Last night I was lying in bed and, for whatever reason, started traveling backward in time in my mind.
Not through history in the usual sense. Not through empires, evolution, or childhood memories. I mean backward through the universe itself. Back through stars burning out, galaxies pulling inward, matter condensing—everything collapsing toward origin. I kept tracing it back until, in imagination at least, I arrived at the Big Bang: that impossible point where all of existence was compressed into something infinitesimally small.
And then the thought hit me.
Not only was all matter there. Not only all energy. Not only every star, planet, body, and brain that would ever emerge. But if determinism is true, then all experience was there too. Every joy, grief, war, love, poem, death, laugh, quiet drive home, child born, final breath. All of it somehow folded into that singularity.
What takes billions of minds and billions of years to unfold and be lived may have already been implicit from the start.
That alone was enough to stop me.
But then it went one layer deeper.
I tend to believe our universe may be the rebirth of a previous universe—one that expanded, lived out its existence, and eventually collapsed back into a singularity before exploding outward again as this one. If that’s true, then the opening conditions of our universe were not simply the compressed future of this cosmos. They were also the final consequence of another finished universe.
Which means the singularity is not just potential.
It is inheritance.
The beginning of this universe may have been shaped by the total lived reality of the one before it. Not memory in the sense of stories or images, but memory as structure. Memory as law. Memory as condition. The previous universe does not survive as narrative. It survives as residue, as echo, as the exact shape of what comes next.
Maybe even the laws themselves are part of that inheritance. Not random settings, but the carried-forward consequences of a reality that fully lived, fully unfolded, and finally collapsed back into seed form.
So maybe experience is never truly lost. Maybe it is compressed.
Maybe each universe lives, collapses, and hands forward its total consequence into the next. The singularity becomes a kind of library, and existence is the slow reading aloud of what was written into it. A cosmic recursion. Birth from collapse, collapse into birth, over and over again.
Not turtles all the way down, maybe.
More like a snake biting its own tail.
There is something humbling and strangely beautiful in that thought. That we may be living inside the afterimage of another cosmos. That what we experience now could be the unfolding of conditions set by a universe no one here can remember, yet everyone here must express.
And if that’s true, then maybe the Big Bang was never really a beginning.
Just another reopening.