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Thoughts in the Spirit of Nothing
Om shanti shanti shanti
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
― Lewis Carroll
Despite its status as a didactic cliché, “don’t judge a book by its cover” conveys a ‘truth’ rooted in the collective consciousness; namely, that (to use another cliché) “things are not always what they seem”. In fact, we could go further and say that things are never what they seem, as our conception of reality is inextricable from the faculties of perception.
Essentially, the ‘real’, the ‘thing-in-itself’ etc. is (ostensibly at least) an impossibility; an attempt to name the unnameable beyond the philosophical impasse of solipsism. It would hardly be tenable to state that the belief that objects exist outside of our experience is a mere act of faith, yet I would argue this unlikely proposition drives at something more fundamental about the nature of reality — albeit obliquely.
An atom contains roughly 99.9999999999996% ‘empty space’ which, by extension, means we, as upstanding Cartesian subjects, may not be as substantive as we presume. This brings us to a subject that is often glaringly absent from Western…
