Everything is Nothing and Vice Versa
Filed in: Everything is Nothing and Vice Versa
by Natalie Geld
WhyAreWeWhispering.com
When has the phrase ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Really.’ ever really meant ‘nothing?’
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
Verse 11, Lao Tzu’s Tao de Ching (Book of the Way) by Stephen Mitchell
The Hole in the Universe
How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
K.C. Cole is the award-winning author of the internationally bestselling The Universe in a Teacup and First You Build a Cloud. She writes a popular science column in the Los Angeles Times and teaches at UCLA.
Book Excerpts:
“Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens. Without it, the universe is theater without a stage. Without getting to know it we can’t understand the blank page on which the story of everything is written. We can’t trust our own perceptions because everything we see passes through it like a clear but distorting lens, like light from the sky skidding over hot pavement to create a shimmering mirage.”
“We are taught from childhood to shun the shadowy, dread the dark side, fill the void. People feel compelled to plug gaps in conversation, devise activities to do something (anything!) about dead (which is to say “empty”) time. We describe the deranged as “not all there.” We consider it shameful to think negative. No one loves a lack. And yet, nothing may be the single most prolific idea ever to plop into the human brain.”
“…Absences loom large in our attempts to understand just about anything…In fact, what we don’t say, don’t hear, don’t feel, don’t remember, don’t ask, don’t tell, in itself tells psychologists and neuroscientists more about the human mind and the tangled web of neurons and culture that creates it than perhaps any other category of evidence. We define ourselves by what we’re not as much as by what we are.”
“There are hints that nothing eludes us precisely because it is too featureless, like perfectly transparent glass. Perhaps “nothing” is perfect – too perfect to perceive…To make something from nothing, we must crack the glass, destroy the symmetry. When nothing shatters, everything can be born.”
“Potential, it turns out, is one of the most impressive properties of nothing.”
WhyAreWeWhispering.com
When has the phrase ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Really.’ ever really meant ‘nothing?’
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
Verse 11, Lao Tzu’s Tao de Ching (Book of the Way) by Stephen Mitchell
How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything
K.C. Cole is the award-winning author of the internationally bestselling The Universe in a Teacup and First You Build a Cloud. She writes a popular science column in the Los Angeles Times and teaches at UCLA.
Book Excerpts:
“Understanding nothing matters, because nothing is the all-important background upon which everything else happens. Without it, the universe is theater without a stage. Without getting to know it we can’t understand the blank page on which the story of everything is written. We can’t trust our own perceptions because everything we see passes through it like a clear but distorting lens, like light from the sky skidding over hot pavement to create a shimmering mirage.”
“We are taught from childhood to shun the shadowy, dread the dark side, fill the void. People feel compelled to plug gaps in conversation, devise activities to do something (anything!) about dead (which is to say “empty”) time. We describe the deranged as “not all there.” We consider it shameful to think negative. No one loves a lack. And yet, nothing may be the single most prolific idea ever to plop into the human brain.”
“…Absences loom large in our attempts to understand just about anything…In fact, what we don’t say, don’t hear, don’t feel, don’t remember, don’t ask, don’t tell, in itself tells psychologists and neuroscientists more about the human mind and the tangled web of neurons and culture that creates it than perhaps any other category of evidence. We define ourselves by what we’re not as much as by what we are.”
“There are hints that nothing eludes us precisely because it is too featureless, like perfectly transparent glass. Perhaps “nothing” is perfect – too perfect to perceive…To make something from nothing, we must crack the glass, destroy the symmetry. When nothing shatters, everything can be born.”
“Potential, it turns out, is one of the most impressive properties of nothing.”
