Eternal Potential

As Birnbaum himself states, there is only one dynamic that is truly eternal – Potential. Potential is the spinal column, or core, threading through the entire universe and every stage of metaphysics.

We are often told the Big Bang is the beginning of the Universe. Birnbaum says that this leaves some essential, unsolved questions. Most importantly, it fails to describe why the universe came into being.

That can seem an odd thought and something we often take for granted. But philosophers as far back as Aristotle often would wonder why does anything exist. Science talks a whole lot about what exists and even how it started but never really touches on why anything exists in the first place.

Birnbaum says that to understand why things exist, we have to look back to before they did. So, what was there before there was something? Picture before the Big Bang, when there was nothing, not even an empty universe. Just nothing at all. Before all that, there was still something. That something was Potential.

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If you think about it, it makes sense and isn’t hard to imagine. The only thing that predates existence itself is the Potential for it to exist. Potential is always a precursor to actuality. Or, to put it more simply, something has to be able to exist before it can exist.

Something must be possible before it can be real. This is not some play on words but a simple truth.

In the nothingness of the absence of a universe, the universe was forced into being under its own weight of Potential. Birnbaum states that there exists a metaphysical push and pull between Q4P and E+, an inherent draw between the boundless Potential of what could be and the Extraordinariation that all that Potential could achieve. At some point, it hit a “critical mass”, triggering the Big Bang itself. This follows the natural path laid out in: Q4P∞ → C+ → E+

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