Try attempting to think of the implications that before you came into existence you did not exist. There existed a world in which you were non-existent, whether there or anywhere else. Now try to conceive that beyond the individual origin of your existence lies an ultimate point of origin for all finite existence. Now attempt to conceive what lies beyond each of these points: your beginning on the one hand and ‘the beginning of finitude’ on the other hand. As you attempt to bring to mind the point of origins of finite being from super-finite being you will realize that an infinite abyss of darkness now lies before your mental perception, as what your mind can possibly bring to mind suffers increasing degrees of conceptual shortages and inadequacies. Your memory, your conceptual perspicacity, and your imagination will all fail to come to your aid in such a mental endeavor of striving to catch a glimpse of the realities revolving around the origin of all finite being. Now attempt to try to go beyond this line of demarcation between finite being and the infinite abyss of originless, which represents what existed before the ultimate beginning of finitude, being that lies beyond it. No finite creature, no matter how intelligent, could accomplish such a mental feat that involves attempting to go beyond this line of Infinite-finite demarcation. You would realize that the fog of enigma lying before your mind’s eye becomes thicker, due your inner vision being thrown into paradoxical confusion brought upon by the thought of an originless being.
Let us now try a more personal approach to this thought experiment. Try to conceive the concept of the origin of your existence by going as far back as you can through the file drawers of your life. As you trace your way back, you will realize that the more you go back the more empty the drawers become. You will ultimately come to drawers that merely contain a sparse number of baby pictures in them, but for the most part they are empty. These drawers particular lack genuine images from a first person perspective but merely memories of pictures taken of you when you were a child between the time of your birth and up to a few years of age. Now beyond these drawers of the first years of your life as a finite being lie one last drawer. As you mentally try to open this drawer, you find that it is completely empty, as your memory lies barren of any concrete depictions of the duration of your existence up to your birth. Even the attempt to open this drawer causes discombobulation within your mind, as you come to terms with the apparent ontological emptiness of your existence that now lies before your mind’s eye. Now there actually might be a picture of a computer image of you as a baby in the womb, but such an abstraction does not suffice as an actual ontological impression of your finite existence. So ultimately the first drawer of your existence as the finite being that you are lies completely empty. You have reached the point of origin of your existence, yet as you proceed to filter through the files from front to back contained in this last chapter, the void that lies before you begins to overwhelm and consume your thoughts.
Now meditate on this conundrum of conceiving the mysterious origins of your existence as a finite being, by continually reinforcing in your mind the implications of your existence actually having a beginning. For instance, meditate on the fact that before this beginning, you did not exist at all. Now think to yourself, what happened before I came into existence and where was I when this happened? Ask yourself further, “did I actually not exist at one point?” By necessity such enigmatic questions will lead to confusion, for we perceive of our existence as falsely originless. This false perception results because we have become so habitually used to conceiving our existence as part of a continual continuum made up of day after day, as our self-consciousness seems to have no beginning nor end, seeing as we seem to live in the moment as part of an infinite past and an infinite future. Yet we know within our innermost being that indeed we do have a beginning, and that we have merely deceived ourselves into thinking of ourselves as a quantitatively finite being. This becomes very clear what we come to terms with our lack of self-sufficiency and our mortality, as well as realizing that we utterly lack qualitative degrees of infiniteness due to our inescapable contextuality and our existential finitude. Now try to abstract from this finite continuum of your self-consciousness in attempting to bring to mind those points along the continuum that lie closest to the point of origins of your existence as a finite being. Strive to go further to what lies before your point of origins and ultimately what lies before the point of origins of all of finitude. Doing so will cause the thoughts of your mind to twist in upon themselves. Even though finitude is all that you know, you come to realize how little you actually understand the enigma of finite existence.
If you are not yet convinced of this paradoxical enigma, then as you come across the following questions close your eyes and meditate upon them for the purpose of inwardly trying to come to terms with what they are asking, and then attempt to mentally envision your answers to them: Where did finitude come from? How was it that finitude was not, and then it came to be? Where was I before finitude came to be? How could space and time come into existence from nothing? What is finite being and what does its origination look like? Do I have a point of origins? Once I was not, now I am? Where did I come from? What am I? How can there be a beginning from a beginningless past that stretches into infinity before this beginning without any vanishing point? Moreover, where did what generated finite existence come from? How did the “big bang”, bang[1]? Where did what “banged” come from, and how did it go from not banging to banging? What happened before the beginning? How can anything have no beginning? How can there even be an originless existence? How can there be no beginning to a being, and somewhere along an infinite continuum of its existence ( <--> ), which has no beginning or end, there lie a point that represents when this Infinite being generated finite being, such that this point represents the beginning of the finite world that we inhabit, while all the while this Infinite being continues remaining infinite? What is Infinite reality that exists without origins and without end? What is originlessness? What is Infinite being?
