Sunday, June 14, 2015

Thinking about Nothing

Today on my jog today I decided to think about nothing. My run is often my meditation time and today I tried to do what Sensei Tanouye once taught me. I concentrate on my breath in and out, in and out, in and out. I empty my mind of everything and then gradually concentrate on nothing and let go of that as well.

Sensei told me that things/concepts would intrude but just accept them and let them pass by. And so I began thinking about nothing.

The first nothing that pops in is zero. How lucky humans were to discover zero which would found our math, our science and our technology.

I let it go and run on.

Jena Paul Sartre taught that consciousness or radical subjectivity is nothing, the opposite of something or the object. And Heidegger followed up with consciousness as time so time is not a thing but the background on which things appear.

I let it go and run on.

I am nothing. There is no ego entity but simply a collectivity of perceptions. My ownership and my control of these images or ideas are but illusions.

I let it go and run on.

Death is the final emptying out. There may be some worth in trying to prolong death, but ultimately it is futile. Life is simply Bede's bird flying out of the darkness through the window into the lit mead hall and out the other side.

I let it go and run on.

Creation of the universe from nothing--perhaps quantum fluctuations of possible particles and boom! the big bang of birth towards entropy.

I let it go and run on.

Dark matter, hypothesized by its gravitational effects, is it the new ether? --the void through which galaxies and stars and planets and all things travel. Nature abhors a vacuum. There is no being without nothing; there is nothing without being.

I let it go and run on.

Philosophers say God is discovered through analogy, the biggest and best of everything, the Big Thing, the Ultimate Person, the Absolute Idea, the union of essence and existence, the Uncaused Cause. But Mystics of all traditions encounter God, not analogically, but negatively, as No Thing, as No Person, as No Idea, without both essence and existence. Total Absence. The Void.

I let it go and run on.

Thinking is nothing opposing things in the universe. It can say no to every idea that comes forth, every answer that is proposed, every law that is made. It is rebellion. It is transcendence.

I let it go and run on.

I begin to feel my body aching yet exhilarated. I begin to notice my breath labored yet inspiring.

But it is nothing.



No comments:

Post a Comment