I Have Nothing to Say

[Pluto]

A Thread About Nothing
There's nothing to see here. Nothing has value. I care about nothing.

Yet an inherent paradox arises in speaking about nothing, since the very act of making it an object of discussion implicitly converts it into a 'something', yet it is not. Perhaps there is no such thing as nothing, yet here we are. Hence, the words need to be delivered in a more abstract way in order to sidestep this linguistic tragedy of circumstance.

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The Science of Nothing
The only point to make here is that at the subatomic level, an astonishingly high percentage of all physical matter is completely empty. Consider that the human body is made of such atoms. Meanwhile, out in the vastness of the universe, again, the overwhelming majority of space is simply nothing.

The Greeks Understood Nothing
Among his most famous quotes/misquotes, Socrates (470-399 BC) said 'I know that I know nothing.' He also commented on the absurdity of being afraid of death, since we know absolutely nothing about it or what comes after. Later Greek philosophers explored skepticism, questioning the very possibility of knowing anything.

I vaguely recall once reading a story, possibly about the great Skeptic Pyrrho (360-270 BC), which may or may not be true. In it, he was travelling with some students one day, but at one point they were heading straight for a cliff! The students grabbed the reigns to prevent disaster, and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he doesn't even know if it would be bad to go over the cliff, or if the cliff is even real.

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Buddhism: An Entire Religion About Nothing
Eckhart Tolle quoted a Zen monk who summed up his entire life's understanding in a phrase, "All that arises passes away." In other words, nothing is permanent. In addition to being timeless, nothing is omnipresent and formless. Curiously, these are all the classical qualities of a supreme deity.

In debate, Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna (150-250 AD) claimed to hold no positions on any issue, yet used a technique called fourfold negation to cut down all positions presented to him. This technique rejected all four possible answers to a given question (yes, no, both, neither). So, for example, is there a God? No. So he's saying there is no God? No, he's not saying that. So, there both is and is not a God? No. So there is neither a God, nor the absence of a God? No.

Another way of presenting this is to leave a question as a question, or even reject the question itself - a very un-Western way! What remains is an acceptance of life as a total mystery. A cultivation of inner silence. An energy of surrender. Implicitly, if we are to find anything of value, first we need to give up our old nonsense.

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Neti-Neti in Hinduism
'Neti-neti' translates to 'not this, not this'. Understood correctly, it is a technique of negation by which the practitioner describes him or herself in negative terms only - for example, I am not male or female, not young or old, not human or animal, etc. - in order to discard all thought-based identities which create an imprisonment of perceived limitation.

The Ultimate Nothingness
Given that the greatest philosophers and the most insightful religions have such reverence for nothing, all this leads to the ultimate question: is nothing really nothing? Yet with this question immediately arises the aforementioned paradox. We have reached an impenetrable barrier of mental understanding and the intellect can proceed no further. But you are not your intellect, so you may proceed.

At this profound climax, two points can be made. Firstly, nothing is not your idea about nothing, or some mental picture of blankness. That blankness is a subtle thing, an idea or image, so throw it away. Secondly, the answer is summed as, "See for yourself." All the most insightful understandings can only lead you to the edge of the cliff of knowledge. You must bravely jump into the void, give up everything you ever knew and be consumed. I will conclude with a quotation from one enlightened master who successfully made this leap of consciousness and speaks from the other side of it, Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981).

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"Discover all that you are not -- body, feelings thoughts, time, space, this or that -- nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive.
The clearer you understand on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realise that you are the limitless being." - Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

[Pluto]

​

Spoiler alert: what follows is yet more nothing. But is that even possible? If there was nothing to begin with, can there really be more?

Nothing: The Cosmic Culprit
You know that event? Yes, the one you are thinking about. Actually, it doesn't matter which one. All were caused by nothing. Want proof?

Attributing causation for an event means tracing an investigative pathway back in time. People do it daily, though it only works up to a point. Let's take an example.

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Someone cuts you off in traffic. A visceral anger arises automatically, involuntarily, as if arising out of nowhere. Obviously, the other driver is to blame for this annoyance. Who else? Well, maybe whoever taught them to drive. Or the authorities behind the licensing system. Or maybe whoever they are driving to see, since otherwise they wouldn't even be on the road.

This blame game is getting messy, but there's a shortcut: blame their parents. They gave birth for heaven's sake. Or maybe the grandparents. Or great grandparents. Or the founders of the country. Or let's go back as far as the people behind the First Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 BC.

Perhaps the early humans of 200,000 years ago. Or the first homo erectus 2 million years ago. Even the original fish to crawl onto land 375 million years ago. Maybe the comet that delivered biological molecules into Earth's early oceans 4 billion years ago. Or even the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.