In trying to answer these questions, you realize that both how we ask these questions and how we set out to answer them are from a presuppositionally bias affiliation with finitude, for we can only think in terms of finite categories. Consequently, such a concept of the point of origins of finite existence and the concept of an originless existence defies the very process by which our mind attempts to conceive reality. Hence, we cannot help but to ask the questions aforementioned in an enigmatic and paradoxical way, because our language in asking is bounded. Our finitely determined language renders them completely unaskable and unanswerable by us finite beings. So, through these thought experiments we come face to face with the enigmatic situation of finite being and the infinitely more enigmatic situation of Infinite being. In other words, this fog of enigmatic mystery of the origins of finite being arises and makes what lies beyond it increasingly more unintelligible and harder to perceive. Therefore, we realize that such a series of ontological deliberations makes even more clear how infinitely more enigmatic are similar ontological deliberation when they revolve around Infinite Being.
We will also come up against a similar enigmatic veil if we try to conceive answers to the questions concerning the end of our temporal life. This resembles a type of concluding point of finite being, even if there does indeed exist an afterlife. For instance, consider the following questions supposing you find yourself on your death bed: “What happens at the end? What happens after death? Where will I exist when I die? Will I cease to exist? How could I come back into existence? Is there another plane of reality in finitude where I go after I die? How could my finite being become translated onto this other plane? Can my soul and spirit persist beyond the grave?” Now additional distortions within our mind would continue if we went back to pondering the implications of what happened before the beginning of finitude, when no finite entity, including ourselves, ever existed. Both apparent end points[2] of finite being should be understood together, as we go back to pondering existence before finite being came into existence. Now try asking the question, “Where did I exist before the beginning?” Even though this question entails an implicit contradiction, we are still prone to asking it, because of the enigma that represents a being that has a point of origins.
Even though we often look at photos or read history books when we were not yet been born imagining a world where we do not exist trying to be conscious of our own absence throws our mind into confusion. A person might find themselves wondering, “You mean that I really did not exist but now I exist? It seems that I have always existed, for it seems that I simply am and have always been and will always be”. Then you will find yourself thinking to yourself, “Did I actually once not exist? Even though I know the answer is yes, it still causes a state of confusion. Did the world I inhabit once not exist? Likewise, I know the answer is yes, but it still causes a state of confusion. Can I intelligibly perceive or imagine such a beginningless and endless infinity that lies before the beginning of finitude, since I actually do know that there exists a beginning of my existence and the finite world that I inhabit as a finite creature? How is it that I now exist, that I even existed in the first place, let alone find myself presently existing in the here and the now? What is the here and the now? What is time? How can only timelessness precede the beginning? How can timelessness or a timeless being birth time? Where am I? Who am I? What am I? I seem to be an ‘I am,’ yet how could I have come into existence from an originless ‘past’? What does my origin look like? When did I begin? Can I imagine a world where my ‘I am’ is completely absent?”
In attempting to conceive your origins in light of your Christian convictions you might find yourself making the following inner deliberation: “I know the explanation of how a person becomes conceived by the process of sexual reproduction, yet why can I not imagine conception in relation to my own existence, for it seems like I always have been? I know that the account of my origin stands out as more mysterious than what the textbooks say, for I believe what I have read in the Scriptures, ‘Certainly you made my mind and heart; you wove me together in my mother’s womb…You knew me thoroughly; my bones were not hidden from you, when I was made in secret.. Your eyes saw me when I was inside the womb. All the days ordained for me were recorded in your scroll before one of them came into existence. How difficult it is for me to fathom your thoughts about me, O God! How vast is their sum total! If I tried to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand’ (Ps. 139:13-18). Even still, I cannot help but inquire into how my finite being can even exist in the first place, let alone an Infinite being that exists as completely originless and how the origin of my existence ‘sprang’ from such an originless existence?”
We human beings do find ourselves at times pursuing these inquiries in the deep caverns of our mind when we lie in bed at night staring into the void that lies between the world of the waking and the world of dreaming. We also know what it is like to experience our thoughts and get nowhere in answering our questions, but instead we find more and more questions that likewise cannot be answered. In these times of being confounded by these enigmatic inquiries we have experienced the emptiness of infinity as it comes to be viewed by us finite creatures. We cannot possibly imagine such Infinite realities that lie within the abyss [insert footnote why you use abyss; put earlier] of the concept of originlessness, yet we are innately aware that it actually exists. Ultimately, however, such thoughts can only serve to remind ourselves of the absolute limitations imposed upon our mind’s eye due to our inescapable finitude. Nevertheless, this should not detract from the importance of engaging in such enigmatic inquiries while meditating on existence, for they remind us that something beyond finitude actually exists. Even though we know deep within ourselves that something does actually exist out in this infinite abyss of emptiness, we only come to conclude that such an originless being lies infinitely beyond the reach of our mind’s eye. Such an unfathomable truth might also occur in the mind of an astronomist as she attempts to conceive the seemingly infinite expanse of the universe in view of its state of continual expansion, for she likewise realizes that no one can see the end of the universe and coming to fully grasp it cannot be achieved. So she admits that although she knows that something exists beyond the horizon of her view of the universe, she cannot actually bring it to mind. For Christians, we know what lies beyond the stars and what keeps everything in motion.
