Here is a fascinating episode of PBS’s Space Time from a couple years ago. Was the Big Bang a white hole, the phenomenon that is the theorized mirror opposite of a black hole?

Possibly. Some theoretical physicists such as Lee Smolin are speculating it might be. In this video Matthew John O’Dowd says one of the differences between the theorized white hole and the Big Bang is that the Big Bang does not have a singularity like a white hole does. As he says, the Big Bang “happened everywhere at the same time.”

But it is not as if this bang happened only at one instant in a time of the far distant past; the Big Bang is still happening right now, at all times. That is, of course, the inevitable meaning of it happening everywhere in space, since space is also linked with time in Einstein’s discovery of spacetime. If it happened every “where,” then it also is happening at every “when.” It was not a simple event of the past. It is now!

O’Dowd also notes how from our perspective we can never see a white hole or its singularity because its past singularity and past event horizon exist in the infinite past, and light rays exiting it can therefore never reach us. This might also make that white hole’s singularity essentially “invisible” to us, similar to how the future black hole singularity is also “invisible” to us, hidden behind the event horizon. So maybe that might also be a reason why the Big Bang does not appear to us now to have a singularity; we can’t see its source in the infinite past. This may also be related to the limits of the observable universe, beyond which we cannot see because the light rays will never reach us even in the infinite future.

This might also suggest that perhaps we are still inside that initial Singularity? We can’t see it as a separate “object,” because we are It. This One is everywhere, in everywhen, in everything, in every being, spacetime itself and the information arising in it being that Singularity or One that we are currently residing within? Even O’Dowd notes earlier in the episode that once you fall into a black hole, the singularity no longer occupies a central “location” anymore, it now “occupies an inevitable future time,” which sounds similar to saying that the Big Bang happens everywhere at all times (including our past and future times). The Big Bang has come, and is yet coming, we being that One (see John 4:23, 5:25, 16:32).

As the philosopher Alan Watts wrote,

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you’re not something that’s a result of the big bang. You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I’m that, too. But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

-Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

As you may have guessed, the idea of a white hole, and of an eternal black (white) hole, begins to sound like many mystical interpretations of God or Ultimate Reality from various mystical traditions throughout history, which really piques my interest. God has been said to be the Source of all, of Light, of Energy, of all Being, of all Things (Creation), and it is the panentheistic Divine that is embedded within all things (forms) and yet simultaneously beyond all things (form emerges from it, the Creator). And yet this God may also be the deepest darkest Void, Nothingness, Emptiness, pure no “thing,” the opposite of Light and Energy in a Dazzling Dark or utter blackness. And this God seems to exist from all eternity to all eternity, both in the infinite past, and in the infinite future. This God, this One, this Singularity, has no beginning, and it has no end. It is the Alpha and Omega, all things at all times, and yet is also beyond all things and all spacetime.

And perhaps God or Ultimate Reality may be both of these, at-one and the same time! It may be that they are two sides of the very same coin, the black hole is where information (spacetime itself) goes to “die” from this universe, and the white hole is where information (spacetime itself) emerges again or “resurrects” or “reincarnates” to live and start a new universe or “creation” as a Big Bang, as Lee Smolin suggests. And as O’Dowd notes, the eternal black hole of the past technically is a white hole, so these seemingly two different entities could somehow be One and the same entity, seen from the dualistic time-dependent perspective of ourselves from within this present emergent spacetime.

What, then, might we be? This is where it gets really mind boggling. We might be that Singularity, that One, that God, which has become aware of its Self! That One that keeps erupting into white hole Big Bangs, manifesting this spacetime and everything within it, and who also devours its Self through black holes, which erupt into white hole Big Bangs again, indefinitely, for all eternity. Every black hole in our universe may contain its own white hole Big Banged universe “inside” it or on the “other side.” This brings a whole new meaning to passing on to the “other side.”

Maybe when God “dies” here, God is “reborn” elsewhere. Said another way, when energy (information) becomes “annihilated” in the black holes here, it is not actually destroyed, but it may actually become the white Light energy in the white hole Big Bang of the spacetime that emerges on the “other side” of that black hole’s Singularity. I also suggested something like this once before in my article about the mysticism of falling into a black hole. This present article may now be more of the mysticism of emerging from a white hole, what science may know as the “Big Bang,” but which some religions, have described as the “beginning of time,” the creation, the Light that emerged “in the beginning” of Genesis.

Considering that there are some 100 million black holes in our universe, that means there could be at least 100 million white hole Big Bangs on “the other side” of those event horizons from our universe, each giving birth to their own spacetime and energy (information), and eventually their own black holes, with their own nested white hole Big Bang universes. And it’s turtles all the way down (and up!), universes within universes, like the Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. This may be the theorized “multiverse,” which may not be universes that sit side-by-side as “bubbles,” but within each other in an infinite regress. And this may be a potential solution to the “problem” of the speculated future “heat death” of this particular universe. Maybe what we think of as the cosmic God is not limited to this particular cosmos. Perhaps this “God” is just another limitation of our finite perceptions. God may be more infinite than we have ever thought.

Or as one Mormon poet once wrote,

Do you think that you could ever,
Through all eternity,
Find out the generation
Where Gods began to be?

Or see the grand beginning,
Where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation,
Where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers,
“No man has found ‘pure space,’
Nor seen the outside curtains,
Where nothing has a place.”

The works of God continue,
And worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter;
There is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit;
There is no end to race.

There is no end to virtue;
There is no end to might;
There is no end to wisdom;
There is no end to light.
There is no end to union;
There is no end to youth;
There is no end to priesthood;
There is no end to truth.

There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.
There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.

-William W. Phelps (1792–1872), “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” hymn text