Recently, (Bergquist, 2026a) I wrote about dancing between the raindrops (referring to the ways in which we anticipate and adjust to the world as we engage it from moment to moment). In this essay, I wish to consider the ways in which we dance in conditions where there are no raindrops. There is only a void.
Specifically, in this essay, I return to the profound and inescapable question of why there is something rather than nothing in our universe. And if there is something, how do we discern its meaning and purpose. Don Howard (2025, p. 128) put it this way:
If there is a source–of being, of time, of consciousness-it has not announced itself. It has not left instructions. It has given no clear sign that it wishes to be found. What we have is a world. Coherent. Incomplete. Capable of meaning, but unwilling to impose it.
There is a related existential question that is more personal. It concerns why we, as human beings, exist and what, if anything, is our purpose in being part of the complex and challenging environment in which we live (and which we may be destroying).
I begin by considering several of the answers that have been given to the matter of metaphysical existence.
The Matter of Existence
The most common explanation given for the existence of our universe (or many universes) is founded in a belief that there is some superior being that has created everything we see around us (the profane world)—and even that which we can’t see but believe is there (the sacred world) (Eliade, 1959). All the other explanations are harder to explain or grasp. They deal somehow with a disruption in a uniform and therefore non-discernable (nothingness) field.
The Big Bang
The Big Bang results in some way from this disruption. The “secular” explanations often lead to some form of accidentalism or intrusiveness. As Gregory Bateson (1979) has noted regarding the formation of the human embryo, there must be some intrusion (pinprick) in the embryo for it to organize and orient into a viable fetus. Of course, there is the explanation that resides in the head and heart of most of us who are neither theologians nor scientists. This is the explanation that resides in the conclusion that there is no explanation: “We should just leave things alone and go on with the business of living a life in this universe however it was formed.”