So, we find that in the deepest recesses of our mind, there indeed exists an unknown conceptual element that although it lies present in one sense as a known element, it is completely not present in the other sense as an unknown element. Within our innermost being lies an innate awareness of the existence of the point of origins of finite being and the existence of an originless Infinite Being. This is why we can even engage in such endless inquiries in the first place. Nevertheless, such an innate awareness exists like a trace, an impression, or a shadow permanently imprinted upon our mind. Figuratively it is like an immense footprint or a bone of a dinosaur that a person who has never seen a dinosaur before comes across, whether in real life or by symbolic representation. When the person encounters it, nothing that he has ever experienced matches up with the monolithic proportions of such a creature. This visible impression invokes mystery and wonder as it forms a mental impression that he later reflects on. It is clear to him that such a creature exists, yet its existence confounds his mind, seeing as he has only encountered creatures of much smaller proportions. Whatever this creature is, it seems to him that it must be part of an entirely different class of creatures than what this impression seems to bring to mind.
Our imagination ceases to be of value when as finite creatures we try to conceive a line of thinking that inevitably draws us to the abyss of the concept of an originless infinity. Within such an unintelligible abyss lie the Infinite realities corresponding to an originless pre-existence that defies the very finitely contextualized categories of thought that demarcates what can possibly be thought by our minds. A one-dimensional entity would come against a similar untraversable abyss of unintelligibility when attempting to conceive the concept of three dimensions. To put it simply, these purely supercontextual concepts of infinity defy all finite possibilities, and thus, could not have possibly arisen from our finite mind. Instead, these impressions or traces of the origin of finite being and the concept of originless Infinite being could only have been placed within our soul by the Infinite Being responsible for the origin of our finite being. Nevertheless, this trace itself exemplifies sheer enigmatic mystery, such that although our mind is innately aware of these qualitatively transcendental concepts, we cannot possibly grasp them to the least extent. As we have already witnessed firsthand, if we finite creatures apply mental effort to conceive them, they only become progressively more enshrouded in the fog of enigmatic mystery. Therefore, the more we try to conceive such concepts the more awe-inspiring they become, and the smaller we become in comparison to the extent that we seem to become seemingly nothing in comparison.
We absolutely cannot concretely conceive or imagine what exactly the concept of infiniteness is. The concept defies all of our finite experiences and all of our finite ideas. So it must be understood as an unknown variable with an a priori trace within our mind that cannot be accounted for in view of anything outside of our mind, anything else that exists in our mind, or even the mind itself. Yet, this trace becomes exacerbated by the “voice of creation,” for we read the following in our guide: “For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts and their senseless hearts were darkened” (Rm. 1:20-21).
From the very dawn of finitude, the evidence for the existence of an Infinite Being has been clearly manifested by the display of effects that could only be produced by or correspond to the existence of Infinite Being, which represents the unknown variable. So, the voice of creation offers all humanity concrete evidence of the actual existence of this unknown variable whose trace lies innately imprinted on the walls of the deepest cavern of our mind. Furthermore, the voice of creation informs us of things about this unknown variable, such as the infinite attributes, infinite power, and the supercontextual nature of this unknown variable, a.k.a. Infinite Being. As such, the voice of creation shouts out, “There must be a God!” And by God this voice of creation makes clear that the images of finitude do not at all suffice, but only the origin of the trace of originless Infinite Being that lies innately engraved upon the depths of our soul. All of us human beings innately bear within our consciousness this trace of the existence of Infinite Being, whether or not we consciously or only unconsciously pay any heed to it or not. Nevertheless, this purely enigmatic trace of the concept of Infinite Being within the deepest part of our soul usually remains suppressed by people, especially humanity on a large scale. Even when they acknowledge the Divine, rarely does the conceptions they attribute to the Divine come to truly correspond with Infinite Being, but instead merely correspond to quantitatively superior concepts of finite being or images of the divine that exists as Wholly Other.
Due to rebellion against Governance by a heart that disregards the trace of Infinite Being, this trace becomes for a person merely a distant forgotten memory that lies deep and hidden within the deepest closet of this person’s soul. For an obstinate person who has willfully driven himself or herself further and further away from the mysteries of the soul, the trace of the existence of Infinite Being and person's origin as a finite being stays hidden. Such individuals run away from their eternity destiny to know God, for the sake of chasing after the shallow aspects of existence, such as carnal and social immediacy, dependence on only empirical aspects of finitude, etc. These temporal aspirations consciously or unconsciously ignore the traces of one’s origin from the palm of the Originless One that lies as eternal realities engraved upon the walls of the deepest cavern of the heart of a creature made in the very ontological image of the Originless One. Hence, this trace of Infinite Being and the eternity written on the walls of the human heart become merely faded birth-marks that can hardly be made out now, due to actively or passively forsaking the eternal destiny of each individual of the human race.
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