Thesis on the Nature of the Universe

It is a mystery that never ends. Some call her Nuit.

Consider that the universe is one continuous phenomenon. It has no beginning, and it goes on without end. Everything that has ever happened, everything that ever will happen, everything that was or is or will be, is contained within that single Thing we call Universe. In Thelema, this is also what we know as the body of Nuit. 

“Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body.”  -- Liber AL I:26.

Consider the possibility that individual consciousness exists only as an illusion of perception within this Oneness of Being, and that it exists for one purpose: so that the Universe can  experience itself as 'the other' in every possible way. In Thelema, this single point of identity is what we call Hadit.

“Be thou Hadit, my secret centre, my heart & my tongue!” -- Liber AL I:6

The idea that anything can exist continuously without a beginning or ending goes against our observations of everyday experience. From our localized and individual perspective, everything we know can be shown to fit into a long chain of causes and effects linked together by a series of beginnings and endings in what we call world history throughout time. Even the seemingly everlasting things around us — mountains, planets, suns, and galaxies — had a birth in the distant past, and all will eventually come to an end, though we will not live to see it.  

This concept of time moving linearly, measured by a chain of cause and effect, shapes our definition of the three dimensional world we see around us. We naturally and logically extrapolate the cause-and-effect model into the larger workings throughout the universe and assume that everything that exists (including the universe) must have had a corresponding cause or beginning.

If we take any single event and the events that led to it, and we look backward up the chain to an original first cause that started it all, before which there was nothing, we hit a conceptual brick wall. Theoretically, we should be able to work our way back from any single event all the way to the Big Bang, or the moment when God created the universe, or the Kether point as it emerged from the qabalistic Veils of Naught, or some similar First Cause. But our logical mind struggles with the idea that there could be nothing before the beginning. “What came before that?” we ask, caught up in conditioned ways of thinking. To think otherwise is a struggle.

There are models of the universe in which a cyclical and continuous restarting of physical reality occurs after the cosmos reaches a period of stillness and emptiness. This at least answers the question of what came before the beginning, to the point where we have a binary on/off phenomenon that runs continuously without end. But this model still fails to explain how it all got there in the first place, an answer that is perhaps guarded by the fourth power of the Sphinx. 

Despite all this conjecture, it is a fact that in our lifetime, we will personally witness only a tiny fragment of a cosmic ebb and flow that for all we know has always been here and that will continue on forever.  Crowley echoes this mystery in Liber ABA and the Book of Thoth.

 “Nature is a continuous phenomenon, though we may not know in all cases how things are connected.” -- Magick in Theory and Practice  

“Death is the apex of one curve of the snake Life: behold all Opposites as necessary complements, and rejoice!”  -- Book of Thoth, Death

Our individual lives begin and end, just as the universe begins and ends, only to be reborn again in an eternal cycle. While the universe exists, we all exist. When it does not, neither do we.