2. Something and Nothing
‘Nothing. Nothing is an awe-inspiring yet essentially undigested concept, highly esteemed by writers of a mystical or existential tendency, but by most others regarded with anxiety, nausea, or panic.’
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Truth has taken on a special pre-eminence in modern times. Despite the onslaught of post-modernism, somehow, there is an inherent belief in an absolute truth in the form of verifiable correspondence with the observable world as being at least theoretically possible. The notion still holds sway even although looking more closely at such truth claims leads inevitably to an ever-receding horizon of possible knowledge about the world. Look close enough at matter, or energy, or force and they simply evaporate. Is there anything absolutely true? Perhaps just the statement ‘something is going on’! But even that might be up for question. Even the difference between something and nothing might not ultimately be real.
The entire world is like this! When one looks closely at words and descriptions and questions, they carve up the world in the manner described above. Very big questions therefore are suspect. They are asked with the assumption that there could be a clear meaning to the question and a straightforward answer that we could understand. But unfortunately the world is not like this. The way language splits the world is a false split, as previously described. There can only be one universe — by definition — and therefore even at this level, any divisions in the universe are just our descriptions – our way of seeing the world.
There is one really fundamental question and that is:- ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ (It was apparently Leibniz who first raised this as a philosophical concern – there has to be a ‘sufficient reason’ for something to be.) Is this question at least immune from the concerns raised above? I would have to say, no, it’s not! Even the difference between something and nothing is a false split.
Buddhism has a way of speaking about ultimate reality, in that all statements must be qualified by three others. So if we say: ‘the universe exists’, we make a split in the universe by suggesting that all non-existent things do not belong to it. Hence, we need to qualify our statement by also saying: ‘the universe does not exist’’ ‘the universe both exists and does not exist,’ and finally, ‘the universe neither exists nor does it not exist.’ Clearly, even all four statements about the universe taken together don’t really tell us anything. And that of course is the whole point — no statement about ultimate reality really makes any sense. It is only by defining boundaries, and assuming parochial economies of human endeavour or ecology or whatever that we can get to a place where statements can take on a meaning. Our statements and questions will then be qualified by the limits that we knowingly impose upon ourselves.
What then of something and nothing? It is more than simply a matter of saying there could have been nothing, but instead there’s something or saying something and nothing are the same. It might seem like a very strange point to make, but our culture has an inherent bias towards something. Nothing is regarded as an absence – almost a mistake. Our view of reality might be very different indeed if we were to turn this on its head and see something arising out of nothing. Consider this explanation of the issue given by Wu Wei Wei, commenting on the Diamond Sutra and quoted by Jerry Katz:
‘The importance of this understanding of the precedence of the negative element to the positive, of the void to the plenum, of non-being to being, of I am not to I am is sufficiently great to justify any degree of hyperbole — for it requires a reversal of our habitual way of regarding these matters, and a transvaluation of our established values according to which…we assume positive reality or being and then look for negatives. That is, we imagine the void as an emptiness in a pre-existing fullness, a nothing in an assumed something, whereas we are urgently required to apprehend the ubiquitous pre-existence of nothing, out of which something may appear, or out of non-manifestation manifestation.’
So, whilst in one sense — regarding all as one — we are obliged to regard something and nothing as a false split; nonetheless, when we look closer at this duality, the usual manner of understanding is perhaps flawed. We assume nothing to be almost a product of something or at least the absence of something rather than giving nothing its true and balanced weight.
Again, it may seem like a subtle point, but so much of what we do gives pre-eminence to existence. Even for instance St. Anslem’s famous proof for the existence of God uses the precedence of existence over non-existence as a reason for belief. The whole basis of empirical science — that is, science based on observation — makes the underlying assumption that existence is primary and that extension in space and time are basic to that existence. Logical positivism extended this notion to effectively dismiss the unseen as irrelevant and unreal. Science has so far made an exception for forces — gravity, electro-magnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force — but the search always seems to be on to find particles which facilitate these forces — to render them material. Subjectivity and with it emotion, spirituality, desire and passion, have often therefore been rendered non-existent. We will see in later chapters the immense damage this has done, not least to women and to the feminine aspect of reality. However, we will also see how non-material things — in the pursuit of ideals – have been covertly rendered into qualities of being. For instance, happiness has become something that we might possess or earn, as if it were a physical thing. Ethics changed to metaphysics, in the relentless materialisation of the world.
In Greek mythology, first there was chaos and then one of the earliest gods to be born was Eros. Eros is able to bring order out of chaos. Eros is the creative attraction of opposites and the order that can result. To be erotic is to love and affirm life! This brings us to another aspect of the something and nothing question, the contrast between creation from nothing (‘ex nihilo’) as opposed to order out of chaos. If we were to adopt order out of chaos we might also say becoming rather than beginning.
