Let's continue our investigation into a seeming relationship between the Origin (of both any- and Everything) and Creativity, which is to say, radical novelty.
The origin of anything (e.g., the universe, life, consciousness) is a kind of black box, since it is over the subjective horizon, i.e., totally outside our ways of knowing what exists. There can be no model of what lies outside the model. You say model, I say Gödel, but the point is the same.
As we said, physical cosmology can trace our universe all the way back to Planck time and no further. Among other reasons, that’s when time supposedly begins -- at precisely Planck o’clock, and don’t be late! Before that there's no before, only after. We’re living in the debris of the forever after.
At least that's what they want us to believe, for some reason. But a simple exurban lad such as myself wants to know how there can be an after with no before? Isn’t that like an outside with no inside, or up with no down?
Not necessarily, since those terms co-arise and define one another. Perhaps this is more like light and dark, where the latter is just a privation, not anything that positively exists. If that’s the case, then things were more real at Planck time.
But that makes no sense, because in this bang, things get progressively more real with the passage of time. We’ll get back to this subject, but it has to do with the undeniable fact that the miracle of the human subject surpasses the cosmos and everything in it. Mine does, anyway.
It occurs to me that origin and original (AKA novelty and creation) might just be etymologically related. Let’s look into this wild hunch.
Origin: rise, beginning, or derivation from a source; primary source or cause, e.g., fountain, spring; any arbitrary zero from which a magnitude is reckoned.
This is followed by a lengthy spiel, perhaps because this is such a primordial concept that it’s difficult to reduce it to something less, or wrap our words around it:
Source, inception, root, provenance, prime mover: origin applies to a person, situation, or condition that marks the beginning of a course or development, to the point at which something rises or starts…
It goes on and on, for example, “a point of ultimate beginning whence something rises, flows, or emanates.” But I think I get the point: it’s a point, which is to say, a dimensionless place where all radii meet and from whence they extend.
Next, original: the source or cause from which something arises.
That indeed sounds familiar, but there’s much more: author, originator; a work composed firsthand; a person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity; an innovator.
But we were thinking more of the adjective, especially this: creative, fertile, germinal, inventive. Also, not secondary, derivative, or imitative; fresh, new.
I guess that settles it: the dimensionless Origin is creative, fertile, inventive, fresh, and new. Now and always. And it is precisely this author, originator, innovator, and inventive person of whom we are said to be image and likeness.
In short, we are reflections, and I don’t mean to be pedantic, but here’s the first definition: the partial or complete return of a wave motion from a surface that it encounters. Connotations include turning back, return, relation, connection, and recollection.
Where does all this leave us?
Back to the insight that Origin and Creation are either synonymous or irreducible to anything less; that there must be a Person involved; that this latter is the Principle of our personhood; and that each fresh and new human adventure is a journey of (vertical) recollection, turning back (metanoia), connection, relation, and return.
One hopes, at any rate.
Lots more, but this is a good place to end, or at least to start fresh tomorrow.
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