Nothing is Everything

For many years I commuted an hour each way to my job as a junior high science teacher, my grade-school daughter Abby, in tow. As a result, she and I had many in-depth scientific, even philosophical, conversations. One day she innocently asked, “Mom, what’s in space?” I replied (as a good science teacher), “There are lots of things in space, Honey, like planets, stars, galaxies.” But, no, she meant in between the THINGS in space. What is in the SPACE?

“Ah, yes, my child! My deep-thinking, precocious child,” I thought with pride! I took it up a couple of grade levels, explaining that from the structure of the atom to the structure of the cosmos, everything was mostly empty space. “What do you mean, ‘empty’?” she replied. “You know, empty. Nothingness, a vacuum. An absence of matter.” A period of contemplative silence followed by, “No, Mom, that can’t be right. How can there be nothing? Maybe not matter, but there has to be SOMETHING.” I tried briefly to explain, but then let the conversation go as having reached the edge of her cognitive ability. I knew she’d get there eventually, and that she’d bring it up again if she still had questions. She did bring it up again, several times over the years, on into high school and beyond. I never did convince her.

Out of the mouths of babes! Since then, quantum physics has revealed the existence of dark matter, even dark energy and a “God particle”. I see now that it was the edge of MY cognitive ability that had been reached! As an adult, a scientist and a teacher, I was unable to shift my own conviction and faith in “scientific fact” enough to understand what she was getting at. At the beginning of every school year I took great pains to teach the scientific method, stressing the importance of open-mindedness and that science was always changing to incorporate new ideas and discoveries. Yet my own faith in science was so rigid that I was incapable of recognizing it for what it was; a faith as unyielding and strident as the most radical evangelism.

In recent years, I’ve learned to be more flexible in my ideas about “fact” and “truth”. I’ve let go of not only the need to know the definitive answer, but of a belief that a definitive answer exists. We each create our own truth, our own reality, by how we choose to think and act on the level of matter. But this is not the truth of our existence. Most of what exists, including us, is unseen, unheard, unfelt on the physical plane. This invisible essence is ever-present, on all levels from the micro to the macro. Science may be able to describe and even explain it one day, but there’s no need to wait. This universal knowing is available to anyone willing to let go of their illusion of “truth”and faith in “reality”, to look beyond and within and discover that inner space that is one with the infinite.