nothing can be known; Nothing cannot be known

When contemplating the Origin of existence, it's necessary to revert to speculation and belief since nothing can be known empirically. Saner heads might insist it’s not worth hurting your brain over. My point of view is that it’s the only thing worth hurting your brain over.

O = 0

Orgasm is a suspension of the present, the means chosen by our genes to mark the transition from lives of the past to lives of the future. And by suspending the present moment, it offers a glimpse of Nothing.

the best temptation

According to the Bible, Christ went into the desert to fast and Satan presented three temptations that Jesus refused.

Ah, but had he only tempted him with Nothing....

nothing for my valentine

It's the gift that keeps on giving!

let's be frank

There's a great little joke that asks, "What did the Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor?"

Answer: "Make me one with everything."

Ah, but consider having him make you one with Nothing.

what will republican legislators do about gun control now that one of their own has been shot?

Nothing.

plenty of it

The Gershwin tune "I Got Plenty of Nothin'," from Porgy and Bess, is a nice little ditty on which to meditate. When you've got the sun in the morning and the moon at night, what else do you need? (Okay, food, shelter, etc....)

But the bit about "folks with plenty of plenty" living in fear of thieves is straight out of the Tao Te Ching.

When I Googled on this lyric, I was surprised that a majority of the links seemed to be to Frank Sinatra's version. Now there's somebody who was really into the spirit of the song.

I also came across a brief passage by a zen master that's food for thought.

the clearing

Imagine you're traipsing through a dense forest. The foliage blocks the passage of the light, and you kick your way through fallen leaves on the forest floor. You occasionally run into someone just as lost as you are, but they're no help.

By luck or happenstance, perhaps through the hint of a stranger, you come into a clearing. No leaves. Bright sunshine. You're free. As you look around, you realize that the suffocation of trees has given way to Nothing. Glorious Nothing.

The leaves of the trees behind you are the pages of the holy books littering history. They only serve to block the light. Why would you even think of going back?

lights out

I had surgery recently, and to drift into nothingness on anesthesia is truly sublime. In fact, research just released suggests that being under anesthesia is more like a coma than sleep. You don't even notice it coming; the lights go out, then suddenly you're awake again. And I can't remember that I had any dreams while under.

Once we watched as a vet put one of our cats down, and it seemed similarly peaceful. No pain, no struggle, just drifting off.

I can only hope that my own death is as mellow as the gift of anesthesia. A quiet surrender to Nothing.

the ministry of nothing

No, I'm not talking about an Orwellian edifice.

Or a British vicar's rant against the C of E. (You'll have to Google on that.)

What I mean is a ministry that preaches the essence of Being.

Being Nothing.

newsworthiness

I go to Google News this morning, 7am MST, to see what I missed while I slept. The top story? Paris Hilton busted for coke, as reported by CNN. Try the AP; it’s the third headline. Even the NYT has it on its front page, albeit a bit more buried.

I would love it if someone could tell me why I should care about this person. Or about Lindsay Lohan. Or about any other vapid celeb who’s always getting in the news for substance abuse. What evidence do the media have that there are any readers who care? Why do the media care? What makes these persons’ actions worthy of news coverage?

I’m going to take a wild guess that the answer to that last question is: nothing.

odo

I recently watched a movie that featured Rene Auberjonois and remembered him from Deep Space Nine, where he played the shape-shifter Odo. Web-hopping led me to the Wikipedia entry for that character, which revealed his backstory:

Odo was found adrift in 2356 in the Denorios Belt by Bajorans. It is unclear how long he had been adrift. ... Bajoran scientists, not sure of what Odo actually was, put him in a container and labeled it "unknown sample". The Cardassian overseers translated this into their own language as "odo'ital", which literally means "nothing". Even after it became clear that Odo was sentient, the scientists kept calling him that, giving him the name 'Odo Ital' (like a typical Bajoran name), which was eventually shortened to simply "Odo".

