I don't get Buddhism (2)

“I’m sure. With millions of people with nothing better to do than to stay home and smoke pot, it’s not surprising you get a spiritual awakening.”

yes man.
always the praxis.

insanity is just a societal pressure.
sanity is absence of bad work.

Chakra, Im interested to learn this Advaita term. Where did it originate and which are its first sources?

I learned Zen pretty much as you say it, by letting go through pushing deep into my emotions and self first, and then suddenly withdrawing.
You can even compare it to doing 50 pushups in order to get relaxed; deep relaxation and synchronization of the nadi’s to balance the energy system so as for consciousness to escape its torrents, is the whole reason for the existence of Shaolin kung fu. Healthy transfer of energy. Tantra without the sex, which allows for much more detached and pristine silences.

Tantric heaven is the merger of selves and a current of ecstasy, but being-nor-nonbeing is the full release of all the “muscles” that hold together the experience of identity, all the emotional and nervous and intellectual strings are released, fall to the ground like dusted-out cobwebs. What remains is such pure glory that one minute of it suffices to illuminate a whole year.

The earliest sources can be found in the Advaita Vedanta (Vedas) and the Upanishads. They predate Buddhism by about 500-1,000 years.

Advaita means ‘non-dual’ or ‘not two’. I used the term Advaita as a way to broaden the discussion from a particular, limited brand of Enlightenment (Bodhi).

Advaita is not a stand-alone philosophy but more of an underlying basis that many spiritual teachings including Buddhism, Zen and Taoism are based upon, so you’ll find Advaita throughout most non-dual religions and philosophies.

In simplistic terms, Western spirituality is built upon the belief that there are two worlds: the mind (spirit) and matter; while Advaita/Non-duality state there’s only one Reality: Brahman (Impersonal Principle/‘God’) and Atman (Self) are one in the same. Over time, Buddhists took on a lot of Hindu beliefs which is why I like going back to Advaita, Zen, Tao and the like.

FTR: I’m not pushing any beliefs here. I personally don’t ‘believe’ anything. I think some ideas explain Reality better than others but ultimately I agree with the Advaita crowd who say the only Absolute Truth (as apposed to relative ‘truth’) that exists in this semi-conscious, dream realm is the Truth that states what we are not; any truth that claims to know what we are, is just part of the illusion. This goes back to what Gib said about everything in this dream-world being part of the dream. It’s also why I said the Enlightened Ones are lucid dreamers – dream entities, like us, who are just more Awake. They, and their ‘truths’, are part of the dream. There’s nothing sinister about that, it’s all part of the lila, the divine play.
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Oh, LOL. The way you spelled ‘sequal’ made me think it was a code joke. OK, moving right along….

Um, no. California is going to be one of the worst places I’d want to be in when this coup d’etat moves into gear over this coming year and onward.

I moved from Sydney (Australia) to a coastal country town a decade ago because I saw this world-wide, technocratic fascism closing in and I didn’t want to get caught in a big city when it finally snapped shut. Anyhoo, that’s for another forum…

Well that’s not my idea of Awakening LOL.

I’m talking about the proliferation of spiritual knowledge that was once only available if you had a guru and after a decade or so, the guru thought you were worthy enough. Today this knowledge is everywhere – in books and on the net – which is why a lot of traditionalists are pissed. They say the people receiving this knowledge aren’t ready for and either don’t understand it or they distort it so it can be understood. It’s not about the words; it’s about the individual realization that lies behind the words.

There’s also a lot of real and virtual communities springing up which is encouraging. As the world becomes more oppressive and technocratic, there’s an opposite trend that’s pulling some people out of the control grid and back to the earth, humanity and spirituality.

EDIT: Gib, I’ll respond to the other parts a bit later.
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Fair enough. The mind cannot conceive that which created it; that which comes after cannot know that which comes before.

It’s the egoic mind that blocks Consciousness and reduces it to consciousness (little ‘c’) so if the egoic mind blocks Consciousness, how could the mind know Consciousness?

It’s like a child trying to see if the fridge light goes out when he closes the fridge door. Each time he opens the fridge to check, he finds the light is on. His very actions prevent him from finding out. There must be different way of knowing.

The mind is like a window; the cleaner the window, the more light shines through. Religions and metaphysical philosophies are like stained-glass windows. No doubt, they can be very beautiful but they’re man-made images that block natural light and fresh air. Unlike the window metaphor however, Conscious Light doesn’t come from the outside, but rather from the inside. God is not an object; God is the subject.

