In the Beginning There Was No Balance

This book is the first of the six-book Balance series: Measure · The Human · Breaking · Meaning · Life · The Center. It is the first book of the series.

The first movement of being

Let us picture a pair of scales. The pans are empty, the pointer in the middle. We call it "balanced." Yet an empty scale is not in balance; it simply has not weighed anything yet. Balance begins when a weight is placed. It is established when the placed weight finds its counterpart.

We must think of the beginning of being in the same way. In the beginning there was no balance. Because there was nothing to be balanced. Nothingness is not in balance; nothingness is only nothing. Balance is a need born together with the first movement. Once something exists, it has a place, a limit, a weight. And that weight asks for something across from it.

Cosmology today describes the beginning of the universe as a hot, dense and almost uniform state. The word "almost" matters. The temperature differences measured in the universe's first light are on the order of one part in a hundred thousand. Had there not been so small a difference, there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no human being upon them asking questions. A flawless uniformity would be a stillness in which nothing could gather and nothing could separate.

So the first movement of being is the breaking of a balance. But this breaking is not a random scattering; it is a measured stirring. More would have scattered the universe; less would have given birth to nothing.

The order within chaos

In ancient Greek, chaos meant "opening," "gaping," the void before all things. Today we use the word for disorder. Yet chaos and order are not enemies. Chaos is the place where order is not yet visible.

Look at the flow of a river. Each drop seems to go its own way; eddies, foam, sudden bends. But the river reaches the sea. Look at the rippling of a flock of birds in the air. No bird directs the whole; each looks only at the one beside it. And still they curve across the sky like a single body.

The Qur'an leaves this order before the human eye as an invitation:

You see no discord in the creation of the All-Merciful. Turn your eye again and look: can you see any rift?

Al-Mulk 67:3 (translation)

Having said "you see no discord," the verse at once says "look again." Order is not surrendered at a single glance. The first glance sees chaos; the second glance seeks the measure. Perhaps the human task is this second glance.

The birth of balance

Balance is not a beginning but a result. Forces meet, test one another, and in the end make room for one another. A planet does not fall into its star, because its fall is balanced by its own speed. An orbit is in truth a fall that lasts forever; only a fall that never strikes.

What a beautiful lesson: balance is not not-falling. Balance is not losing the way while falling.

The sun cannot overtake the moon, nor can the night outrun the day. Each swims in an orbit.

Ya-Sin 36:40 (translation)

The verb "to swim" is striking. One who swims stays within the water but does not sink; moves but is not swept away. Balance is the name not of standing still, but of swimming.

To the question of whether it is a human invention or a discovery, a first answer can be given here: The human being did not invent balance. He was born inside a balance. His breath, his heartbeat, the salt in his blood, his body's warmth; all had been measured before he was even aware of it. What the human does is notice this measure he finds ready within and around him, and then learn not to break it.