Thought Itself

I have been having incredible discussions with my friend and coworker Justin Lipscomb about nothingness, and the role that it plays in Buddhism, Daoism and Heidegger.

Nothing is not nonbeing.  Nothing is nothing at all, unlike anything and unconditioned, while nonbeing is a particular sort of not-being.  For example, a possibility is something that as yet is not, but it is that not-yet in a particular, understandable way.  Nothing, in contrast, is not understandable, as it is nothing in particular.  Similarly, freedom is different from chaos, as freedom means one has choices which can be distinguished from each other, while no clear choices can be distinguished in chaos.  Freedom means we can make wise or foolish choices.  Chaos, like nothingness, removes all clarity and thus all choice.

Much as Buddhists argue that the self we think about when we are self-conscious and self-critical is not our actual self, but rather a self-concept, our concept of nothingness is not nothing itself, as it is a particular sort of thing, a concept we can name and share.  Nothingness cannot be conceived of apart from anything else, nor can it truly be named.  Our concept of nothing is actually a particular type of nonbeing, like a possibility or potential, as we can name it and distinguish it from other concepts.  We often conceive of nothing as dark and empty, much like a child in a dark room, but nothing is neither dark nor empty, as it isn’t anything in particular.  Nothing is neither dark, nor light, nor a shade of grey in between.

For Heidegger, we can live authentically insofar as we can face change, death and the horizon of time, because nothing is just over the horizon.  We do not know what change, the future or death will bring, for ourselves or our world with all of its meaning, and so nothing looms as the indistinguishable.  When our routines are interrupted, we are faced with anxiety as our possibilities and choices disappear and cannot be distinguished.

If we embrace change, anxiety becomes enthusiasm, and all sorts of new possibilities open up before us, but this requires that we accept change, death and the passage of time rather than run from them.  One cannot run from the horizon, as it always remains with us.  If we accept the presence of nothing and the indistinguishable into our lives, all sorts of nonbeing, possibility and change open to us, such that we can choose how we want to live and we know we are making a choice.  The chaos of anxiety becomes the freedom of authenticity.  What at first seems like the end of all possibility is itself what makes possibility possible.

In the New York Times editorial God, Darwin and My College Biology Class, David P. Barash argues that evolution and religion are difficult to reconcile.

Whether or not this is true, Barash says William Paley’s watchmaker argument has been shown to be bunk given natural selection, but then concludes the paragraph saying that living things are an “entirely mechanical phenomenon“.  Many have noted that we are substituting modern mechanical metaphors for ancient mind metaphors, such that we look at the cosmos as a machine rather than as a cosmic mind with a plan.

The odd thing is that machines are all intelligently designed, which is the opposite of what Barash is arguing about life and evolution.  It would be more accurate to say that the diversification of life is itself a tree, given that it appears to be one far more than it does a watch.  Ancient people thought trees have human-like minds or “spirits”, which many modern people consider to be foolish animism, but we are replacing that with unrecognized, unselfconscious metaphors ourselves.

We are still portraying the world in human terms, viewing it as if it is like ourselves, but we now interact with more machines than people, which I sadly recognize as I talk to you through this textual device.  People used to think the world was a parent, and now they think it is a machine, which is sad because it need not be either at all.  It seems that people used to have their lives shaped and given order by personal interactions, and now have their lives shaped and ordered by a whirling din of mechanics, each device itself intelligently designed but the whole interaction not planned out at all.

It has recently been discovered that our Milky Way galaxy is part of a large super-cluster of galaxies that has been named Laniakea, Hawaiian for “Immeasurable Heaven”.   In a sense, we are all catching a great wave in our cosmic Hawaiian home.

The Jains of ancient India used the metaphor of the leaky boat to show how, through discipline and training, you can improve your body and mind. Say you are crossing a river in a leaky boat. To get to the other side, like the proverbial chicken, you must first plug the leaks, and then bail water out of the boat. If you bail before you plug, you won’t stop the water coming in, and if you plug but don’t bail, you still have water in the boat with you.

Plugging is like sticking to a rule, program or diet that stops something bad from coming into your life. Jains are famous for their non-violence and vegetarianism, which is why they do not eat root vegetables, because you must kill the entire plant when you pull it out of the ground.

Bailing is like exercise or training that gets rid of the bad that is already in you. Jains are also famous for spending long periods meditating and standing in yogic postures in the jungle, sometimes for so long that vines were said to grow up their bodies.

Jains believe that it is only by this two-pronged plug and bail strategy that the individual can be fully liberated and be united with the cosmos, escaping the rounds of reincarnation. Regardless of what you believe, it is also an excellent strategy for training and improving yourself.