“Takahara-san, I think you’ll never be satisfied,” she said suddenly.
She is, Takahara thought. She really is smarter than I thought.
“I think that no matter what kind of happiness you find, no matter what kind of counseling you do, you’ll never be saved. I just get that feeling.”
Takahara’s heart began to race. He smiled. “Ha ha, how rude! I am happy.”
“I’m sorry . . . I just get that feeling.” She took a breath. “I want to make you just a little more at ease. I can’t save you. I know that. And I’m sorry, but Rina-san can’t save you either.”
What was happening all of a sudden? Takahara looked at her. Her eyes were moist, and her voice had grown louder. What a joke! All she’s done is move from the filth of the outside world to the filth here.
“Why do women always think, ‘I can change this man, I can save him’?” he asked.
“Some do, but not all women are like that. You seem to like to categorize everything to make yourself feel better.”
She’s smart, Takahara thought. She says the most irritating things to me, like she’s trying to get a rise. This scout really did fail.
“But. But I think I can save you. But just for three seconds.”
“What?”
“Takahara-san, even if you don’t like my body, when you come inside me, for that three seconds it takes you to come inside me, I think I can . . .”
Takahara stared at her. Her eyes and lips were wet. I see, Takahara thought. She’s even more of a handful than I imagined. Just like the leader said. Women are the only thing we’ll never understand. Her white blouse was open at the chest, her left shoulder exposed. Her smooth, white shoulder. Her skirt revealed an expanse of thigh. Three seconds, Takahara thought. Three seconds of happiness.
“I appreciate your intentions, but you know that personal advances are forbidden, right?”
“But, Rina-san—”
“She’s different. She has permission.”
“Then I want permission, too.”
“Please, calm down. You’re just anxious about leaving here.”
But what about those three seconds of pleasure? Takahara wouldn’t ask that either. Why give that to someone like Takahara, who was already imagining the laziness he’d feel after ejaculating?
Takahara smiled as kindly as he could. “Calm down and think about this. Look, look at how you’re acting right now. This is why you’ve been unhappy. This is why.”
How fake. My words are so fake. There’s no way she can calm down. What good would it do her to calm down? Life’s boring if you’re calm. Why should she want that? As long as you’re just trying to grab at the happiness right in front of you it doesn’t matter if that leads you to hell.
Takahara stared at her again. He imagined her when she was innocent. Maybe when she was in middle school she liked a lot of boys. There were probably lots of classmates who lusted after her, too. I haven’t had sex with that many women, but that’s not what she thinks. If I did break the rules and responded to her advances, all it would lead to is an hour of distraction. Should I make her scream, telling her the whole time, Don’t make any noise, we can’t get found out? Takahara smiled. But pleasure didn’t fit into his plan. It would only get in the way.
“Takahara-san, I . . .”
She stood up, moved closer to him, offering her hand. Suddenly his phone rang. Takahara’s heart began to race.
“I’m sorry. My phone. We’ll talk about this later.”
Her hand fell. It had no place to go. Takahara ushered the confused girl out of his room. He’d have to send her to counseling.
Takahara answered his phone. This was the call that would decide everything. He spoke as quietly as he could.
7
Matsuo-san’s Lectures, II, PART 1
Everyone, today I’d like to talk about the universe. The beginning of the universe. And what is said to be the oldest of Indian scriptures, the Rigveda.
What really is this universe we all live in? How was it formed in the first place?
The planet we live on exists in a space we call the solar system. The collection of countless groups of stars and planets like our solar system is called a galaxy. From far away, the galaxy we live in looks like a disk. The radius of that disk is approximately fifty thousand light-years. It’s so large that it would take fifty thousand years to traverse, flying at the speed of light. In this universe, we can currently see about one hundred billion galaxies. There are one hundred billion galaxies, each with a radius of about fifty thousand light-years. This is a tremendous number. Our universe is shockingly large.
One of those hundred billion galaxies, ours, is called the Milky Way. And our solar system is about twenty-eight thousand light-years from the center of our galaxy, out toward the edge. In other words, even in just the Milky Way, our solar system is way out in the boonies.
So, how was the universe created? I’m not sure if this is true, of course, but I will tell you about one theory that is currently quite influential. This theory claims that our universe was formed about thirteen billion seven hundred million years ago.
First, everyone, please imagine a vacuum. There’s no air, nothing. Just space. Of course, there’s no such thing as a complete vacuum. If you look closely at that vacuum, there are microparticles even tinier than atoms suddenly popping up and then vanishing in the next instant. This happens constantly. It’s quite strange to think about, isn’t it? In other words, even a vacuum is not truly nothing. It’s constantly fluctuating between something and nothing. It exists as both nothing and something. This is quite difficult to wrap our heads around. [Laughter.] But, for a moment, let’s abandon common sense. In what appears to be nothingness, in that vacuum, there are particles popping in and out of existence. Please, just accept that that’s how it is. In that space, the usually contradictory concepts of something and nothing coexist.
