There are 4 fundamental questions of existence:

1. Why does something rather than nothing exist?
2. What is the fundamental nature of existence?
3. Why is what exists that which exists rather than something else?
4. What actually does exist?

Yesterday I provided my best take on question 1. After much careful consideration and all things considered I think the simplest and most explanatory answer to question 2, the fundamental nature of existence, is as follows:

Rather than being a quality of individual entities, existence must be their common substance. Only this can explain why all things share the same quality of existence, because they are all forms of the same 'stuff' called existence.

If we take existence as the fundamental substrate of the universe, then all the things of the universe become forms in this universal sea of existence. Thus it's their existence within the sea of existence that gives all things their individual
existences. This is a very simple and highly explanatory model.

The universal sea of existence and all the forms of existence that exist within it is all that exists.

By analogy consider an originally formless sea of water. Then all the various forms of water such as waves, ripples, currents, and tides are all various forms of the same fundamental substance of water. They are all information forms of water in a
universal medium of water.

So we can model all the individual things of the world to be information forms of existence that exist within existence and thereby gain their individual existences.

Now if everything is the information of what it is rather than a physical object this works quite well and is consistent with the Buddhist teaching of the emptiness of things because all things are just the information forms of what they are and their
common underlying existence is their Mu or śūnyatā.

This is also consistent with a new understanding of physics, because the universal sea of existence can quite logically be identified with the quantum vacuum. The QV is then seen as science's initial discovery of the sea of existence out of which actual
particles arise and which is necessary to support their continuing existence.

This model is also consistent with the concept of Tao out of which all forms arise. However the basic forms that arise out of the Tao aren't male and female and the I-Ching hexagrams but the elementary particles. In this view the elementary particles are
the fundamental information forms that arise out of the QV and are the basic constituents of everything in the entire universe. The elementary particles aren't physical objects but the fundamental information forms of existence out of which the entire
universe is constructed.

It all fits together neatly and elegantly, and it leads naturally to the answer to the 3rd fundamental question of existence which will be the subject of my next post.

Edgar L. Owen

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