Something Is Nothing
Before tackling the nature of the soul, we need to dig into a more primal mystery of existence. Why does the universe even exist? Why something rather than nothing? Science has no answer, often suggesting that everything—the cosmos and its natural laws—simply emerged from nothing in the Big Bang, uncaused and spontaneous.
Psychedelic pioneer Terrence McKenna famously quipped, “Give me one miracle, and I’ll explain the rest.” Similarly, science’s reliance on the Big Bang as an unexplained miracle isn’t so different from religious creation myths. But if we’re looking for a rational explanation for the universe, we don’t get to take the easy way out. Fortunately, mathematics offers us a solution that’s been hiding in plain sight.
For much of my early life, these tough questions weren’t even on my radar. I wasn’t contemplating the universe’s origins or grappling with philosophical puzzles. My focus was on navigating the everyday: school, dating, coming out as gay during my first year at Virginia Tech, and—ironically—contracting mononucleosis, the “kissing disease,” shortly after. Leaving school early due to extended sick leave, I joined the cybersecurity industry and fully embraced my new identity. Like many before me, I got swept up in the gay party scene—a kind of euphoric liberation after years of societal judgment. Picture high-energy, multi-day events—an all-gay Studio 54 on steroids—where pulsing music, flashing lights, and the thrill of freedom held us in their grip. For many of us, these nights of intoxication and wild abandon were the ultimate rebellion against all we’d been told was wrong about us.
But the party scene has a darker side. It’s all too easy to get swept into addiction, and I spent over a year spiraling downward. I lost friends to this life, watching them vanish into a haze of drugs and self-destruction. Without realizing it, I had left the ordinary world and I was undergoing a kind of Dionysian initiation. Much like ancient rituals meant to confront and purge primal urges through ecstasy, I found myself drawn into a cycle of extremes. The deeper I went, the more I encountered society’s darkest corners—drug dealers, sex workers, and the full spectrum of human nature, from unthinkable cruelty to surprising compassion. I needed to find balance in Apollonian wisdom.
At some point, the hard questions became unavoidable. Alone in my Washington, D.C. apartment, drained and questioning everything I’d seen and done, I faced a riddle as old as time: how can good and evil coexist? How could one person’s good be another’s evil? I was staring down an ancient paradox, something like a Zen koan. Then, suddenly, I was thrown into a moment of kensho—a moment of clarity. I glimpsed the universe as a unified, breathtaking whole, yet also as an infinity of free-willed parts, moving together as one.
This insight finally pulled me out of the spiral and set me on a more “spiritual” path. For years, I turned this understanding over in my mind. It seemed clear that the universe was made up of countless parts—perhaps even individual souls—each balanced in precise harmony to create a coherent whole. I didn’t know it then, but I was stepping into territory many great thinkers had explored throughout history.
Yet, the pursuit of an analytical truth turned out to be a difficult road. Time and again, I found myself pushing the idea away, retreating to simpler notions. Existentialism offered an easy out: there is no inherent purpose or meaning in life, and I could assign my own purpose and meaning! Nonduality also appealed to me: if I didn’t exist, there was an escape hatch and I just needed to understand this “one simple trick” to realization.
On the other hand, if there was a fundamental ground truth to reality, it would mean I was wrong about nearly everything, and that I had to shoulder responsibility not only for myself but also for my role in the collective.
It was easy to reject this truth, but I would find myself pulled back into self-destructive habits—back to the party scene as a way to escape. But recently, committing to this book has helped me stay anchored to this project I’m taking on.
I also had more to learn about navigating my intuition. Back then, I interpreted this through a simple notion of unity: we are all interconnected such that for every action, there must be a reciprocal or “compossible” action or actions to balance the system out.
It’s likely that the Buddhist material that I had been studying biased my thinking. Rather than an ontological unity, a singleton, I perceived many individual components working together, as functional unity. Each individual choice must be balanced by others. This suggested a kind of non-judgmental karma, and was easy to understand and relate to. While this is a good start, I still had much to learn. This was an important lesson—intuition can reveal profound insights, but must be balanced by logic and reason to arrive at a grounded truth.
In studying the logic and mathematics that Mike Hockney (the “God Series” of books) and Dr. Thomas Stark (the “Truth Series” of books) present, I’ve been able to refine this understanding. The universe we inhabit is a collective dream, dreamed into existence by infinite individual souls. We can conceptualize the collective dream as an interference pattern of thoughts contributed by each of us. We co-create the universe, and as we each participate in the dream, our thoughts interact through constructive and destructive interference, producing a world that seems highly entropic at times. Unlike karma, where responsibility for cause and effect rests solely on us, in this case we share responsibility with everybody else. The world we co-create seems to almost take on a mind of it’s own sometimes, leading to causes we didn’t expect.