When the mind is as clear and as transparent as glass, unimpeded Conscious Light pours outward from deep within. That is En-Lightenment – that is being full of Light, full of Consciousness.

Enlightenment is having a naked mind and an exposed heart. The Enlightened being is simply one who has returned to his original innocence.
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Oh, I guess that just means I’m a bad speller. Maybe it comes from looking at SQL all day. Ha!

Ha! Of course not. I meant it as a joke, obviously, but it does conjure up some serious thoughts. I’ve always wondered for example, if “spiritual awakening” means just one thing or could it mean many different things? Like stepping outside your zone of familiarity and into a “higher” reality–you could end up anywhere in that higher reality–like stepping outside a circle, you could end up on the north side or the south side–diametrically opposite places–perhaps with wildly different things to see. There’s also a contrast between “spiritual awakening” as a deeper consciousness of the true nature of reality and “spiritual awakening” as being touched by spiritual entities–like someone who has been contacted by dead people; they aren’t much more enlightened or insightful than most ordinary people but they now have this connection to the spiritual world.

And do drugs really awaken you spiritually? I don’t think the things one experiences while on drugs necessarily count as a spiritual awakening–I don’t think the Buddha just became high in his moment of enlightenment–but I think having a variety of experiences of your own modes consciousness can give you a deeper understanding of your mind and consciousness in general–like looking at a mountain from different angles–which I think can count as a form of spiritual awakening.

They’re probably right.

That about sums me up, probably. I’ve got an ego. Not in the sense that I’m full of myself but that I’ve got no less of an ego than anybody else. I don’t know how I could not. Ego is a natural part of our being. I cannot imagine an effective way to just put it aside.

It’s very interesting that you put it that way. It reminds me of my own concepts of the window-to-reality model of consciousness and the system-of-experiences model of consciousness. The window-to-reality model pictures consciousness as a featureless window through which reality simply passes through unvarnished–essentially, naive realism–whereas the system-of-experiences model pictures consciousness as a collection of experiences (or qualia) working together as a system–your stained glass window being an excellent example–the idea being that regardless of what lies beyond it in any kind of “real world”, the system of experiences we are having project reality for us. In one model, reality comes into consciousness. In the other, reality comes out of consciousness.

I’ve effectively rejected the window-to-reality model of conscious and believe only that reality is a projection of our experiences (idealism 101). Maybe this is why I have so much trouble understanding the light of consciousness.

The mind is living multi dimensional energy.

Reality is a kind of multi dimensional energy also.

The mind and the world are different configurations of the same basis.

I would think so. Go monism!

Although I’ve never been a fan of the “energy” picture of mind. Energy as a metaphor, sure, but at best, it’s a hippie’s best attempt to reduce consciousness to physics.

I think mind is meaning (or information) and so is all of reality–meaning that carries being within it; it tells you something; it tells you what it is, and consequently projects as existence.

Mmmm… I think I may have confused you? The stained-glass metaphor was solely to do with the clarity of the mind: it’s ‘stained’ by beliefs (including non-duality beliefs) or it’s clear in its open, naked innocence. Forget about the mind for the moment and ponder this:

When talking about consciousness, there are two main models: The Universe-First and the Consciousness-First models.

The Universe-First model (materialism) says: In the beginning, there was nothing and from that nothing, something appeared (Big Bang universe) then, from that something (aka matter), consciousness appeared. In other words, consciousness comes from matter.

The Consciousness-First model (non-duality) also says: In the beginning there was Nothing (No-thing/the Absolute/Para Brahman) but what came from the Absolute Nothingness was the relative somethingness: aka Consciousness – which in turn gave birth to (or dreamed up) the dream world we appear to exist in.

In other words, matter – and everything else in this dream/virtual reality – is created by Consciousness somewhat similar to how consciousness (little ‘c’) seemingly creates the dreams we have every night.

But these bodies feel real and they feel conscious, right? Yes, but when you’re dreaming at night, your dream body feels real and your dream body feels conscious, but is it? Do the imagined, non-existent dream characters have their own individual consciousness, or does it all come from the one, single source – the dreamer’s consciousness?

This is the Advaita/non-dual Conscious-First model. It states that every ‘thing’ comes from Consciousness (“non-dual”, “all is one”). There’s just one source that flows through all the universes whether they be material, energetic or spiritual universes.

