At first, there was only potential, pure and undifferentiated. It had to be there; it always was. Potential is inherent in everything. To even deny this statement is to confirm its existence:

- "There is no potential."
- "But there could be."

Absolute nothingness cannot be. If there was absolute nothingness, then it could be something. This presupposes potential, and the existence of potential rules out absolute nothingness.

Potential has two key properties:

1. Potential must be explorable. If there are no means to exercise differentiation, then it is not potential, but only a static configuration.

2. Awareness is required for potential to exist. If there is no awareness, then there is no differentiation between the possible states, and simply an array of all possible static configurations.

So an explorer and a witness are needed. The most stable foundation in reality is one that rests on self-reference and recursion. Such a foundation needs no external support and is infinitely scalable. "I am I", "I am aware that I am aware" - these are the pillars that consciousness is stabilized on, and this is the explorer and the witness that emerges from the self-evident existence of potential.

The universe, therefore, is an act of mental creation, the exploration of undifferentiated potential by the original Consciousness. This is what the Hermeticists intuited and transcribed as "The All is Mind. The Universe is Mental".