My Answer to the Biggest Question of Humankind

Every big question I can think of starts with the one question: How did existence begin? If you go deep enough, that is ultimately the question you end up with. Who created all this? What is God? Depending on how you answer that question, you will answer all the other important questions in life quite differently.

I have spent a lot of time looking for an answer without even realizing it. Yet, over the course of writing my book, The God That Stopped Hiding, and The Three Courses that grew out of it, I now feel ready to give my answer.

The key shift my mind and being had to make in order to understand how existence “started” (if it ever did; I believe it has never ended, so how could it start?) was to recalibrate my understanding of nothing: Of the void, of the emptiness from which everything arises.

I remember that during my school years, I had my first conversations about God with a friend of mine. Conversation might be the wrong word. I was mostly laughing at him for believing in God. I was so convinced that God did not exist that anyone who believed in God was a joke to me. My argument for devaluing his belief was simple and, in my opinion, also very solid: If everything was created by God, then who or what created God? I did not know the answer to how it all started either, but I was sure God could not be it.

When I now think back to my past self saying that, I have to chuckle. Not because I was wrong, but because I was right for the wrong reason. I had a point, and still, I was off the mark by a mile.

The Mechanics of Nothing

I now understand that there was one assumption on which I based my (dis)belief that turned out to be wrong. I assumed that no thing could appear out of nothing. The only way my mind was able to imagine creation was through cause and effect. I, as a person, have agency. I create. Everything around me in this world is caused and created by something, so I assumed that had to be true for the first act of creation as well. Someone had to set off the Big Bang. But now I see the world differently.

I now understand that everything within existence is governed by cause and effect, but existence itself is not.

This sentence is a headline, not a conclusion that already needs to make sense to you. Also, I want you to feel this sentence instead of intellectually understanding it, and so I invite you to join me in the moment everything started. Let's take a little trip with our imagination:

Imagine you are standing next to me, but you cannot see me. You cannot see yourself either because you do not have a body yet. All you have is awareness, and all you see around you is pure white nothing.

That white nothing around you has no shape. It does not even have a color. There is no difference anywhere around you. That is what the beginning looks like, minus us standing there. At the beginning, there is not even awareness to witness itself. All there is is unmanifested potential.

I believe that is as close as I can get to describing ground zero without expanding this essay too much because, as you might already suspect, it is a space far beyond words. We can only imagine the absolute nothing, the void, by placing an observer inside it, even though the presence of an observer would already mean it was no longer the void. Still, I had to try to give you an idea.

This state of absolute potential is a state of absolute equilibrium. Remember how noise-canceling headphones work. They do not insulate you from the sounds around you. Rather, they detect incoming sound waves and create exactly the opposite sound wave to cancel them out. That is why they are called noise-canceling headphones.

The void state follows the same principle, yet its complexity is obviously unimaginably greater. But just as noise-canceling headphones create silence by balancing two opposing sounds, the void state creates absolute nothingness by balancing all the opposites of our existence.

Yet the moment that balance is reached, everything disappears, and thus, logically, the void state cannot be observed. You cannot even place that state chronologically at the beginning of existence, like the opening of a movie, because in the void state, nothing exists, not even space or time. As a logical conclusion, that state still exists, right here and now.

The Start of Something With No End

So why did this state create a world like ours? Why doesn’t it just stay in a state of potential without manifestation in the real world?

Since we are trying to understand how existence began from within our three-dimensional reality, we have to begin with what this reality reveals to us. Here, change is not optional. It is a universal and unavoidable condition of existence. And if our reality arose from the void, then the potential for change must already have existed within that void. Otherwise, a changing universe could never have emerged from it. Perfect equilibrium may contain no visible movement, but it cannot be incapable of change. If it were, we would not exist. Consequently, the balance of the void state is always fragile. Since nothing can remain unchanged, it is constantly shifting and whenever it does it creates reality.

I do not imagine the “beginning” as a Big Bang. The moment our world “began,” a slight asymmetry arose, like a ripple in an entirely calm mountain lake. The water was always there, but because it was so clear and transparent, you could not see it. Yet the moment the void fell slightly out of balance, our world started to become visible.

To quote from my book:

And that difference doesn’t come from intention or choice, it doesn’t need a creator. It comes from the fact that perfect uniformity is unstable—not in a mechanical sense, but in the sense that it cannot be known. Awareness without distinction has nothing to register itself against. So the first “event” is not a thing emerging, but a relation forming.

Awareness does not decide to look at itself. It simply becomes possible for awareness to register itself as something because a slight asymmetry arises. That asymmetry doesn’t have to be big. It can be infinitesimal. But once there is even the tiniest difference, awareness now has a reference point. And the moment there is a reference point, there is form—not because form is added, but because form is what difference feels like from the inside.

The God That Stopped Hiding

The moment even a small difference appeared, perhaps eventually even the first particle and its antimatter counterpart, there was something to grow from, constantly fueled by pure potential from within the void. Our world started to grow as every organism we know grows: From within itself. Our universe grew into the complexity we know today, yet at some point, it will shrink again and return to nothing, only to appear from that space again, just as we humans are born and return, constantly coming in and out of the void state.

The void is like a big pumping heart: Every time it pulses life expands. Every time it contracts life retreats. These two forces are always in balance.

Everything originates from there, yet the closer you approach that state the more it disappears. Just like sound waves canceling each other out to create silence, the void exists only as the perfect equilibrium of everything there is and even observing it would disturb that balance.

That state is not bound by space or time. It also does not have agency because it does not exist, remember? Yet, paradoxically, it is the foundation of the entire “real” world we can feel and touch right now.

So how did it all start?

It never began, and it never ended.

Who created it?

No one.

What does that mean for us?

Nothing and everything.

The absence of a predetermined meaning does not lead me to selfishness or domination. Quite the opposite. Once there is no higher authority deciding for us, we are fully responsible for what we create through our choices. We can choose fear, competition, and control, but we can also feel what these choices do to us and to the people around us. Compassion is not right because a God commanded it. It is right because separation hurts, because suffering is real within this reality, and because joy grows when life is allowed to support life.

I now understand that everything within existence is governed by meaning, but existence itself is not.

There is no deeper reason for all this. It is happening because not happening is impossible. Yet the absence of a predetermined meaning does not make life meaningless. Existence may have begun without intention, but the moment awareness, experience, and relationship appeared, meaning appeared with them. Life is full of meaning because we are free to give it meaning.

No creator has chosen our purpose for us. No higher authority will decide which guiding star we follow. That freedom is immense, but it does not come without consequences. You are not your own God because you can control everything. You are your own God because no one else can choose for you. Your life is yours to shape, and that makes you free. But it also makes you responsible.

Choose wisely.