“The world is illusion. Brahman alone Is. The world is Brahman.” – Shankaracharya

(to be continued…)
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I get it. It just reminded me of my theories of mind. I would describe the stain glass window metaphor as a mix of the window model and the system model. The window model aspect is maintained in the fact that light from the outside still gets through but it has the aspect of the system model in that part of what’s getting through (the color) isn’t from the outside but artificially added as it passes through. The system model of consciousness takes the artificial aspect and runs all the way with it, saying it’s all artificial, that there is no light coming from the outside, that it’s all stain glass generating its own light (so more like a television screen than a stain glass).

Actually, I normally wouldn’t use the term ‘artificial’. I don’t actually believe the system model of consciousness generates a ‘fake’ reality. The light is still real. It’s just coming from within, not without. It’s more a theory of what consciousness is rather than what reality is.

This is one of the reasons why I’m so curious to know what the experience of enlightenment is like. I want to know if I’d be able to chock it up to just another experience–a very special and unique experience, but not something undeniably more than experience. If so, it could be considered just another system of experiences projecting itself as reality. It would still be a very special experience and perhaps the one we’re all seeking. Maybe enlightenment is not so much a “waking up” but a “finding”. A finding of that special state of consciousness that finally satisfies our deepest spiritual longings and brings to rest our perpetual psychological struggle with ourselves and the yearning for happiness. After all, we always feel like we know reality now, that we’ve “woken up” to the truth compared to the ignorance and naivety we used to live in when we were younger. If only I knew then what I know now, we say. Isn’t this just the way consciousness is? Doesn’t consciousness always project its beliefs and ways of experiencing the world now as raw reality? If the experience of becoming enlightened is like waking from a dream, wouldn’t the same be true of the enlightened state we enter into? Wouldn’t we say, like we’d say of any other mental state we enter into, now I see reality for what it is? And we might feel that we have arrived at the final resting spot on our journey simply because we are satisfied with where we are, and wish to stay here, and wish to show others the way.

It would still be a wholy worthwhile state to strive for, and not necessarily illusory (if you take my concept of consciousness generating its own light seriously). It would also explain a great deal of cases of seemingly spontaneous enlightenment, or cases of individuals who seem naturally enlightened all the time.

Yeah, the consciousness-first view is very much like my system-of-experiences view. In fact, as a panpsychic and idealist, I don’t believe there was ever a time when there wasn’t consciousness (though there was a time when there was no matter, no physicality). The Eastern idea of “nothingness” or “emptiness” has always entrigued me. It contrasts, from what I understand, with the Western idea of nothingness/emptiness in that it tries to say it’s really somethingness but a somethingness that can’t be thought of as something. It’s like it’s not something but not nothing either–it’s something inconceivable, something that falls outside all intelligible categories. (which seems like cheating to me).

And you call the something that came out of the Absolute Nothingness relative somethingness. What does ‘relative’ mean? It is only something relative to the Absolute Nothing?

I can agree with the “one source” idea, but I’ve always had a problem with the all-is-illusion idea just because it’s projected by consciousness. I think consciousness gives reality to things. Which means you could say things are invented, but invention isn’t always synonymous with fake. We regard the dream world as fake only in relation to the real world we wake up to. It’s fake only because our consciousness isn’t projecting it anymore. But at the time, it could be regarded as real. This jars our ordinary way of thinking about things because it forces us to conceptualize the waking world and the dream world as both real at the same time, but without an adequate concept of “reality” that can accommodate both. This is why I’m a relativist. I find that relativism, with careful use of language, sorts out all the confusion and contradiction. We don’t have to say the dream world is real and the waking world is real at the same time, but that relative to what I’m experiencing now, the dream I had last night is fake and the world I see around me now is real. But at the time, the dream world was real for me, and the waking world was, well, it was non-existent for all intents and purposes. And I think absolute reality is fundamentally relative (ironic choice of wording, I realize). That is, there is no such thing as “the” truth–only truth according to someone, or some source, or at the end of the day, experience. This doesn’t make truth any less real than Einstein’s relativism makes motion unreal. The idea that relativism implies unreality is a misconception. The whole point of relativism is to offer an alternative to saying: this is real but that is not. It is to say: the reality of this or that depends on something (a person, a standard, a frame of reference). But at the end of the day, something has to be real–for me and my theories, it just depends on experience.

The funniest thing about the Buddha was that he was a hypocrite.

“Non-clinging”, “non-attachment”. Right?