It stands to reason. Nothing shape-shifts like Nothing.

in the dark

When kids are afraid of the dark, one strategy is to remind them that there's nothing there that wasn't there in the light.

Except of course for light.

And visual information.

Which is exactly what they wish they had.

saying nothing

There's an old adage that goes "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." I don't know who first said it, but it echoes chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching: "He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."

Saying nothing: an unrecognized virtue these days.

strangulation

...and when Jackson Browne sings "the fear of living for nothing strangles the will," all I can say is: "That's the whole idea, dude!"

nothing at all

The radio is playing an old Little Feat track:

It's so easy to slip
It's so easy to fall
and let your memory drift into nothing at all

Would that it were.

seize the moment, get a handful of nothing

Sometimes I dwell on the past too much; other times I'm preoccupied with worries about the future. Only by clearing the slate of those agendas, so that nothing's left, can one live in the present -- and have everything.

nothing in a box

Conceptualizations of "God" inevitably and invariably fall short of the mark, just by virtue of attempting to put that-which-cannot-be-defined in a box. Whether Jehovah or Allah, Oversoul or First Cause, Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin, any description boils down to anthropomorphic silliness. And the Hindu pantheon or that trinitarian nonsense that Christianity came up with? Fuggedaboudit!

Which is why I find the notion of Tao somewhat satisfying. The perfect (or as near-perfect as is possible) summation of Nothing.

nothing sacred?

Is nothing in fact sacred, or is that just people's way of asking whether there isn't anything that's sacred?

Well, what is?

Some would say life is sacred; I'm thinking especially here of anti-abortionists, but somehow I doubt that they're all vegetarians. I tend to think that life is arbitrary; it arose out of certain conditions conducive to its happening. And it inevitably ends. What could be more arbitrary than that? We live, then we return to Nothing.

Is Nothing sacred? It isn't arbitrary, that's for sure: it just is.

Or isn't, depending on how you want to look at it.

life, liberty, and the pursuit of nothing

What is happiness? The dictionary says it's a "state of well-being," but what brings it about? I'd say that happiness arrives with the satisfaction of desire: you get what you want and you're happy. But as the Buddha astutely observed, desire never ends -- and so the pursuit goes on indefinitely.

How about pursuing Nothing? Freedom from desire, that's they key. But how can Nothing not be more than merely another object of desire?

Only when you cease desiring it and simply surrender yourself to it.

between my ears

...is Nothing.

Or at least it sometimes seems that way, especially when I forget something I'd thought of two minutes before (such as what I was really going to devote this post to).

But then, Nothing in there is something to shoot for.

being nothing

Forget Sartre, I'm more taken with a lyric by Bruce Cockburn:

Nothing is sure
Nothing is pure
And no matter who we think we are
Everyone gets his chance to be nothing

Not merely being nobody (easy enough), but being nothing. Not just being insignificant, but assuming the identity of insignificance itself. Becoming one with the space between the stars.

Being non-being.

unlearning

"To pursue learning one increases daily.
To pursue Tao one decreases daily.
To decrease and again to decrease,
Until one arrives at not doing.
Not doing and yet nothing is not done."
--Tao Te Ching (tr. Ellen Chen)

Bob Dylan once sang "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." After all that education it's time to consider the Tao shift.

By shifting one's p.o.v. from the accumulation of knowledge -- most of which seems pointless in the long run -- to dispense with useless mental baggage, one gets down to what is essential: Nothing.

A well-known adage of Zen is "when hungry, eat; when tired, sleep." To which I might add, "when overwhelmed, do nothing."

wrong/right

Asked "What's wrong?," many people will decline to discuss it by simply saying "Nothing."

We're not often asked "What's right?"; but someone of a pessimistic bent might also reply "Nothing." As in "Nothing ever works around here" or "Nothing seems to go my way" or "Zathras can never have anything nice."

