#cosmic unity

From Nothingness To Everythingness And Back :)

Don't be fooled by Buddhist spiritual schools, especially. They often use very sloppy language that can confuse more than it clarifies.

For example, look at the hidden symmetry between “I am nothing” and “I am everything.” Both can function as attempts to dissolve ordinary personal identity into something absolute. One erases the self into void, the other expands it into totality. Psychologically, both can produce a feeling of release from ordinary boundaries.

The term "nothing" doesn't always refer to complete nonexistence. In various philosophical discussions, it often highlights the idea that our usual understanding of the self is unstable or lacks a solid foundation. For example, when someone says “the self is nothing,” they may not mean “there is literally no experience occurring.” They may mean that the self is not a single fixed entity discoverable inside experience. Instead, it is a process, construction, narrative center, or coordination pattern. In that more limited sense, the statement can have coherence.

Thinkers like Thomas Metzinger make a related argument without mystical language. Metzinger does not claim consciousness encounters literal nothingness. He argues that what we call “the self” is a transparent model generated by the brain rather than an independently existing object inside experience. So the “self” is not nothing in the sense of nonexistence, but “no-thing” in the sense that no stable inner entity can be located.

Similarly, some existential thinkers use “nothingness” to describe gaps, indeterminacy, absence of fixed essence, or collapse of ordinary meaning structures rather than absolute void. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, describes consciousness as introducing “nothingness” because humans can negate, imagine absence, refuse, or distance themselves from immediate reality. Again, this is not literal non-being. Not all talk of nothingness is nonsense, but people often slide carelessly between different meanings of the word. Absolute non-being, ego dissolution, reduced self-identification, absence of conceptual thought, emotional emptiness, depersonalization, and metaphysical void all become merged together under one dramatic term. That merging creates confusion.