But then he clung and was attached enough to teach the ‘dharma’, and he stated that we NEED! (clinging and attachment) to follow the dharma to break free from suffering, even though we’re attached to the dharma.

The short of it? Buddhism is stupid.

Another thing I hate about Buddhism is that enlightenment is unexplainable…

Actually, every being in existence can understand it:

Zero sum realities are hell reams. You are awake when you understand this. That’s all being awake is. Anyone can have this insight.

The Buddha fucked up. Life moves on.

Re relativity:
We often use words like ‘Awareness’ and ‘Consciousness’ as synonyms but when talking about the big picture, we need to be a bit more accurate.

Awareness is Absolute. Awareness is pure; there’s nothing but Awareness. Consciousness is relative. When you’re conscious, you’re conscious of something, so consciousness is relative to that which it is conscious of. So we should use the term ‘Awareness’ when it’s pure (God) and ‘Consciousness’ when it’s in relation to something (God’s dream).

From pure Awareness comes Consciousness and from Consciousness comes the dreamtime (time/space) and the 10,000 things.

Re Nothingness:
This world is back-to-front, upside-down and inside-out. Virtually everything we hold to be true in this bizarre world is false and vice versa.

The Western concept of ‘nothingness’ (little ‘n’) is an abstraction. It’s an empty placeholder that exists in duality but as a space yet to be filled.

In Eastern philosophy ‘Nothingness’ – or No-Thingness – is everything, and everything is nothing. Nothingness is pregnant and bursting with potential. Nothingness is that from which everything arises. Nothingness was before time; it gave birth to time but it, itself, is timeless.

Nothingness appears black, deep and void but both consciousness and light are invisible until they strike something that reflects them. In Nothingness, there are no manifestations, no ‘things’ to reflect off so we don’t see things nor do we perceive the effects of Consciousness if it were possible to do so.

“The Tao is an empty vessel; it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!”

“Oh, hidden deep but ever present!
I do not know from whence it comes.
It is the forefather of the Gods.”

“This appears as darkness - darkness within darkness – the gate to all mystery”
– The Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (6th-century BC sage)

Anyway, I’ll stop here because I began to ramble and drift all over the place; ironically, Nothing can get pretty deep. Think about black holes… think about the creation of the universe coming from nothing. In essence, according to the Advaita-based philosophies, Nothingness (Para Brahman) is that which gave birth to Awareness/Consciousness (Brahman) and, in turn, gave birth to the universe and the 10,000 things.

Note: ‘nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’ as it relates to Enlightenment, is something different. It’s about emptying, detaching from, or not identifying with, the content of Consciousness (thoughts, emotions, beliefs) but identifying with Consciousness itself – i.e. who You are. Again, the background (Consciousness) is what’s Real; the constantly changing thoughts, emotions and beliefs we hold in the foreground of our consciousness are not Real.
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Question for you, Chakra, and I’d appreciate your honesty: how much would you say you understand this stuff? I would say I don’t understand it nearly as much as I potentially could. I mean, when I read these descriptions of nothingness, concepts are conjured up in my mind, but concepts are conjured up for almost anything that one attempts to explain, and that doesn’t mean one understands. I can only reconcile the above by supposing that nothingness isn’t really nothingness, though it doesn’t seem to be somethingness as we traditionally understand it.

Does Eastern thought have a word that matches more the Western idea of nothingness–literally a lack of anything?

Actually, the precise word they use is “emptiness”, as in, you are a container that can always take something. This is also a biblical concept, “your cup over-runneth”

In Buddhism, the biblical concept is bad (cup over-running). In the biblical concept, Buddhism is bad (your cup always being empty)

The Void, the no-thingness, exists in all serious cosmologies, from Zen to Kabbalah to Odinic Shamanism and more, as the origin of thing-ness.

I wrote 500 words or so on it but only confused the matter, as is natural with this concept.

I once was able to say it somewhat clearly, in kabbalistic terms.

Please.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ZfESt3Bpk[/youtube]

Any case, it is the direct result of the impossibility for Nothing to exist. “Nothing does not exist”. You always get those double ententres if you use the concept Nothing. Because it refers to… nothing.
So No-thingness is what exist directly as a result of the lack of power of Nothing to enforce itself.

It is not therewith a full fledged being, just an infinite potential.
The pure overflowing cup of infinity as I recently called it somewhere. I thought that was good.

