It seems like there’s often a misunderstanding around phrases like “everything is nothing” or “it’s all nothing.” Many people don’t really grasp what that means because you can’t fully understand it until you see it directly for yourself. I’ve seen this idea thrown around a lot, including on my own blog in the past, and it’s easy to confuse the meaning.
For example, when people hear “it’s nothing,” they might think it just means something trivial, like when you stub your toe and the pain fades after a few minutes—it’s “nothing” in the sense of being insignificant. But that’s not the kind of nothingness we’re pointing to here.
A better analogy is a dream: you dream at night, and while you’re dreaming, it feels real—there’s a whole story, events, even emotions. But when you wake up, you instantly recognize, “Oh, that wasn’t real—it was nothing.” It seemed to happen, but where is the dream now? Where was it even located to begin with? Can you pinpoint it? No—because it arose from nowhere and dissolved back into nowhere. That’s the kind of nothingness being referred to.
And here's the thing: in dreams, you often know of the happenings in the dream without necessarily being a person in it. You might witness the events without any specific identity or point of view. Even when you think you're seeing the dream “as a person,” that person is just part of the dream—it’s not who you actually are.
The same applies here: if you think you’re a person, pause and ask yourself, “Who is the one that knows of this person? Who is aware of this body, this mind, this identity?” If you’re the body, how could you know of it? You can only know of something if you’re not it. For example, you know of your body, your thoughts, your experiences—so who is the one doing the knowing?
Some might then say, “Well, I know I am awareness.” But even then, ask yourself, “Who is it that knows they are aware?” Keep going backwards. No matter how far you go, you’ll find that every answer dissolves. There’s no person doing the knowing, no object that can be pinned down. And that’s the point—it’s not something you can explain in words, because it’s not an idea or a thing.
All of this is just an appearance—arising from nowhere, grounded in nothing. And the moment you directly see this, the misunderstanding falls away effortlessly.