Where were you when the Big Bang happened?

A few days ago I watched again a film (forgot its name, I tend to forget such details 🙂 ) about Egyptian gods and legends and some epical battles. The scene that caught my attention, was one in which a mortal asked god Toth – the god of wisdom and knowledge – how come he was there when the world was created, considering that the world didn’t exist yet? If nothing was there, how come he was already there, watching the world being built from scratch?  Toth’s answer, of course, didn’t provide any detailed explanation for the spectator; instead it said ‘Your brain would liquefy if I told you, because you wouldn’t be able to understand it’.

This scene remained in mind since the first time I ever saw this film, and it still makes me giggle each time I see it, thinking how…elegant, the film producer avoided a very philosophical subject.

Then, a few months ago, I found out that the way I was breathing wasn’t the correct way! Didn’t ever think about it before, I just used do it as a reflex, to survive, as air – excuse me, oxygen! – is the primary thing that keeps us alive. And I was breathing in the wrong way! Also, I used to breathe without paying attention to it, I mean, who actually thinks about the entire process while going through everyday living? A lot of people! I was to find out afterwards! From trainers and sportsmen, to Buddhist monks and people living in the Peruvian Andes. A Morgan Freeman documentary on the Origins of God also shed a light on this breathing stuff: each time we breathe, the amount of molecules we inhale or exhale is greater than the known number of stars in the known Universe. That means that we breathe an entire Universe, a few thousand times per day, without thinking about it, noticing it or even understanding what this means.

All the air we are breathing was once exhaled by our ancestors, the oxygen was released by plants living way before our time, the soil that feeds our food was built in time by the remains of our forefathers. As the energy is never wasted, but always reused and preserved in a different way (Newton’s laws), our molecules are just our ancestor’s molecules recombined in a different form: ourselves. And this didn’t just start happening a while ago, this has been happening since the beginning of time.So, going back to the movie I was mentioning above, whatever was there, in the beginning, it’s the source of us all. Whether we were created by a God, appeared due to the most powerful explosion ever, we all come from the same ‘person’s’ intention or from the same primordial soup of atoms. And thinking that all the atoms are different combinations of the same subatomic particles, we get to a point where our very basis exists: we all come from the same place, share the same structure and destiny.

If we could only see this connection between all of us, the fact that we all have the same source, share the same molecular structure, just that slightly arranged in a different pattern, none of the separation nonsense and myths would exist anymore. If we understood that we all should show the same respect for our ancestors, as we live on their heritage, and that one day we become ourselves the nurturing source for our hearers, maybe things would be different. If we understood there is no border between you and me, between people and plants, animals, the Universe, we would respect this existence on this ‘playground’ a lot more, knowing that whatever affects you, will also, in the end, affect me too.

The question remains: where were you when the Big Bang happened? You were there, watching it, being part of it, and so was I. The particles that form us were there, generated there, along with all the other elements that surround us. We were there! And we will be here until the end of time, together! Just to…start it all over again.