Of course. In order to explain thing-ness, you must start with that which came before thing-ness–no-thing-ness. Though it seems most ancient religions, and the surviving modern Eastern religions, have an easier go at this than we do in the West. Based on what I’d been reading here, and other sources I’ve read in the past, it almost seems it would have been self-evident to these ancient religions, and Eastern religions, that somethingness inevitably comes out of nothingness. It’s a hard concept for Westerners to grasp because we think just the opposite. How many times have we heard on this board “you can’t get something out of nothing,” or “how can something just pop into existence out of nothing”? No doubt, the laws of conservation of mass and energy have a lot to do with this, as well as Newton’s laws of motion: things just stay the way they are unless something forces them to change. Somethingness remains somethingness and nothingness remains nothingness. And you can see why: has anyone here actually seen something spontaneously pop out of a void? When you have emptiness, it seems to stay empty until something fills it. But by the same token, this is the crux that baffles the Western mind when it comes to the great questions of existence: how did we get something if it started with nothing?

Just as most ancient religions have this concept of no-thingness, they also almost always have a concept of chaos, and they seem to play the same role. We’re usually persuaded by modern scientific thought to contrast existence with nothingness, but the ancients seem to contrast it with chaos. They didn’t see the universe as a bunch of somethingness, but as order. And therefore, opposed to it, preceding it, was chaos. Whereas, for us, it seems like nothing can come out of nothingness, anything can come out of chaos–that’s more or less part and parcel of chaos–and so is it any surprise that existence was thought to come out of chaos? And is chaos closer to the Eastern concept of nothingness/emptiness?

It’s easy to slip into thinking of nothingness as a thing because that is the nature of thought. To form a concept of something, anything, is to make it into an object in our minds, if even that which it represents is not a thing. I call this objectification, and it is inevitable if we are to think at all. It doesn’t mean we have to trick ourselves into thinking abstract ideas are really literal objects–we can always remember that these are just abstractions–but the form they take in the mind can be deceiving and if we are not careful we will be persuaded that the objectification of our concepts is a real feature of the thing it represents.

Because there is no getter

Not sure what you mean by the 'relativity of somethingness’.

Awareness and Consciousness are different aspect of the same thing.
Awareness is just pure Awareness – nothing else. It appears as Consciousness when some ‘thing’ rises within pure Awareness.
When something appears, there’s something to be conscious of… there’s the perceived and the perceiver…there’s duality.
Where there’s Consciousness, there’s duality; where there’s duality, there’s Consciousness.
When that which is perceived vanishes, the imagined perceiver (little ‘you’) vanishes and only pure Awareness remains.

This is all conceptual stuff so don’t take it too literally. These concepts are not to be believed as Truth; they’re meant to help release us from our current programmed beliefs, and in doing so, help us realize this for ourselves. After all, this is not about anything else, but our Selves. Ultimately, all this knowledge is not about the universe, Awareness, duality, the creation etc. It all about the “I”. The universe is a giant mirror and what we’re really seeing is our Selves.

youtube.com/watch?v=akE2Sgg8hI8

Hope that clarified what I meant, somewhat? Using language and metaphors often create their own complications. They often introduce hierarchy (space) and time which is problematic when talking about stuff like this.
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I’ve got a pretty good understanding of the overall philosophy if that’s what you mean, after all, I spent decades traveling, living in spiritual communes and religious monasteries, sleeping on cold tiled temple floors and tents in winter, working my ass off for years, 7 days a week etc just to get access to books that weren’t available anywhere else. I even spent 3 years learning Sanskrit because a lot of stuff wasn’t in English and, of course, there was lots of meditation involved as well. People have no idea how lucky we are today to have all this knowledge a few clicks away in your own living room. It still blows me away.

Anyway, over time I managed to collate all the stuff and boiled it down enough to be able to understand where most teachers were coming from. The hard part is that many teachers/gurus/literature/translations use the same word for different things or different words for the same thing. It can get enormously confusing. Once I worked that out, I could largely grasp what most teachers were referring to.

Real understanding is understanding all of this is only second-hand conceptual knowledge. Real understanding comes from your own experience.

Somewhere down the track we have to decide if we want to be a cartographer or an adventurer. The cartographer is an expert on, and collector of, maps. The cartographer can tell you anything you need to know about maps while the explorer is happy to get a basic map with enough detail to start the journey and see for him/herself.

