Getting Acquainted with Nothing
Detail of the flag of the Republic of Korea, featuring the yin-yang symbol.
Nothing can sneak up on us when we least expect it, an uncomfortable fact that has certainly been amplified during the Covid-19 crisis as millions of people have been obliged to self-isolate. In fact, negative feelings of failure, envy and resentment, and experiences of loss, absence, sickness and death seem to shape our lives more than positive feelings and experiences. Despite our desire to hold onto ‘positive’ emotions and thoughts, we often find ourselves trapped in the company of the ‘negative.’
There is a battle raging inside all of us between the internal and external forces moving us forward and helping us grow, and those holding us back and defeating us. Intrinsic to our emotional and intellectual life are conscious or unconscious, willed or unwilled, encounters with ‘nothing’ – with pessimistic, critical, skeptical, apathetic, cynical, violent and destructive attitudes. It can be encountered as a very personal matter which poses deep existential problems, as when we conclude that we live in a meaningless abyss between the nothingness before birth and the nothingness after death.
Such negativity can form the basis for judgments about the meaning of existence as a whole, as when Macbeth says that life is “ full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” This overwhelmingly negative feeling can become so permanent that only suicide seems to offer a way out. ‘There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing’[1], writes the contemporary Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li, giving new voice to the perennial sense of despair. Acute awareness of existential worthlessness can have specific causes - cruel parenting or the trauma of war - but it can also, as Blaise Pascal observes, simply be the result of someone being “in complete repose, without passions, without occupation, without amusement, without duty’. For at such moments, “Immediately there arises from the bottom of his soul boredom, grief, chagrin, scorn, despair.”[2]
And yet such feelings of existential nothingness can also lead to the recognition that our feeling of groundlessness is an inevitable consequence of being over-dependent on some basic habits of thinking. Buddhist teachings state that all things are without essential and enduring identity, that all existence is interconnected in a chain of co-dependent becoming within a state of constant flux. Therefore, a meditation on one’s own emptiness or nothingness can aid in relinquishing our grasp on the binary oppositions that usually dominate existence, and so be the prelude to an enlightening experience of peaceful mindfulness.
In this sense, exploring how Nothing performs, animates, and transforms can be a potential prelude to a healing process in which the usual segregations in our thinking begin to seem less rigid and therefore less terrorizing. Once we have familiarized ourselves with the negative, we can start to think dialectically: not negative v positive, but rather negative-positive, where we are positioning ourselves in a ‘fuzzy,’ in-between position, one from where we can pivot back and forth between poles.
The Taoist concept of yinyang is an ancient system of dialectical thinking. Buddhism calls itself the ‘middle way,’ because it invites the merging of contradictions, or the mutual conversion of binary opposites. These traditions aim to help us to stay in touch with the undelimited whole. As the Zen monk Hui Neng declares: “ All things are in your essential nature. If you see everyone’s bad and good but do not grasp or reject any of it, and do not become affected by it, your mind is like space – this is called greatness”. [3] The ‘nothing,’ ‘void,’ or ‘emptiness’ of Buddhism isn’t therefore referring to the absence of ‘something,’ and is intended to signal an unconceptualizable connectedness which cannot be grasped, circumscribed or delimited.
[1] Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write You in Your Life, Random House, 2017
[2] Pascal, Pensées, No. 201
[3] Hui Neng, ‘The Sutra of Hui-Neng, Grand Master of Zen, With Hui-neng’s Commentary on the Diamond Sutra, trans. Thomas Cleary, Boston and London: Shambhala, 1998, 17