Nothingness - The Source of
Everything
"It is the slience between the notes that makes the music." - Zen saying
It occurred to me with all this talk about nothingness, one might get the impression that I'm a slacker. I am, of course. But, still, regarding the concept of Nothingness, I didn't want to give the wrong impression.
Nothingness is a bit difficult to explain. Since most people in the world today believe in science, I'll attempt a 'scientific' explanation. The philosophical, mystic, rational and religious explanations are probably just as valid, but here in the West we tend to place science above most of these things.
So, here goes...
Think, for a moment, about what is known of the substance of things. Substance consists of molecules of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus with orbiting electrons. If we consider, for illustrative purposes, the size of the nucleus to be about the size of a marble, then proportionately, the orbiting electron would be the size of a very small speck - at a distance of a hundred yards away! Atoms are in fact 99.99 percent empty space. The models and illustrations that we commonly see cannot be drawn to scale because the empty space is far too vast. No matter how solid anything appears, the fact is that only about one thousandth of one percent of it is anything at all. The rest is emptiness. And it doesn't even end here!
Electrons, protons, and neutrons are NOT neat solid spheres as illustrated in pictures. The science of quantum physics tell us that they, too, are mostly void space with sparse packets of flickering energy. Deepak Chopra, a best-selling author, puts it this way:
"Within this void, packets of energy wink in and out of existence millions of times per second. When you throw a baseball, you see a solid sphere making an arc through the air. But in truth the baseball is an energy packet with no hard-edged boundaries of any kind, disappearing completely and reappearing slightly ahead of itself in space-time.At a fundamental level, we're all living in an elaborate illusion of Nothingness. Everything around us, our thoughts, our perceptions, the entire universe, are nothing more than varying aggregates of fast-moving and slow-moving energy that may or may not exist at any particular point in time. It all seems very real. But, in fact, we really can't be sure of anything.You, and everything around you, are a cloud of possibilities actualizing yourselves in the quantum field. Nothing you sense is reliable – no smell, sound, taste, touch or sight actually exists. You are swimming through the quantum soup, trying to understand infinity with the crude tools of the five senses. Your brain disappears and reappears at every second, and yet this magic act occurs too quickly for you to detect it."
But what exactly is this Nothingness, you ask? It's an old question, first asked by Buddha over two thousand five hundred years ago - long before science was invented. Is Nothingness what some might call God? Is it thought? Is it all things unknowable, the Source of all things? Yes... And no... Any words that are written can never quite reach it. It is beyond our intellectual grasp. For as long as we are limited by The Illusion of Physical Being, we shall probably never know.
-Pat Henry 2004
Home