Newsletter #3: Nothingness

This week’s newsletter is about nothing. You’ve heard right. I planned to write about nothing for the last edition, but then something came up.

What do I mean by nothing? We may define nothingness as the opposite or absence of something. In an absolute sense, it would not even be that—as it still needs something to exist in relation to. But absolute nothingness doesn’t exist.

You see, we already run into trouble, as language is always relative. Everything we can conceptualize with language has a reference. Everything we can talk about, we can only define in terms of other things we know. Darkness only makes sense as the absence of light, other is that which is not me, space is that which contains things, etc. To know what something is, in itself, it can only be experienced.

To get deeper into the experience—or no-experience—of nothingness, I want to invite you on a little thought experiment. Imagine the absence of all things. The absence of being or existence itself. Not you, not me, not the world, no time, no space, not even empty space. Think about the time before you were born. Or the time before the universe existed. Do you remember what it was like? I bet it was like nothing.

What happens if you try to go there? You’ll notice something interesting is going to happen. Our minds have a blind spot. We are used to conceptual thinking, i.e., defining things in terms of relatives. We cannot go to a place from which to imagine absolute nothingness.

But maybe, you’ll come to an interesting realization. Did you ever ask yourself, why something exists at all? Why does the world exist? Why do you exist? It is precisely because of that. Nothingness cannot exist. Literally, that’s its definition. But it is more profound than just a play of words.

You cannot remember what it was like before you were born because you did not exist. All you know is, there has always been something. And because of this, there will always be something. Because nothing cannot exist. Nothing doesn’t exist, cannot be experienced. You did not exist, but only from the perspective of you parents and others what remember the time before you. But from your perspective, existence is all there was and all there will ever be. The same goes for death. You will die or disappear only from the perspective of the people who live after you, but from your perspective you will not die, as experience itself cannot stop. Because for it to stop it would not exist, ergo cannot be experienced. This maybe hard to grasp, but bear with me—it is worth contemplating.

If you look closely towards nothingness another interesting thing may happen. As nothing does not exist, it cannot be experienced. For something to be experienced, it must become an object. And there must be something that experiences it, in other terms, a subject, or the experiencer.

And we’ve now directly seen how all comes into existence. From nothingness, a subject and object arise, in order for experience to happen. Nothingness, in other terms, is the pure potential from which everything arises. We can directly look into your own experience to know this. How does anything come to you? A thought, a feeling, the world in front of your eyes? It arises out of nothingness, or no-experience and then merges back into it.

Everything arises on the screen we may call consciousness. This screen itself doesn’t change by the content that is displayed. Note, that subject and object are both “made out of” the same stuff. The subject, the You, merges into the object of experience. We become the music or the emotion we’re experiencing. There is no other You than the subject that arises moment to moment and merges into the object of experience.

It is similar to watching a movie. We become immersed in the movie, and forget about the screen.

The only thing that remains is the unchanged screen of consciousness and a sense of agency that moves the focus of awareness within this infinite screen.

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