Can one experience nothingness if nothing is experienced?
The local guru shaman yogi dude wants me to give up all desire, hope, fear, dreams, joy… blah blah blah and join him in his state of nirvana by experiencing nothingness.
I asked him how one experiences nothingness if there is nothing to experience? He sidesteps the question, suggesting that I simply let go of all my human qualities, and finding myself without any trace of myself, I will know nothingness.
Huh? How do I find myself without myself? How is nothingness known if nothing is there to know?
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Yeah sounds like a paradoxical oxymoron.
(I often wondered as a teenager, If you were to program a machine to go out of control, is it really out of control as that is exactly what you controlled it to do ? I concluded thenceforth that control is an illusion) Maybe the guru is selling you an illusion ?
Ha! There is truly nothing like nothingness. You’ve got to try it. You will know the moment that nothing happens that you have truly arrived.
by meditation, i mean nothingness is an indicator, it is not a concept, it is a radical state of being. It isn’t a position to be reasoned to. it isn’t to be ascertained by comparison with somethingness or emptiness or Death and so forth, or being and non being, or any other traditional method of knowing, that would only create paradox and confusion.
By letting go as he suggests you could experience nothingness and by doing so you will actually feel everything. None of it makes any sense and it won’t make sense unless you try and it is harder to do than you think.
I’m not sure, but I’m going to try. right now….................
I have a problem with that word. Nothing as is defined cannot exist, since by already having a definition, it’s something.
I’m guessing then, that in this case it’s a state of mind, rather than nothingness. I also find it hard to imagine that a human could totally discard everything that makes them a human.
Sounds to me as bogus as how Christianity basically views everything that makes humans what they are a sin or something evil.
But either way, even if one succeeds and there really is nothing, that nothing is still something so it’s not entirely ’‘nothingness’’. So I guess there’s something to find, but how? I denno. I don’t believe in ’‘nothing’’ though.
Just clear your mind of everything, don’t think, just blank everything out & relax, Close your mind down. Think of nothing, pull all of your emotions into the middle of your mind. :-/
Shut everything out.
@Scooby When you completely don’t know it, then and only then do you know it.
@ETpro , Two can play at that game…..
The wizard was a seeker
Who spent too long
Delving into enigmas
And perched atop riddles
Gazing at the stars
He talked gibberish
To all intents and purposes
His thought a multifarious
Cacophony of frenetic concepts
Running helter skelter
Randomly without bounds
His consciousness fanatically adrift,
In doubt, hopelessly lost, abandoned
What did I see in the enigma?
What did they cost you, those stars?
What knowledge did he attain?
Who am I, thinking?
How exactly did I fry this brain?
Just what started the time bomb ticking?
Why break the glass?
Set the alarm screaming?
I saw a chariot of jubilant devils
Drawn by Hell’s fiery hounds
A universe in discord
Returned a smile that lied and frowned
He perceived men feed on each other
In the name of greed
A dead field of souls
Living only to bleed
I sickened of slaving
To the whip cracks of rigmarole
The sacrifice of spirit’s
Sacred covenant
On the altar of corrupted need
I simply looked away
Anywhere. . . to the stars
Twinkling serenely under my study
Revealing their myriad secrets
Winking back at me
I was reversed and cursed
In the mirror
Never to reveal the treasure sensibly
All truth in fragments
To which no lucid words
Nor coherent concepts
Could hope to do justice
I saw a magenta n’ crimson panda
In a Luna lender
Long John Silver riding Apollo 13
And now. . .
Now I see a vortex of danger
This wizard in a grid
I see a stranger in distress
On a hiding to nothingness
And he stared back into
The vexed void of me
I see a sorcerer riding headlong,
To the slaughter
Jubilantly, on a chariot
Drawn by Hell’s baying hounds.
Every fresh purple n’ lavender dawn breaks
Like an egg’s golden yolk on my fate
Each orange n’ pink sunset a grid-lock
Marking the shrinking span of my finite time
my futile quest for meaning
I get the distinct feeling
The universe draws perverse pleasure
In taunting me with its awful abundance
Of nothingness and matter
As I shiver solitary
Down here on brutal Earth’s
Urine-soaked bus shelter
Begging for an escape
Gibbeting at the apes.
@Scooby Awesome poem. I’m not going to even try to match that effort at the game.
errr uh… thad’ be me ma’am… tastes good too!
the Alan Watts Kool-Aid is one of my favorite flavors
weh-heh-hell then… check out his latest free non copy righted podcast on the psychedelic salon about nothingness… It’s absolutely brilliant… and he gets some great shots in on the religions of psychiatry as well in the process.
And though I do enjoy Watt’s Kool-Aid… I tend to prefer Terrence McKenna’s brand a wee bit more.
Of course it doesn’t make “rational sense” – all such gambits are the upaya (skillful methods aka tricks) used by rascal gurus to cajole us out of our talky-think brains into the World of Sensation & Being.
But – at the risk of trying to say the unsayable – if Nothingness is, then “you” are not. There is no experience of Nothingness because there is NO EXPERIENCER.
“Nothingness” is just another word for “the subject-object illusionary lie has been transcended”.
It is an indescribable non-state that can only be approached in total darkness, silently with a completely still non-mind. It is a mute zero speaking mime to a deaf nobody.
Experience requires contrast & nothing has none, it’s all space & no figure.
But the whole thing’s really just another damn golden spiritual carrot to wave in front of your face.
You don’t want Nothingness, you just want to break out of your (large/active) Ego & get to the Umwelt of Actual Reality.
Of course, some in-light-end masters would say you are already pure & perfect & diamond mind, your ego & conditioning just won’t let you rest in its reality because of its desires to have things be different & more to your liking.
If in doubt, disregard gurus & shun yogis entirely (including McKenna & Watts & even me)....
“There is no experience of Nothingness because there is NO EXPERIENCER.”
Brilliant!
i hereby tip my hat to the cat
“You don’t want Nothingness, you just want to break out of your (large/active) Ego & get to the Umwelt of Actual Reality.”
Thad’ be the want to wish for. IMHO, proof that nothing cannot exist. For if I wanted nothingness, and I got it, then what would I have, and who would be the me that had it?
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