Infinity and nothing are very closely linked. There’s something very strange about ‘nothing,’ because we can conceptualise it and not experience it. It’s impossible to have an experience of ‘nothing’ in this universe which is made up of things, everywhere you look ‘nothing,’ does not exist!
Likewise, there’s something very strange about infinity, and that’s because infinity can also be conceptualised but not experienced. Science tells us every day that the universe is not only made up of finite things but is itself finite. We can be reasonably sure of how big it is, but despite its vast size, it isn’t infinite. Everywhere you look infinity doesn’t exist.
The heat death of the universe.
Not even time is infinite, it began with the bright, hot flash of the universe’s birth and will cease when all of the remaining matter in the universe comes to a stop, when it finally cools to the point that no further vibration is possible, time will effectively stop because no further changes in material states will be possible. Time is essentially a measure of the universe’s cooling. All time is thermal.
A cold, dead universe is mathematically speaking exactly the same as the singularity that our universe is supposed to have come from. In other words, there are lots of different ways you can describe ‘nothing,’ as long as the sum total of all descriptions is ‘zero.’ This is very strange because it makes nothing and infinity one and the same.
Mathematics describes physics.
We all know what happened the last time we had something approaching the mathematical equivalent of zero in the universe and that was the singularity that produced the big bang.
“What has happened once can very well happen again. If it happened once it’s extraordinary, and it’s not really very much more extraordinary if it happened all over again. I do know I’ve seen people die and I’ve seen people born after them. So after I die not only somebody but myriads of other beings will be born. We all know that; there’s no doubt about it. What worries us is that when we’re dead there could be nothing at all forever, as if that were something to worry about. Before you were born there was this same nothing at all forever, and yet you happened. If you happened once you can happen again.”
The Essential Lectures of Alan Watts.
Is the universe the same? what happened once, can happen again. There is some evidence to suggest that this may well be the case. The theory of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology suggests just that. In the distant future when all matter has cooled to absolute zero and no further vibration is possible this aeon will end and another will begin with a new big bang, at least according to the theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose who has written extensively on this subject in his book Cycles of Time.
So what can we take away from this?
If the new universe has the exact same starting conditions as this one, then you and I and everything else that we can know and experience today will have to exist once more. If not then all sorts of other arrangements and variations are possible. Every possibility must exist if given enough time and space as per the discussion outlined in this article.
This means that at some incredibly distant past aeon, you must have existed and that at some incredibly distant point in the next aeon or some future aeon, you’ll get to exist all over again.
The thing with most adherents of reincarnation is that they don’t seem to allow for the fact that the laws of physics actually allow the possibility of it, they think it’s magical or supernatural when in fact it isn’t. It’s simply matter expressing itself through limited forms across unlimited time or space. In other words, what can happen once can happen again, it might just be in a location that’s so far away in space that it’s beyond the event horizon of this universe or so far away in time that it takes place in another aeon, one of an infinite number in endless time.