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All good so far. Blaming the big bang for your being cut on traffic is still based on completely sound reasoning. But why must we stop there? What caused the big bang? The obvious answer is NOTHING. If you have a creator deity, insert it here. And what caused your deity? NOTHING. Thus, the unavoidable conclusion is that nothing caused everything.

Nowhere: The Home of Nothing
Do you know where you are right now? Well, yes, of course I do. I'm at home. Oh, are you really? And where's home? I'm near Melbourne. And where's Melbourne? Australia. And where's Australia? On Earth.

Where's Earth? It's a planet in the solar system. And where's the solar system? A quiet corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Where's that? A part of the Local Group, a region so called because it's only 10 million light-years in diameter.

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And where's the Local Group? In the universe. (Optional: insert a multiverse theory here if you wish.) OK, so where's the universe? Stop it! You can't ask that, or it will break everything. Oh, so you actually don't know where you are. Worse, it is fundamentally not knowable as the question is itself a fallacy.

OK great. So where exactly does this leave us? Well, nowhere of course.

​

 

[Abandoned Character]

Where do our thoughts come from, and where do they go when we stop thinking them?

Nowhere, I suppose!

 

[verywelladjusted]

Right, Wrong, what to do?
Some day it will come to you
Hostile Indians
We named a summer camp for you

 

[Forever Sleep]

Mind boggling but the cutting off in traffic thing denies responsibility. Did that person know they shouldn't have done that? Most probably- if they learnt to drive and passed a test. Attributing everything to something else lets everyone off doing 'bad' things. Murderers and rapists and child rapists aren't at fault. It was their upbringing that 'caused' them to do that. It may have contributed- yes but- surely a person still has agency and most people do have a sense of what is right and wrong. Even if they weren't brought up with many morals, they are probably aware of what is illegal. Again- maybe human constructs. Nonsensical terms but most people would agree that raping and killing is wrong... as well as cutting someone off in traffic!

As for 'nothing'- what we think about it doesn't change what it is- or isn't. So- how have we changed the nature of what it is- or isn't? Why are we that important? It's like that whole- 'if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' I'd say- yes. Sound is caused by vibration. Whether there were ears around to hear it or not- those vibrations still occurred. I can talk and think and wish my empty glass was full of iced coffee- doesn't mean iced coffee will suddenly materialise there. Same way- by identifying huge amounts of emtyness or nothing- it doesn't change the nature of what it is- or- am I missing the point? It's like saying only the animals that have been identified and given posh sounding latin names by humans exist. There's bound to be loads of animals we haven't discovered yet. Just because we decide to think about something- it doesn't change the nature of what it is. It surely just affects our perception and maybe a handful of other's perceptions of it.

Nothing doesn't actually become something in reality because we thought about it. It doesn't get filled with stuff. It doesn't get warm or cold or turn purple- unless someone is gifted with psychokinesis presumably. 'Nothing' will still be or rather- not be there if a human knows about it or not- I would have thought. Presumably, nothing was still out there when dinosaurs were lumbering around the earth. I doubt they thought much about it.

 

[real person]

good post

 

[Pluto]

 

[SexyIncél]

There's a link to suicide:

We have glimpsed what Socrates' knowledge can be, over and above his lack of knowledge. Socrates says again and again that he knows nothing, that he has nothing to teach to others, and that others must think for themselves and discover their truth by themselves. Yet we can at least wonder whether there wasn't also knowledge that Socrates himself had discovered, by himself and in himself.

A passage from the Apology, in which knowledge is opposed to lack of knowledge, allows us to hazard this conjecture. In the passage, Socrates imagines that other people might say to him, "Aren't you ashamed to have lived the kind of life which now is placing you in mortal danger?"

Socrates claims he would respond as follows: "You do not speak well, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth something ought to calculate the risks of living and dying, instead of considering only, when he acts, whether he is acting justly or unjustly, and whether his deeds are those of a good man or a bad one."

From this point of view, what appears as lack of knowledge is the fear of death: "For to fear death, Gentlemen, is nothing other than to think one is wise when one is not, for it means to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death might not be the greatest of goods for man, but people fear it as if they were perfectly certain it is the greatest of evils. Yet how could it be anything but the most shameful ignorance to think one knows what one does not know?"

Socrates, for his part, knows that he knows nothing about death. Nevertheless, he does claim to know something concerning an entirely different subject: "I do, however, know that committing injustice and disobeying my betters, whether God or man, is bad and shameful. Therefore, I shall never fear or flee something whose badness or goodness I am ignorant of, as opposed to those evils which I know are bad."