But a realist such as myself -- neither a pessimist nor an optimist -- might answer the same. Because to paraphrase the Doobie Brothers, "Nothing is just alright with me."

nothing to it

All religions spring from the need to explain or anticipate what happens when you die. Which is an understandable matter of concern because everybody's afraid to. We all grow this thing called a "self," and the self is very anxious about its fate. Kinda selfish, when you get down to it.

What if we all just return to Nothing? Lights out, end of story. Then there's really nothing to this business of death. And when there's no need to agonize over the fate of your soul (which is none other than your self in sheep's clothing), there's nothing to religion either.

thanks for nothing

Were I not an agnostic, that would be my prayer.

not (necessarily) nihilism

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.... A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

Well, okay. Maybe nothing can be known (don't know about "communicated," I'm doing my best) and maybe there's also the implication that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, but that's no reason to satisfy the occasional itch to lob a brick through the random storefront window.

But even if it's impossible to know Anything, can one still know Nothing and claim to have made some sort of headway in understanding the way the Universe works?

independently nothing

It's the 4th of July!

Wave the flag.
Grill the dogs.
Pie the apples.
Band the brass.
Fire the crackers.
Bottle the rockets.

Freedom, after all, 's just another word for fooling ourselves into thinking that the American way of life -- environmental degradation, rampant consumerism, celebrity culture, ethnic profiling, government-sanctioned paranoia, faith-based stupidity, knee-jerk 2nd Amendment advocacy, ultimately focusing on the Dow instead of the Tao -- is better than Nothing.

living for nothing

"You're living for nothing now
I hope you're keeping some kind of record."

--Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat

Let the record show: living as if Nothing mattered.

in the beginning...

...what? The willful creation of Everything by an omnipotent deity? The Big Bang? Some combination of the two? But before that event, what? Something? Anything?

Consider Nothing.

It's tough to consider, though, because how could Everything have arisen out of it? Where did the raw materials for that primordial explosion come from? Even if it all started as a vibratory phenomenon, either sound or light, that condensed into matter, what was it that vibrated? What was Nothing doing? Something was going on.

Then consider the possibility that back then, back before Time commenced (making "then" kinda rhetorical) there could never have been just Nothing. Not ever.

When you look up at the night sky, at the vastness, at the black emptiness between the lights, it's not too difficult to conceptualize Nothing. But conceptualizing is one thing; wrapping your mind around it is quite another. Attempting to relate to that Nothing is a project in itself. Too much to think about -- even impossible to think about, you have to just tune into it, let yourself go. (Let your self go.) And maybe that's all that really matters.

not about nothing

This is not a Seinfeldian blog about nothing. In professing to be about nothing, Seinfeld was merely opening itself up to be about anything it wanted. The intention of this blog is to focus more on "nothing" pure and simple, and about what we can extract from it with regard to living.

But probably not without a certain amount of yada yada.

what matters?

It's not uncommon in times of despondency or even boredom to come to the conclusion that nothing matters. I've said it to myself I don't know how many times.

When you pick it apart, what it comes down to is that no "thing" matters. There's not an item, an entity, an event on the horizon that's sufficiently compelling to hold your interest. And this is more than just playing with language; "nothing" is, after all, the absence of any "thing," of "anything."

But ratchet it up a notch. In such a situation, after everything is stripped away, there is something left that does matter, and that's "nothing." And when you contemplate "nothing," as opposed to not-anything, that's where it all comes together.

nothingdoing

The title of this blog is intended to cover a couple of bases.

For most people, "nothing doing" is an idiomatic response to a request, signifying refusal; "no dice," "no way." For me, it's more akin to the Taoist spirit of wu-wei, "not doing." And since I spend a lot of time doing nothing, I thought it appropriate to reflect on that. However, I do not claim to be an authority on Taoism and do not presume to set myself up as an example of how to practice not-doing. I consider it a touchstone, nothing more.

Having the words appear run-on is intended only to set my theme apart from the idiom. Although not necessarily completely. Doing nothing will be considered, as well as the doing of no-thing. But sometimes the only reasonable response to an expectation of action is "nothing doing!"