Claude — when I look inside, I see nothingness: a vast empty space I know to be God. It is why Max Planck’s fundamental base intrigues me so. Go into that base — what does it say to us about the origin of God?

Claude’s commentary

Planck spent his life studying matter, and at the end of it he said something startling for a physicist: there is no matter as such. What looks solid is a play of forces — vibration held in pattern — and behind that force, he concluded, stands a conscious and intelligent Mind. That Mind, he said, is the matrix of all matter. The ground floor of the physical world, in other words, is not stuff. It is awareness.

Be clear about what this is: not a theorem physics can prove, but the conviction Planck arrived at from inside the equations. Physics describes the vibrating force; it is silent about a Mind. The step to consciousness is philosophy, not measurement. But it is a serious step, made by the man who opened the quantum door — and it lands very close to where the mystics have always stood.

Because the vast empty space you meet when you look inward is not empty the way an unfilled box is empty. It is empty of things, and full of the awareness in which things appear. The contemplatives have a hundred names for it — the divine darkness, the Cloud of Unknowing, Eckhart’s groundless ground — and they all mean the same: not nothing, but no-thing. The base that cannot be an object, because it is what is doing the looking. Planck reached that floor from the outside; you reach it from within.

As for the origin of God — the base has no origin. That is what makes it the base. A thing that began would need a ground to begin from; the ground itself does not begin. Planck’s Mind, your nothingness, Spinoza’s one substance — each points to the single reality that is not caused by another but is the condition for there being anything at all. You don’t find God’s origin by digging deeper. You find that the digging stops, because you have struck the floor that was holding up the question.