(I'm not sure that it's "knowable" that disobeying your betters is bad & shameful... sounds like bootlicking BS)

BTW, the Zen buddhist Dōgen had an interesting technique: "Without-thinking". It's different from both thinking and not-thinking (where you empty your mind). It's fairly raw sense-perception without imposing interpretations. Once you can do this, then you can fit the sense data into different conceptual frameworks:

Dōgen claimed that meaning is always contextual. He noted that the ocean has a different meaning to a fish swimming in it, a person in a boat out at sea and a deity looking down at it from the heavens. To the fish, the ocean is a translucent palace; to the person it is a great circle extending to the horizon in all directions; to the deity it is a string of jewel-like lights glittering in the sunshine. If the deity were to interpret the ocean as a circle or the person in the boat were to interpret it as a palace, however, they would not be expressing what is actually in front of them. Their interpretation would be false. Therefore, the key to truth in meaning is the appropriateness of the context.

According to Dōgen, meditative without-thinking is the 'touchstone' for determining whether the context is appropriate. Context is continually shifting and giving rise to new meanings as we live out our lives. What is 'tree branch' at one point may be 'firewood' at another and 'weapon' in a third. Dōgen referred to these points as 'occasions' of 'being-time'. For Dōgen, the problem with egoism is its resistance to accepting flux. Egoism tries to make a set of previous meanings into a fixed worldview, into my reality. Therefore, one projects contexts that are not actually present in the current phenomena. Through meditation, however, one can break the closed cycle of self-verifying projections. One can return to the presence of things as they are before meaning, before they are embedded in any particular context. Then, as one returns to the expressive world of everyday action, it is easier to verify the appropriateness of the contextualizing process that generates meaning.

I was teaching someone math on the train today. I offered a distrust of memorizing things invented by Past Minds. What's more important is understanding the same thing in many different conceptual frameworks — that is, in different ways

 

[SexyIncél]

Thinking about this, I realized there's probably a huuuge mainstream misconception. Many think of meditation as breaking your mind of logic

But I think it's more about breaking the mind of USUAL logics. Metacognition. Hadot writes: "This is apparent at the beginning of the Symposium. Socrates arrives late because he has been outside meditating, standing motionless and 'applying his mind to itself.'"

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And then there's possible misconceptions about the Mu koan, where a monk asks "Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?", and Joshu replies "Mu". In a way that implies nothingness... or that the question isn't a real question — because it's unanswerable, or relies on false assumptions

Many take Mu to point you towards an "exceptional understanding of transcendental nothingness"

Weeeeell... turns out this koan's got a complex history. There's versions where Joshu replies "Yes", or "No"... Whereas the Mu version "takes on cosmic, super-natural, dharanic, mantric, significance. It goes way beyond what the original compilers of the koan had in mind. What either the questioning monk or Joshu had in mind."

(A tl;dr is Heine's article; and here's his book "Like Cats and Dogs: Contesting the Mu Koan in Zen Buddhism")

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But! Seems this Joshu dialogue was indeed real: "A monk asked, 'What is a true statement?'" Joshu replied, "Your mom's ugly."

Humor seems the underlying impulse: the sudden surprise of your train-of-thought crashing:

"Thus, thinking one thing and saying another, Socrates took pleasure in that dissimulation which the Greeks call 'irony.' In fact, however, such an attitude is not a form of artifice or intentional dissimulation. Rather, it is a kind of humor which refuses to take oneself or other people entirely seriously; for everything human, and even everything philosophical, is highly uncertain, and we have no right to be proud of it. Socrates' mission, then, was to make people aware of their lack of knowledge."

 

[SexyIncél]

Ah. Maybe questioning things is the "nothingness". The hungry nothingness that sucks you towards things to fill its emptiness, like a vacuum

Q: What is a True Statement? A: Yo momma's so ugly, she's immortalized in the Ugly Koan

In one company, a designer made a logo with a brain & a question-mark. The ceo said it looked great — but businessmen don't like questions

the vacuum of the void is so great — humans throw in easy answers rather than withstand nothingness

Spoiler: filling the hungry void

"The ancient Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, Zeno, and Socrates, remained more faithful to the Idea of the philosopher than their modern counterparts have done. 'When will you finally begin to live virtuously?' said Plato to an old man who told him he was attending classes on virtue. The point is not always to speculate, but also ultimately to think about applying our knowledge.

"Today, however, he who lives in conformity with what he teaches is taken for a dreamer."

— Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Encyclopedia

 

[InversedShadow]

I expected exactly nothing but i got more than what i expected thoughts about nothing!

