I apologize in advance for any faulty physics, but physics isn't the point of this, he said.

It's all too much to get my mind around. I look up into the night sky and see a lovely, but very limited universe. Use a powerful enough telescope and we can get images of the universe from waaaay back in time; galaxies that don't even look like that anymore (or as one closed universe theory posits, we're looking at the same galaxies, including our own, over and over at different time periods over billions of years of existence).

And not long ago, the WMAP satellite brought us a digitized rendition of what is called the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, the remnant radiation from the Big Bang, the primordial glow of the universe before the first stars coalesced and ignited. There's not much we can see beyond that.

Beyond that we get to the Inflation Theory – the theory that from the Big Bang, the universe experienced an almost instantaneous, hundreds-fold growth, faster than the speed of light. One "moment", all the stuff in the universe is contained in a size smaller than a proton, and then in a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second (mathematically, that's 10 to the minus 35th second) it inflates to . . . I assume big. A big space. I assume bigger than the size of a basketball or I'd be disappointed, but who knows?

That's all fine for the astrophysicists and mathematicians, but for the layperson, isn't that splitting fine enough hairs to allow us to say it just "happened"? The universe was just created, pretty much out of nothing. At one moment, it pretty much wasn't there, come on, it's smaller than a proton, and the next moment, it's there. Faster than the blink of the eye, faster than the snap of the finger, faster than presto.

But you don't get something from nothing, so we say that the contents of the entire universe was all there. Anything that was going to become something was contained in that Big Bang. That's a lot of stuff. Presumably it contained all the stuff that comprises the theorized countless black holes in the universe.

Black holes, which are so massive that not even light can escape their gravity; where the laws of physics break down; where relativity and quantum mechanics must be reconciled (which is one of the main reasons physicists are trying to find a way to mathematically reconcile them with String and M Theory).

If the mass of a single black hole is so incredible, imagine something the mass of all the black holes in the universe, plus all the other mass in the universe concentrated in one point smaller than a proton. Never mind the mechanism to instigate the Big Bang and Inflation, physicists have theories about that which I don't need to understand. I'm just fixated on that concentrated little dot that is so inconceivably massive that it seems to me that it would crush itself out of very existence before the mechanics of the Big Bang could even happen. Nothingness.

I'm not touching the physics, that's way out of my league. I'm rolling in metaphysics, and it seems to me that: A) something may have been, in fact, created out of nothing; and B) that something was created instantaneously. When I read shit about the creation of the universe, I don't particularly care about the science, because it's so bizarre that my brain is mostly re-interpreting it into metaphysics or mysticism anyway; the metaphor, the puzzle, the journey, the Big Bang of consciousness, creation myths.

In another several thousand years, understanding might become either greater or of such a different quality that what our cutting edge sciences are theorizing now might be studied as secular mythology, even mysticism.