothing is our origin, than maybe there's more to nothing than we've been able to fathom thus far...