Everythingness

Tonight I’m meditating on being. You’re welcome to join me.

What’s our deepest fear? We think it’s death. But it’s really what inside death. Annihilation, ending, nothingness.

Nothingness terrifies us like nothing else. Imagine being in the darkest dark. The mind’s disinhibiting circuitry has no input to stimulate it. The self grows restless, anxious, afraid. There are monster lurking in the dark. But in the nothingness, there is something more terrible: the impossibility of being.

So nothingness is our most primal fear, the oldest and truest. But it is also false.

One of the most surprising recent discoveries of physics is that there is no nothing. Quantum physics reveals that where we thought there is nothing…there is in fact always something. Vacuum energy, as the physicists call it. But let us not be confused by words. The simple fact is there is no nothing.

This idea is so revolutionary it’s on the scale of Darwin and Copernicus, perhaps even bigger. It will upend our worlds. Not just by letting us make stuff to sell and buy, flying cars, androids, designer quantum handbag computers, and so on. But because it helps us answer one of the greatest questions of all: what are we? What is this thing we call being? It reveals us. Who and what we suppose we are. It will probably take us decades to trace out its implications. Let me try, and probably fail, to explain them.

“No nothing” tells us we are badly mistaken in how we naively see the world. Most of us believe in something like a Newtonian idea of being: objects moving through space and time. I am I, and you are you. We are things. There is nothing between us. Out there in space, between the stars, planets, dust, there are things, and between them is nothing. In the gaps between the atoms, molecules, cells, there is nothing. That’s how we see the world, the universe, ourselves. “Nothing” separates “things”.

But what if there is no nothing?

Then there are no things, either. You cannot have things without nothing. Nothing is the separation, division between things. It is what makes things objects and subjects, divided, distinct, separate, whole. Hence, if there is no nothing, there cannot be things.

If there are no things, then what is there? Just one whole.

Everything.

I call this principle “Everythingness”, and increasingly it defines how I think about being. There are no things, because there is no nothing. There is only everything.

The physicists and philosphers will spend a hundred years quibbling over it. They will probably say: there can be spatial and temporal nothing…just not energetic nothing. No matter. The central point remains: if there is no nothing, there are no things. Just one whole.

And we must be part of that whole. Not individual wholes ourselves. Selves are an illusion, because there are no things. There is only one self, one being, one whole, and we are simply ripples on its surface. Should we wish to truly experience reality, then we must pierce the illusion of selfhood, and experience everythingness.

So now we come full circle in history. For that is precisely what all the great sages and prophets have always told us. The Hindu idea of Brahman, the one being, the Buddhist conception of Nirvana, of pure being, freedom from suffering and rebirth, the Christian notion of divinity and immanence. All these say precisely the same thing.

Everythingness. There is no separation, division, fragmentation. We are not selves. We are facets of the same jewel, one being experiencing itself.

This is a concept which many of you will find absurd, ludicrous. It will make you angry and anxious. Because it strikes down everything you think, have been taught, desperately believe, arrogantly suppose, is true, with a mighty fist. It extinguishes, with one blow, the foundation of Western metaphysics. That each self is an individual, whole, separate. Made of atoms, that themselves are individual, whole, separate. None of that is or can be true if there is no nothingness.

It is that Big Idea of nothingness giving rise to separation, to things, that has constructed the world around us. It is the prime mover of the economy, society, polity. It is the basis of the materialist belief that fulfillment can be found in “things”, whether people or toys. But because it is false, it is also why we try to find fulfillment in things, and fail. How can we? Fulfillment must then be the very opposite: not more thingness, but more everythingness.

So the false notion of separation through nothingness, which is really the idea of things, is as familiar to us as the air we breathe. Hence, me telling you that it is wrong is like me telling you the air you breathe is really fire. Your mind is likely to fight it desperately, with all its considerable powers of denial, objection, subjection, forgetting, because it causes contradiction, dissonance, conflict. How can there be no things? Am I myself not a thing? But. Though your mind might deny it, reason, intuition, sense, and evidence all tell us you are mistaken.

And you probably know it already, too.

We know the truth of oneness when we love. We know it when we meditate, defy, create, imagine, forgive, absorb ourselves into a great artwork. And now, we know it, too, not just emotionally, but rationally, with carefully calibrated instruments which can peer into the fabric of the universe. There they have found not things…but no nothing, which is precisely the same as wholeness, oneness, everythingness.

Everythingness is as close to truth as we are ever likely to get. The truth of what we are. Remember our deepest fear? There’s no reason for it. There is no nothingness. So how can we be afraid of something that isn’t?

You and I are not things. We are not objects. We are something else. The Buddha called them arisings. Christ called them souls. Rumi called them flames. Let us simply call them processes, that ebb and flow. But we are not different processes, separated, distinct, each one of us whole. We are something more like reflections of one whole. Refractions of the sun upon an endless ocean.

I think: we are in the dawn of the greatest revolution in the history of human thought. As radical as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, but probably more profound. Because it will reshape not just how we see the world — but the universe, and our place in it.

We must all come home. Beyond even our need for love is our greatest need. To feel at home. In a place we do not understand, which we feel alien in. The moment that we are born we feel like strangers in this material world. Everything feels ludicrous, utterly senseless, out of order to us. Camus called it the Absurd. Absurdity is what life as separation, divided into things by nothings, feels like. Because we know, deep down, it must be something more. Our very own being somehow contradicts it.

Should things and nothings be all that we allow ourselves to see, we always will be strangers, who never find our ways home. We can only make peace with the absurdity of life through everythingness. For then we are at last at home in the oneness of being.