Further, it is said that the universe did not start in a particular instant. It did not start at a given temporal point.
Back then, time as we experience it, as one continuous line where past leads to present, didn’t exist. There was no past or present—just “imaginary time.” Our minds cannot comprehend how time worked then. Our brains were built to sense time as if it flows from past to present. But in this “imaginary time,” there is no discernable “beginning.” Our universe suddenly appeared as something incredibly small.
How did it appear? This phenomenon is called quantum tunneling. It seems microparticles are able to borrow energy from elsewhere for just an instant. This strange quantum tunneling happened, and the particles that had been popping in and out of existence came to exist. In that instant, imaginary time transformed into time as we know it, and just one second after one thousand and thirty-four minutes, really just one instant after that, the Big Bang happened and the universe expanded explosively. Just point one seconds after the birth of the universe, the temperature rose to one trillion degrees. It’s said that the nuclei of elements like helium were formed within three minutes of the Big Bang.
But this leads us to a question.
If this is true, what was there before?
Since there was only “imaginary time,” one could simply answer that there was no such thing as “before.” However, there is another theory that there must have been another, different universe, some sort of “mother universe.” Our universe may have been tied to this other universe through the effects of quantum tunneling, and the moment they connected, our universe was born. There are still others who think our universe began at this limitless moment, which is called “the singularity.” In physics nothing can be limitless, so this “singularity” would break the rules of physics. However, after that, the laws of physics kicked in and the universe expanded accordingly. This “singularity” explanation is generally rejected these days, but I find it to be quite appealing.
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Now, let’s talk about the Rigveda.
The Rigveda was created sometime between twelve hundred and one thousand BC and is the oldest Indian scripture. It came before the scriptures of Judaism were written down, and is much older than either Buddhism or Christianity. It is the oldest Hindu text. Isn’t that exciting? A text that’s now more than three thousand years old? In it is the following passage about the birth of the universe.
There was not nonexistent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered it, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? / Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day and night’s divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature: apart from it was nothing whatsoever. / Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminate chaos. All that existed then was void and formless: by the great power of Warmth was born that Unit. / Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire the primal seed and germ of Spirit. Sages who searched with their heart’s thought discovered the existent’s kinship in the nonexistent. / Transversely were their ropes extended: what was above it then, and what below it? There were begetters, there were mighty forces, free action here and energy up yonder. / Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation? The gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
How about that? This three-thousand-year-old text is in keeping with our most advanced physics. I first picked up the Rigveda to research legends, but I was truly surprised when I happened to find this passage. I could write a book about just this coincidence! [Laughter.] One can understand desire as the first particles’ desire to be born and to expand. The sages or wise men are a mystery, but I believe they can be understood as some sort of metaphor. You could also imagine they actually existed (maybe in the mother universe). Even the claim that “Gods came after the expansion of the universe” is pretty amazing. That means the growth of the universe was not the work of the gods.
The most recent particle theory says the following. The smallest elements that make up the world are not particles, not those little dots, but rather incredibly tiny strings. These strings vibrate, and changes in their vibrations alter the fifty or sixty particles we now recognize. This is called Superstring theory.
Transversely were their ropes extended: what was above it then, and what below it?
That quote is from the Rigveda. There are “strings” here as well. In this passage, this word “ropes” appears so suddenly, the timing seems almost unnatural. The Rigveda’s cosmology foresaw our most modern theories of the universe. How is such a thing possible? There are probably people who think it’s a coincidence. They probably assume that the person who wrote this passage, whose name we no longer know, was just hallucinating or something. Actually, I think that myself. So why did his fantasy hit on the truth of the universe? Why did people so long ago have such extremely abstract ideas like “there was neither nothing nor anything”? I believe that the people who wrote this text knew about the structure of the universe.
Atoms know about atoms. If the word “know” as we usually think of it doesn’t fit here, we could also say that atoms embody atoms themselves. I believe the writer of the Rigveda was a human, so his brain, too, must have been made of countless atoms. Atoms know about atoms. Atoms contain the secrets of atoms. Could that collection of countless atoms have shown the writer and their consciousness the true nature of this world? People three thousand years ago had never experienced the overabundance of useless information we all live with now. Could the structure of our brains be completely different from theirs?
The people who wrote this passage likely meditated and arrived at a “certain state,” then saw these images. The truth contained within atoms. Just as the Buddha would do several hundred years later to come to understand the true nature of consciousness. In other words, I wonder if the truth of the world is not already contained within our brains. I can’t help but think it is.
