Nothingness is not emptiness. It is not a container devoid of content. It is absolute absence.
Absence does not allow for a “before”: what precedes the system is inconceivable to the human intellect. What we call the universe is a closed system. Within it, time, space, mass, and frequency emerge. These concepts apply only after the system is established. Before, or rather outside, they are dissolved.
My mind travels far, very far. It rewinds time. I return to adolescence, then to infancy, I feel my mother’s embrace, I disappear, I feel other lives but they are not mine. I feel I have been men, women, I relive within myself the trauma of different deaths. I am no longer human, I am earth, water and fire. I am space, I am dust, I am stars and galaxies, I am an explosion. I am a newborn cosmos.
If something exists outside the closed system, a double question arises: how to verify its reality and how to understand its connection to the system itself.
The intellect, confined within the system, cannot surpass its limits. Where intellect cannot reach, sensitivity operates: imagination, intuition, perception. This faculty does not replace reason but integrates it, allowing man to create further meanings. It is precisely in this capacity, not in machines, that the human primacy resides: the ability to let sensitivity operate and thereby cross the boundary of the closed system.
Outside the scheme, a trace remains: not matter, not physical energy, but an intentional residue that made the universe possible. This trace can only be apprehended through sensitivity and perception, and precisely for this reason it does not belong to the intellect. It manifests as love, as the sacred, as a creative impulse.
I am a newborn cosmos. I am loving consciousness. I love myself, I am vast, infinite, all-encompassing. Stop. I cannot go further back. Yet I feel that moment, the need to express myself, to create myself, to split and fragment: the act of creating time and space, matter, myself, the whole. I have the will to create life and to create myself within it.
The universe is not a neutral fact: it is an intentional act. Not of an individual, but of the whole itself. We consider the universe an act of love because to create something in which pain is present, and to insert ourselves into it, means being aware of suffering and yet accepting it. This gesture is love. Just as a mother brings a child into the world knowing that life will be hard, so the whole has placed itself in a universe that carries both joy and suffering together.
I have the will to create life and to create myself within it.
A sacrifice without memory carries the awareness that this existence will never be free of what we humans call pain.
I am creator of the cosmos and of myself; with creation came both perfection and imperfection, reflections inseparable from it.
They do not precede me and they do not judge me, for they exist only because I brought them into being.
The complexity, the darkness and the light within me are not flaws, but the very texture of the finite universe I have created.
If every being participates in that original act, then the other is not external but part of us, the evil we hate is a side of ourselves, and the entire cosmos is differentiated unity.
Metaphysics is not illusion, but the recognition of our creative identity. To belong to the universe means to be at once its cause and its effect. Like cells in an organism, like stars in a galaxy, we have willed and continually will creation. The ethic that follows is radical: to safeguard being—ourselves and others—as temporary forms of a single act of love.
All is one, one is all, it exists for the love of creation, with its imperfections and its errors. I am you. I am also the person I hate the most, the stone I kicked this morning, the trail of dust on the other side of the galaxy. I am all the forms of life I do not know. I am not divine, but I love myself and I have done all this out of love.
And as I write all this, I have shifted from human to cosmos, to creator, only to find myself suddenly human once again.
You decide to exist.
You create time.
You exist.
There is nothing, and yet you exist.
You create space.
You fill space with yourself.
You are the universe.
And within all of this, a small part of you is precisely you, human.