You know, it’s always bothered me…the big bang theory. Because I practice Chinese Medicine and Daoism, it has been my Daoist thoughts on Big Bang Theory that have bothered me. Suddenly, out of nothingness, there was this massive explosion, and everything came to be.
The explosion was not the first part that bothered me. The part that was bugging me is the ever-expanding Universe. The Universe isn’t retracting or receding, ever. It has always been expanding. From its inception, it has only grown. That is what has bothered me.
Why would this bother me? Well, because of the rules of Yin/Yang theory. The founding principle of Yin/Yang theory is you have to have both yin and yang for life to exist. The theory has yin as expanding and yang as contracting. Yin tends to soften and become more pliable. Yang tends to harden and become more material.
Some real-life examples of how both yin and yang are needed would be breathing. Breathing is a yin and yang exercise where the exhale is more yin, and the inhale is more yang. In order to survive, you need both. The minute you have one without the other, you’re dead. So, without both inhalation and exhalation, life does not exist.
Another one is the sun and the moon. The daylight is more yang allowing plants to gain nutrition and grow. The moonlight is more yin allowing plants to rest and release the excess heat of the day. Without the two, the earth would either heat up and burn up or cool down and turn into a frozen rock. You need the two for life to exist.
That is the part of the big bang theory that has been bothering me. Right now, it appears there aren’t two: expanding and contracting. Instead, there is only one: expanding.
That has had me burning out some brain cells thinking and meditating about this. A couple of things finally came to me. Let’s talk a little more about Daoism and the theory.
Everything comes from the Dao. And Dao is perfect nothingness. I can’t even fathom that because I can’t fathom the concept of nothingness. Even in my limited ability to think, when I think of nothingness, nothingness has boundaries. I can’t fathom stepping into the absolute vacuum-sealed solitude of nothingness and that it is boundless. At a minimum, my tiny brain always has boundaries around nothingness.
The Dao is one, and out of the one, two is created. And with the two, you have life. The two are yin and yang, the polar opposites that allow life to flourish like your breath and like day and night. I have an episode on Yin on Yang theory on my Youtube channel called: The Power of Yin & Yang, Pt. 1 – the Creation of Life. It goes into this in more detail.
Both the expansion of yin and the contraction of yang are necessary to have life according to Yin/Yang theory. That is what has bothered me about the Universe. It has only been expanding. Since the Big Bang, the Universe has only been expanding.
Everything I’ve learned about the Big Bang theory is that it was a great explosion. It was this huge explosion that came from nothingness. Everything was created from that explosion. It’s the terminology, explosion. An explosion is a violent tearing apart or blowing something apart. An explosion is a yin event. It is an expansion.
That would mean, from the start, the Universe has only been a Yin event. If everything has been a yin event, then life could not exist. Yet, in Yin/Yang theory, each expansion must be paired with a contraction if you want life.
That made me think about the Dao, nothingness, and space.
The Big Bang had to be the contraction. Instead of an explosion outward, it was a huge, enormous, massive contraction inwards. It wasn’t created in violence. It was created in silence. Like a colossal breath inwards, all of the nothingness was pulled inwards with intention, and that contraction made nothingness so small, it suddenly appeared. It was almost like a blip on the radar. One minute it isn’t there, and the next minute it is.
If the Big Bang was a contraction, that made the expanding nature of the Universe more plausible.
If everything is about balance in Daoism, maybe nothingness is balance. Or maybe nothingness is like the absolute farthest reach of yin, like a day hitting its darkest point at midnight, and after midnight yang begins to grow. Or maybe, the Big Bang is like yang reaching its farthest point during the day, at noon, and begins to release its hold on the earth, and yin begins to grow inside the daylight.
But for now, the Universe is moving with Yin energetics. The more something expands, the more space comes between particles. From chemistry, you can start to fathom how small things can be. At some point and time, can things expand enough to become nothingness once again? That seems like the only logical ending of constant expansion…nothingness.
At the end of that expansion, will there be another massive contraction as the Universe recreates itself in a never-ending cycle of yin and yang?