Let’s move on. I’d like to talk about how the more you research the universe, the more you find yourself feeling that this universe is just too perfect for humans and other life.
First of all, if not for three-dimensional space, humans would never have come to be. And if the dynamics of the universe had not been as they are now, and the earth did not circle the sun in the fortuitous way it does now, it would have crashed into something. On a smaller level, if the fundamental charge, which determines the strength of electromagnetism, or the coupling constant of protons and neutrons, which determines the strength of the strong nuclear forces, had been even just slightly different from what they are now, carbon, the element that makes up biological life, would have never been formed. Of course, without carbon there would be no living things. Without protein, we couldn’t have DNA, and without DNA we could never produce proteins. That means that at the origin of human life, both proteins and DNA must have existed. I can give many more examples like these. It’s almost like you can say this universe was created to produce life.
Of course, you could also disagree. You could say, “It’s because humans exist that we can look back and think everything was made for us. Of course the universe humans came from is good for humans!” Or, “There are lots of universes besides ours, and it’s because this one is good for humans that we were born here. There are countless other universes where we failed, where we were born but then quickly vanished.”
Of course. But I’d still like to stress that this universe is just too perfect for humans. There must be some meaning behind that. Physicists for whatever reason reject the human-centered perspective. And they reject spirits and other worlds and gods. However, can they really say such things definitively? To expand on this, I’d like to talk about some of the mysterious points in modern astrophysics.
In 2003 NASA reported that ninety-six percent of the universe was made up of unknown substances and energy. According to the most recent numbers, it’s actually about ninety-five. The things that make up our bodies, the air, stars and planets, those compounds and energies we understand—atoms, fundamental particles—make up just five percent of the universe.
Well, what is the remaining ninety-five percent? About twenty-three percent is said to be “dark matter.” While its true form is still a mystery and no one seems to understand it completely, dark matter has mass, but does not react to other materials. It passes right through other materials, like ghost particles. Does dark matter only exist at the edge of the universe? Apparently not. It seems it’s all around us. It’s passing through our bodies right now. It’s everywhere. Some claim that dark matter can pass through different dimensions. Different dimensions? It sounds like fiction, but the universe itself is as strange as most of our fantasies.
For example, there’s Einstein’s theory of relativity. According to this theory, space bends. Gravity is produced through these bends in space. To sum up Einstein’s theory quite briefly, those eternal constants, time and space, are actually relative. They expand and shrink. That’s the theory of relativity in a nutshell. And this has been confirmed through experiments. It is also thought that gravity has an effect on other dimensions as well.
The remaining unknown seventy-two percent of the universe is said to be “dark energy.” It has the opposite effect of gravity on its surroundings, and is said to be involved in the constant expansion of the universe. This energy also holds the key to the end of the universe. If we could understand this energy, we’d know what the future has in store. But let’s talk about that later.
Let’s discuss one more mysterious point. There’s a theory called Brane theory in contemporary astrophysics. It claims that our universe is just a thin film floating in a larger, ten-dimensional universe. This isn’t science fiction. It’s something that famous contemporary physicists around the world are actually researching. One dimension is a
line, two is a plane, three is space as we know it. But what about the other dimensions? Some say that the fourth dimension is time, but if there are ten dimensions, what are the rest of them? There’s still no answer to that question.
We can see that astrophysics and physics aren’t perfect. On the contrary, physicists still have not integrated particle theory (which we so often see in science fiction) with Einstein’s theory of relativity. They say that when the two are integrated, we will have a super theory that can perfectly explain the structure of our universe. But that still seems quite far off.
Well, we’ll discuss the fact that this super theory is still incomplete when I talk about how I imagine the world.
8
Matsuo-san’s Lectures, II, Part 2
First, let’s talk about the smallest compounds that make up this world.
I’ve discussed this before. The atoms that make up these compounds are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, and protons and neutrons are made up of even smaller things called quarks. Assuming there are even smaller particles, let’s imagine there’s a smallest unit. What’s happening inside those smallest units? It seems to me that there are two possibilities.
First, possibility one.
If we assume that the world is not closed, that is to say, that there are other dimensions, I believe the insides of those particles would be something like caves. Properly speaking, we would only be able to see the entrance to those caves, but beyond that would be what we call in human terms alternate dimensions. But there is actually no clear boundary we can point to and say, “Here’s another dimension.” I believe it’s more like a gradation. In other words, while we usually refer to our world as three-dimensional, it exists somewhere in a reality that includes other dimensions. At least that’s what I think. These alternate dimensions are not separate worlds, but areas where light and electrons, even time, cannot be differentiated. There may not even be time there. Things are born and disappear. The concept of existence may not even exist there. Many other worlds are layered on top of this one. That’s what I think.
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