The books by Mike Hockney and his colleagues have been a profound influence on my journey, and have helped me stay grounded. With such an expansive body of knowledge, paired with my own curiosity, it’s been impossible to ignore. A key insight from Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz echoed my own kensho experience.
In “The God Series Book 25 – Transcendental Mathematics,” Hockney recounts Leibniz’s reasoning for why there is something instead of nothing. Publicly, Leibniz attributed it to God, a strategic move to avoid the Catholic Church’s scrutiny. Privately, though, he grasped that “non-nothing” was fundamentally impossible, meaning that our universe—something—was simply a structured form of “nothing.”
Mathematically, we can think of “nothing” as zero and “something” as anything non-zero. So, how many ways can “something” equal “nothing”? Infinitely many. Take 1 - 1 = 0, or 1 + 1 - 2 = 0, or 113 + 169 - 282 = 0. In this way, “nothing” reveals infinite potential. Applying the law of conservation of energy, we see that the universe must always net to zero. It can reshape itself, but any structural change must be reciprocal to stay balanced. Exploring this line of thought further has incredible—and at times, shocking—implications for understanding reality.
The “something” that “nothing” consists of is thought—specifically, an interference pattern of thoughts generated by infinite souls, collectively thinking the universe into existence. Why not matter? Matter can’t emerge from nothing; it requires space, time, and energy. But if “nothing” is truly nothing, it can’t contain any of these. Thought, however, doesn’t rely on physical space or time; it’s immaterial and can exist without a physical form. Thought only requires immaterial minds, while matter relies on forces and the laws of physics. Given this framework of mathematical “nothing,” these thoughts must be inherently mathematical.
Hockney often exalts Leibniz as the greatest genius in history, even recounting a tale where, as a youth, a master declared him to be the reincarnation of Pythagoras. This perhaps explains his mathematical insight into reality. Leibniz didn’t just perceive reality as a coherent whole made of infinite parts; he elegantly mathematized it.
Leibniz took his insights further with his principle of sufficient reason, asserting that everything must have a reason or explanation for why it is the way it is. Nothing happens “for no reason”; nothing simply occurs randomly. How could it? If events could happen for no reason, reality would lose coherence. More likely, causation exists beyond our perception, rather than ascribing it to randomness.
The PSR sparks controversy, especially around the issue of infinite regress. If every effect requires a cause, then each cause would need its own cause, leading to an endless chain. Philosophers debate whether such an infinite sequence is even possible, or if there must be a “first cause” that itself has no explanation—thereby contradicting the PSR. Mathematics, though, offers the perfect resolution: a circle, the most elegant, self-contained expression of infinity, with limitless points along its circumference, where beginning and end converge. It may sound paradoxical, but it’s completely logical. Perhaps logic can reveal truths beyond the limits of our perception?
This brings up another question: if everything has a cause, what about free will? To answer, we need a deeper understanding of the conscious and unconscious mind. Properly understood, free will lies in the ability of a soul to override conditioned patterns of the unconscious in any given moment.
What about quantum mechanics? At the quantum level, events certainly appear random, lacking clear causes. The PSR struggles to align with this “indeterminism” in physics. But it’s essential to remember that quantum mechanics offers multiple interpretations. The Copenhagen interpretation hinges on probabilities and the observer effect, while the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation suggests hidden, unobservable variables. Here, introducing a collection of immaterial minds or souls, existing beyond the scope of traditional science, offers a new candidate for these hidden variables. In doing so, we reach an entirely different conclusion, relying on free will and the complex interactions of infinite souls, rather than on indeterminism and randomness.
Proving how reality works, without appealing to miracles, requires a leap into pure rationalism—a staggeringly simple yet surprisingly difficult shift. Why is it so challenging, so hard to grasp? The alternative to rationalism is an irrational universe, but could that even be? If the universe were irrational, how could it work at all?
To me, the most beautiful part of reasoning from first principles to understand reality is how, as we work through the logic, every mathematical law of the universe begins to emerge, clear as day. Just as the only logical way for something to come from nothing is for something to be nothing, other necessary laws also reveal themselves: the singularity or cosmic mind, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, the illusory nature of matter, the dual mental and material nature of reality, free will coexisting with determinism, and more. This substack isn’t meant to walk you through all these logical pathways, but if you find this intriguing, I highly recommend exploring the work of Mike Hockney and Dr. Thomas Stark.
If this approach is so powerful, why don’t we use it more often? Perhaps it’s because believing in an irrational universe spares us from facing its harder truths. An objective ground truth would dismantle many belief systems and challenge what we’ve built. Years of effort, whole generations, even ancient lineages, might have to reexamine their foundations. Are we ready for that?
Understanding that reality is fundamentally mental—and that the universe itself is shaped by thought—is just the beginning. Next comes a deeper question: what, precisely, is a thought? And how do these infinite souls dream the universe into, and out of, existence?