Humanity has always found itself standing at the edge of mystery, staring into the vastness of existence and asking the same impossible questions: Where did all of this come from? What existed before anything existed? Why is the universe so orderly, so patterned, so alive? These questions belong to no single tradition. They arise naturally wherever a thinking mind meets the night sky.

Centuries ago, the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas attempted to answer them using pure reason. He believed that if we look carefully at the world around us — at movement, change, causation, and the intricate order of nature — then logic would eventually lead us back to a single origin. Something must have set everything into motion. Something must have been the first cause behind every other cause. Something must have imposed order onto the cosmos. For Aquinas, that “something” was a divine being outside the universe who initiated and shaped it.

His framework was elegant and sincere, built at a time when human knowledge of the natural world was limited to what the naked eye could see. For centuries, his reasoning shaped the Western understanding of creation. Yet as our knowledge of the universe expanded, the simplicity of a single first cause began to unravel.

Modern physics entered the picture quietly — with telescopes, equations, particle accelerators, and cosmic background radiation maps — and revealed a universe that is far stranger, far more dynamic, and far less dependent on a single starting point than Aquinas ever imagined. At the smallest scales of existence, particles appear without cause, flickering into and out of being like sparks from an invisible fire. At the largest scales, the universe seems to be expanding not outward into something, but unfolding from within itself. Time may not stretch infinitely backward; it may have begun with the Big Bang, making the question “What happened before?” dissolve into meaninglessness. The universe might not be a one-time creation event at all, but one bubble among an infinite sea of universes continuously forming within a vast, ever-expanding multiverse. And the astonishing order we see — the orbits, the symmetries, the laws of nature — seems less like the product of design and more like the natural expression of deeper mathematical structures.

Physics, in its own language, seems to say: the universe is self-sustaining. It organizes itself. It arises from deeper laws that do not require a designer or a push from outside.

What is remarkable is that long before quantum theory, long before cosmology, long before gravitational waves were detected or cosmic inflation was proposed, Guru Nanak offered a vision of existence that resonates strikingly with this scientific understanding.

Nanak did not frame the universe as a creation crafted at a single moment in time. He did not describe a God who stands apart from the cosmos, issuing commands from beyond its borders. Instead, he spoke of a reality that is One — timeless, boundless, self-existent. For him, the universe is not an artifact; it is an expression. It flows continuously within an eternal order, a harmony that has no beginning and no end. This order is not external or imposed. It is not separate from the world. It is woven into the very fabric of existence.

Where Aquinas seeks a first cause, Nanak points to the futility of tracing beginnings in a reality that is fundamentally beginning-less. Where Aquinas imagines a designer distinct from creation, Nanak sees no such division — the creative force and the creation are one continuous reality. Where Aquinas sees a God working upon the universe, Nanak envisions a universe that is the Divine in motion.

Placed beside the discoveries of modern physics, Nanak’s insights feel astonishingly contemporary. The idea of a universe that unfolds from within itself, governed by laws that hold without external enforcement, harmonizes with his understanding of an eternal order. The notion that time itself may not exist beyond the cosmic moment aligns seamlessly with his portrayal of a timeless reality. And the picture of countless universes arising in an endless cosmic dance echoes his vision of innumerable realms, each part of an infinite expression.

This does not mean Nanak was doing physics, nor that physics is doing spirituality. Rather, it means that wisdom has many languages. Aquinas spoke in the language of logic, physics speaks in mathematics, and Nanak speaks through spiritual insight — but all are reaching toward the same great mystery from different sides.

Aquinas reminds us of the human impulse to search for origins. Physics reminds us that reality may not conform to the linear frameworks our minds prefer. Nanak reminds us that the ultimate truth may not lie in beginnings at all, but in recognizing the unity, the continuity, and the deep order that pervades everything.

When these perspectives are brought together, they offer not a contradiction, but a fuller, richer picture of existence. A picture in which the universe is self-arising, endlessly expressive, grounded in laws that need no author, and permeated by a harmony that is at once scientific, philosophical, and spiritual.

The night sky continues to ask the same questions.
But perhaps the beauty lies not in finding one final answer —
but in learning to see the cosmos through all these lenses at once,
each revealing a facet of truth that deepens the wonder within us.

And maybe this is the quiet truth whispered by the cosmos: that existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a symphony to be heard. Its beginning is not a moment but a melody, rising and falling through timeless rhythm. We stand inside that music — one note among countless others — trying to understand the whole by listening closely to our part. Yet every once in a while, through science, through reflection, through the stillness of the heart, we sense the unity beneath it all. A oneness that needs no cause, no boundary, no explanation. Just a vast, eternal presence inviting us not to grasp it, but to feel it.