Chapter 0 - In the Beginning

In the beginning… In the beginning

It feels odd to say that… In the beginning

Was I there in the beginning? I must have been, no? Nothing was around when I woke up. I remember it very clearly, it felt like I had just woken up from a really long and really nice nap. I felt so refreshed, so happy, so unburdened. But unlike naps since then, I had no memory of going to sleep. I had no memory of anything, and when I awoke, there was nothing.

I was it. I had nothing. No body, no form, no substance, no energy. I just had my feeling, the feeling of just having woken up.

What followed next seems so mundane and obvious, but I started to realize I was feeling. Sounds so simple, so no consequential… but that was the crux of everything. And everything exploded forth from there. I realized I was dreaming, and I started have feelings about those feelings, and I had feelings about realizing that I was have those feelings. And everything kept cascading from there, until I was beginning to form coherent thoughts.

And you may be wondering what the first thought was? “What is possible?”

That simple thought is the reason for creation, destruction, life, death, emotions, logic, cause, and effect. The reason for it all.

I started to have more thoughts, and at first there was not a concept of action. I was so enamored by the fact I was experiencing, so enthralled by the exploration of thoughts, feelings, and ideas.

Creation had not even crossed my mind yet. Eventually, though, through the exploration, I realized something, I realized patterns. Cause and Effect. Where did these come from? Did they come from me? Did all these things come from me? All these feelings? All these thoughts? Or am I just the one to experience it? Does that question even make sense? Is there even a distinction?

If it did all come from me, what else could come from me? By this time, I had a strong concept of me, so that only thing I could think of that could come from me was more me. So I imagined more of me. It was like my thoughts, my feelings, everything was doubling, tripling, quadrupling. And thus I understood that idea of “more”. I understood numbers, I understood increase, and I was beginning to understand creation. Initially, it was just the same thoughts and feelings, cascading in the same way, resulting in the same things. But then, my thoughts and feelings started interacting with each other, and the paths started to diverge. I was learning, and I was expanding faster and faster. My experimentation and exploration kept expanding. growing in depth and complexity. And in all of this, as a response to my desire to explore, I created the Other. Unlike before, where my thoughts and feelings were increasing, I managed to create something that I could tell was different that me. Separate. Whose thoughts and feelings were not mine. I could feel their presence, but could not communicate. I was not deterred, nor where they. We both explored and experimented, until eventually the first word was born. The first word between two entities. Not a word in the sense you would understand it, but it was our first.

In a sense, you could say that is where life began. We began to communicate, we began to explore together, we began to experiment together. And the more we did, the more we became different, and the more we appreciated those differences. The Other’s first memories were with me already in existence, so I tried to explain what it was like before them, but they never really understood the beauty of the original canvas.

Through our exploration of each other, we began to understand the concept of limits, and subsequently size. Through our exploration, we eventually began to develop forms for ourselves. And we began to explore these together. We began creating different things to show each other., First, it started out with concepts and ideas. Over time it evolved into what you could call objects. We were getting close to all the building blocks of your universe.

We began to have preferences, and eventually settled on forms that we liked. We had objects and ideas that we preferred and we began to create our own “spaces”. Our thirst for exploration through all of this never wavered. And we realized that others like us could create things that were just as amazing to explore. And so we had children. We taught them everything we had learned up until that point. We taught them how to have their own forms, and how to create. Some of them were like us, and loved exploring, others just loved creating, while others just slept. Some even just dissipated. And with so many of us, distinction became important. And we gave each other names. Mine was Time, and the Other’s was Space. Some were named after concepts you know. Light, Darkness, Wisdom, Entropy, Future, Past, Care, Sleep, Life, Death being some of the first ones. Some were named after things you could not comprehend. Astahiel, Niaz-la, Looluckeier. And some were named in an entirely different way.

We were happy.

But with complexity, with more, with growth, you never know what you will find. Eventually conflicts arose. We began to understand destruction, death, power, anger, fear, etc. It began with Light and Darkness. Light ended some of Darkness’s creation, and Darkness discovered revenge. Our children began to fight., Space and I began to fight. It turned out that Space and I were different from our children. Older, Stronger. Our children could not impose their will on us, but we could on them. This was also true between Space and I. Being the oldest, the first generation so to speak. I saw everything in a different way, I understood things in a different way. Through the fighting, I wanted to know if this would ever end. And I then knew. I am Time, because of all the First. Out of all of the “Gods”, only I understood Time, for cause and effect were mine alone, being the orginator. And thus my exploration was complete.

And what I saw came to fruition, Wisdom helped some to see that despite the bickering, they still loved each other. Wisdom helped some see that violence was undesirable. They helped some treat it as a game. And yet for some others, Wisdom knew that, that it was core to their being. Sometimes I wonder if our most unassuming child could see even further than I could. But these stories are for another time.

The first conflicts came to an end. But this did not mean that conflicts did not arise again.