Chaos creates the couple Erebos (darkness) and Nyx (night) who in turn birthed Hypnos, the god of sleep. Together with Pasithea, goddess of relaxation and hallucination, Hypnos fathered the three lords of the dream kingdom — Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos, who ruled over the changeable, fearful and fantastical regions of life. Hypnosis’ court is guarded by Aergia — literally, inactivity — goddess of sloth. From this we can note that chaos (rather than just ‘nothingness’) is always attempting to gain a foothold in human life. We need to be doing a bit of work to keep order in place and chaos at bay.
Grace Jantzen, who we will hear more from in later chapters, contrasts the usual word for a person — ‘mortal’ — with ‘natal’. In suggesting this name, she is asking us to consider: Are we beginning just to die or are we born in order to become?
Theologian Catherine Keller has written extensively over this contrast of something out of nothing and order out of chaos. She says:
‘Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet laboured and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed “in the beginning”. But if such talk-talk of the beginning at the end has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of becoming, then theology had better get out of its own way.’
Catherine Keller — Face of the Deep — A Theology of Becoming.
Keller goes on to talk of becoming as a process emerging from chaos:
‘If we discern a third space of beginning – neither pure origin nor nihilist flux – its difference translates into another interstitial space; that between the self-presence of a changeless being who somehow suddenly (back then) created; and the pure nonbeing out of which that creation was summoned, and towards which its fluency falls. That alternative milieu, neither being nor nonbeing, will signify the site of becoming as genesis; the topos of the Deep. Can we tell the story this way; that tehom (the deep) as primal chaos precedes and gives rise to the generative tensions of order and disorder, form and formlessness? Might tehom henceforth suggest the chaoid (so not necessarily chaotic) multidimensionality of a bottomless Deep; the matrix in which the creation becomes? In which the strange inter-fluences of creatures — in ecology, predation, cultures — crisscross the abyss of difference?
Catherine Keller — Face of the Deep — A Theology of Becoming.
In similar vein, the Buddhist tradition recognises the concept of ‘Sunyata’. It is described thus:
‘To call it being is wrong, because only concrete things exist. To call it non-being is wrong. It is best to avoid all description…. It is the basis of all. The absolute, the truth that cannot be preached in words.’
Heinrich Zimmer — Philosophies of India.
Generally speaking, science favours creation ‘ex nihilo’. If some previously-existing chaotic state were envisaged, then science presumably would feel the need to explain this somehow. In balance, although creation out of a literal nothing is not an entirely satisfactory explanation, it is probably preferable and less messy for science than order out of chaos. On the basis of Occam’s Razor — science inevitably opts for this simpler answer. Already, on a small scale, such ‘creation’ is accepted, as when two mutually opposing particles ‘appear’ and then almost instantaneously annihilate each other.
A beginning, as mentioned by Catherine Keller, implies an end. The universe does not simply risk sliding back into chaos, it faces total extinction. Again, there is an underlying association with death in the choice of viewing the creation in this way.
The acceptance of this notion of a literal nothingness from which the universe sprung also ties in with the notion that we are here by chance. However, life defies the second law of thermodynamics — it effectively makes order where chaos should rein. Therefore, science’s preference for creation out of nothing implicitly suggests that life is an anomaly. The way things stand there is a covert interest in dead matter over an interest in life and this awkward bias is studiously ignored. If we were instead to opt for order out of chaos from the outset then life would be seen to be contiguous with the birth and development of the universe.
As Catherine Keller has indicated, form and formlessness are better terms to describe creation than something and nothing. The flux between form and formlessness is an important aspect of life, to which we will return. In the meantime, we can relate these ideas back to what was said about nonduality in Chapter 1. According to Ngakpa Chogyam, nonduality has two sides:
‘One is the empty, or nonduality, and the other is form or duality. Therefore, duality is not illusory but is instead one aspect of nonduality. Like the two sides of a coin, the formless reality has two dimensions — one is form, the other is formless. When we perceive duality as separate from nonduality (or nonduality as separate from duality) we do not engage with the world of manifestation from a perspective of oneness, and thereby we fall into an erroneous relationship with it. From this perspective, it is not “life” or duality that is Maya or illusion; rather it is our relationship to the world that is illusory.’
Ngakpa Chogyam
(As quoted by Mariana Caplan in Eyes Wide Open; Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path.)
A literal nothing is very difficult to conceive. When the term is used in common parlance it is in a more circumscribed manner. For instance, we may speak of ‘empty’ space, a cloudless sky or a street devoid of people or cars. In so doing, we realise of course that this is not a literal nothing. However, that emptiness or vacancy of which we speak has a lot more to say to us than an inaccessible and literal nothingness. It is the spaces between thoughts and words. The small silences in a piece of music. The time of rest between work or action in the world. The time spent alone in between time spent with family, friends or colleagues. The time spent just doing ‘nothing’. It seems to me that these are all necessary counterpoints to the ‘somethings’ that we are busily seeking or creating in the world. Letting go of ‘somethings’ allows a space from which new ideas and new forms can be created. Letting go will be a theme to which we will return.
Formlessness then is far from being empty — in fact formlessness is ever ripe with potential. We make the mistake of seeing ‘nothingness’ as a negative — an absence of stuff — rather than as a potential for birth and the underlying essence of all that is. Order out of chaos, form out of formlessness.
