The Vanishing Point

On this sunny morning, Sarkon the Prophet was playing the Glass Bead Game with cookie the harlequin in the garden across the Welgon Age's tea room, and cookie apparently wasn't concentrating very much on the game. He was quite giggly, asking Sarkon questions like "What would you do if you could..." - typical child questions, which Sarkon tried to answer as well as possible, like that he certainly would fly if he could, or that he'd tell mosquitoes to go drink someone else's blood if he could talk to animals. After some keen answers of the like, Sarkon felt like going a little further and asked impishly, "What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?"

cookie didn't answer immediately, and Sarkon could easily imagine why: after the rather funny retorts he had given, he figured cookie didn't want to answer something dumb, so he had to think hard. Sarkon also tried to think of some keen answer of his own. "Yes, what would I do?..." he wondered.

cookie still wasn't answering, and suddenly (or slowly - it was really difficult to define), that was when Sarkon's light bulb lightened, the vanishing point of this small amount of nil in his mind which had quite bothered him until then - a simple, logical answer to the "Why am I?", "Why are we?" questions.

"You are perfectly right, cookie," Sarkon slowly broke the silence as the harlequin still wasn't answering. "You wouldn't do anything at all."

cookie looked at Sarkon with his usual wondering smile, and the Prophet realized that of course he needed to give an explanation about this nothing-out-of-everything he was proposing. He went on with the following monologue.

"If you could do anything you wanted - if you were omnipotent - you'd be able to satisfy any of the needs you might have instantly, with a snap of the fingers. Consequently, you wouldn't have any needs any longer the second you'd be omnipotent. And if you had no more need, you'd have no more desire, right? And if you had no desire at all, why would you do anything at all?"

"But... wouldn't it be boring?" asked the harlequin while Sarkon was smiling at him.

"Exactly! It would even be so boring that it would be impossible to stand. It would be more impossible to stand than the greatest suffering we can imagine - it would be the most inhumane of hells! Imagine - you don't need nor have the desire to eat, you don't need nor have the desire to breathe, you don't need nor have the desire to see, you don't need nor have the desire to think - heck, you don't even need nor have the desire to exist! Wow!" Sarkon exclaimed, "Have I just proven that an omnipotent being shouldn't exist because he doesn't need to?"

"Does that all make sense?..." cookie started, but Sarkon was gone again.

"Let's imagine that an omnipotent being exists - or existed at some distant beginning - anyway, and that he'd be really omnipotent as we defined it: no need, no desire. The only thing he wouldn't be able to do anything about is his own existence. A state as frightening as hell, in my opinion. Which actually makes me think that... perhaps he would have a single need, one lone desire: escape from his own omnipotence. For who would not want to flee hell? And what would he do for that?"

"Decide that he isn't omnipotent anymore?" guessed cookie.

"Something like that, probably. But what would it imply? When you decide to do something, you indeed have to do something to implement your decision. Since nothing independent from the omnipotent being himself would exist, he would have to create something either limiting his omnipotence, or hiding it to himself. What could it be?"

"?..."

"Some sorts - any sorts - of limits and constraints. Thus, he would create a whole set of limits and constraints, and somehow hide in between them. Two of the constraints he could create would be, for instance, time and space. The omnipotent being would take care of occupying a limited portion of time as well as a limited space. He would create plenty of other constraints, of course, and perhaps find a way of kind of brainwashing himself, so that in the end, he could... Live? And when his time limit is reached, he would just start again, I guess... Of course, he would set up some sort of process to automatize this stuff, as he wouldn't want to go back to his state of omnipotence too often - at all, actually..."

Sarkon the Prophet was breathless and proud of having discovered what he already thought of naming 'The Why of the Universe', when cookie the harlequin remarked, "But we cannot do anything we want, so isn't everything you said rather irrelevant?"

Sarkon's shoulders slumped. Of course it was just theory. He had taken himself too far in a theological reasoning once again, it seemed...

"Let's resume our game," he sighed.

The harlequin smiled, and made a winning move.

* * *

Later Sarkon had the afterthought that omnipotent beings must somehow have a way to hide from themselves anyway - maybe in making themselves believe there is someone else out there who's omnipotent. Or maybe even in making themselves believe they are dimwitted harlequins.

Stroking his white beard, he eyed cookie suspiciously and thought, "Maybe I should found a new religion..."