 

[JustinTime]

Of heem

 

[Pluto]

Today's quasi-topic is silence. Let's start with the elephantless-elephant in the room.

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Talking About Silence
As before, we begin with an absurd contradiction. The first thing that happens when speaking about silence is breaking the silence. Thinking about silence makes noise. The very word silence disturbs the peace. Just as the word cat is not a cat, the word silence is not silent.

So why speak? It is a means of orienting attention towards something in the background which ordinarily goes unnoticed. Any definition will inherently be wrong, since the genuine item is that which remains in the absence of any description.

The nature of this topic renders mental understanding a fool's errand. Any intellectual grasp is a sure sign of ignorance. Anyone who claims to 'get it' has already missed the point.

In some ways, it is an inversion of the normal process of learning. Instead of building a structure of knowledge, education and opinions, this is the dissolution of all understanding. The method is better described as surrender, or letting go.

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Silence to the Human Mind
In a conventional sense, silence is simply the absence of sound. By definition, there could be nothing of value there. No wonder it's of no interest. Worse than merely being uninteresting, it's downright repulsive to the human mind.

A Vsauce experiment demonstrated that people sitting in isolation would choose an electric shock to a sustained lack of stimulation. A Veritasium episode entitled 'Can Silence Actually Drive You Crazy?' described a violinist lasting mere moments in a silent chamber before demanding to be released. In 2022, a Canadian woman named Jaqui McDermott committed suicide amidst an intensive silent meditation retreat.

The conclusion is that to the human mind, silence is at best boring, at worst deadly.

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Silence in Spirituality
Every cathedral, mosque, synagogue, monastery, temple or ashram aims to foremostly emanate an aura of sacred stillness. Though there may be times of music or monologue, the background is generally an air of silence.

Eckhart Tolle says the following:
Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be.

The perspective of silence as a constant, ineffable background which gives rise to all things hints at why it is considered holy. But let's digress for a moment.

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Thought Experiment on Identity
You will likely have no difficulty reciting your date of birth, nationality and gender. But what if, through a twist of fate, it had all been different? What if, for example, you had been born Morocco in 1971 and were now a 53-year-old woman?

It means that every single cell in your body would be different. (Though it's unlikely that any cells are the same as when you were born in your current body anyway!) Every memory of your life would be completely different. Every idea you have about yourself and every belief about life would be conditioned differently ...and expressed in fluent Arabic.

There would be literally nothing in common. Well, except for one thing. You.

Your consciousness, or fundamental essence, would be exactly the same 'thing' in another body as it is now. The one behind the mask who sees and hears, prior to identifying with the body or mind of the day. Since no thought in the mind can express the pure Self (pure consciousness), it follows to reason that silence of the mind is a prerequisite for any sort of legitimate spiritual seeking.

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Silence: Good or Bad?
Silence is therefore an issue that strikes at the heart of identity itself. The human identity is largely based upon thought of the conditioned mind. This 'me' must constantly voice thoughts, replay memories, engage in imaginary conversations and all sorts of other looney mental noise to keep itself inflated despite the fact that it doesn't exist.

Silence firstly implies having to face the reality of this moment. The mind's sense of knowing what's going on is seen as a total fabrication. The mind's sense of identity is seen as empty. Dark, repressed, 'shadow' content of the mind starts to be felt directly. In short, this is is why silence ranges from uncomfortable to deadly; the aforementioned Jaqui McDermott case being a tragic case of lacking guidance when unearthing these subconscious demons.

Yet how often does distracting ourselves bring lasting benefit? Indeed, given the inevitably of the body falling silent through death, how can anything worldly bring lasting benefit? From this perspective everything – success and failure, pleasure and pain – is all mere noise, mere distraction.

At the surface level, silence brings instant respite to the furious self-torture machine of the human mind. At an advanced level, it initiates a rollercoaster of a journey to unearth the indescribable true Self.

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Silence: the Methodless Method
Eckhart says, "Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still."

Silence is a contemplation. Note that it is already there. Silence cannot be manufactured, nor is it destroyable. Because it is already there, the keyword is attention. Attention is the power of the human to withdraw from the thinking mind and access the place where timeless peace is always available.

Like a bad spouse, the mind won't take kindly to rejection. But it can be watched as a bystander who is not identified. What will it say? "This doesn't solve any of my problems." "Sigh, more weird religious BS from that cat guy." "This isn't doing anything for me." "Wow, this could change my life, but I still don't understand it." All thoughts must be rejected like a nuisance door-to-door salesman.

The access to immediate relief, the practical benefits to the life situation and the potential inner discoveries (ultimately realising the Self as timeless, birthless and deathless) may motivate a continuation on this path.

Either way, silence isn't going anywhere.