“The map is not the territory” as the saying goes. The map has rivers, but it doesn’t have a drop of water. It has mountains, but it is as flat as the sheet of paper it’s printed on. So while maps are useful tools, you won’t ‘get’ Buddhism (or any experiential philosophy) by analyzing maps forever. Over-analysis is a trick of the ego. It allows the ego to remain in control while pretending to be interested in a practice that aims to negate the ego/identity. It also allows you to keep all the egoic attachments, beliefs, desires etc while pretending to be on a quest for Truth.

Ultimately, the journey is not about learning more, it’s about unlearning the stuff that’s blocking us. This info is only about getting you to the next stage and from there, you abandon what you learned and move into another realm further and further inward to your original Self.

This is what I understand. Detailed knowledge of every aspect of a religion or philosophy isn’t necessary. Some of the most advanced people I’ve met have been very simple people, with a simple education and a huge heart. Don’t let the intellect take you away from the heart. The heart is the entrance gate and that’s not being mushy or poetic. The heart is the shortcut. It melts the ego and allows you to merge into everything around you.

I’m happy to talk about Nothing later on but just for the LOLs. We can’t seriously believe we know what Nothing is but when has that stopped us?
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This started with my questioning what you meant by “relative somethingness”. I figured your latest post was answering this question. If somethingness is a projection of consciousness of that something, then it is something relative to that consciousness (you seem to be saying). And in turn, consciousness exists in relation to awareness, which in turn is absolute (right?).

I get it. It’s amazing that I just happen to have a whole conceptual toolkit that fits just nicely with these concepts though I don’t believe it to be anything close to what the masters understand about Buddhism, consciousness, and enlightenment.

I imagine the perception of a thing simply bears the quality of “otherness”–I think that’s the nature of sensory experience–like the perception of a color might bear the quality “red” or the taste of a fruit might bear the quality “sweet”. Otherness is just the way we experience objects. But this insinuates an implication–that there is also selfness–something for it to be “other” relative to. It’s like experiencing something being “over there” implies an “over here”. The alternative is to consider that the other and the self are one and the same, but that the sense of otherness predominates–or in other words, being a self doesn’t necessarily always feel like a self.

The idea of pure awareness has always been a challenge for me to wrap my head around. I would think awareness is always awareness of something. I’m at a loss to imagine what pure awareness–without being aware of something–is like. But then again, maybe I’m thinking too much in the first-person. Maybe pure awareness is just what you get when consciousness shuts off–sort of consciousness in a dormant state. Maybe the idea is that it remains as a third-person entity–not something you can be consciously aware of or experience, but is nevertheless there awaiting the next awakening of consciousness.

I recently saw a youtube video of Jim Carry describing something similar to this. He described himself as a facade, as the universe pretending to be Jim Carry, that what he called himself was really an extension of the universe. In a sense, he’s right. We really are just the universe acting out human lives and human characters. But therein lies one of the prickly points I have with Buddhism. I see this as just a perspective. You could look at it as the universe playing the part of gib or Chakra, but you could also look at it as an actual self having emerged from the universe. The one perspective doesn’t invalidate the other–like that image of a vase which also looks like two faces–it’s not that one’s real and the other an illusion–they coexist, though maybe it’s difficult to imagine them both at the same time. It’s all well and good to lean towards the perspective that one is really the universe, but I don’t like how Buddhists take the further step of invalidating the self.

It’s certainly appreciated that you’re honest about this–and aware of it–it shows a deeper understanding of Buddhism that makes the confusions and inconsistencies within it more tolerable. It makes all the difference in the world if one is allowed to say “It’s something like that” rather than “It is that.”

Ha! Ha! Exactly! We can’t know what nothing is because nothing isn’t. And if you want to talk about nothing, just don’t talk.

@gib and Chakra

I have been watching you two having conversation thus taking a liberty to add my understanding of the subject.

let us start from the very beginning- nothingness

As the literal meaning of the term indicates, nothingness means nothingness but it is not nothing. There is a subtle difference between the two and that is precisely why it gets confusing.

Nothingness is a quality while nothing is the stage when this quality manifests and takes over completely. To understand this more clearly, let us take one different and simple example. There are two things, sweetness and sweet. Sweetness is a quality while being/becoming sweet is a stage where the quality of sweetness manifests itself and as the result the infected object becomes sweet. The same theory can be applied to nothingness. It means that yes, there exists a quality of nothingness but it has not manifested yet. it other words, we can say that there is something more other than nothingness which is forbidding it from taking over completely, and that is potential of being/becoming something. This potential always remains there, even in nothingness thus it never reaches at the stage of total nothing but remains only at nothingness. This very potential is a root cause of all the existence we see around.

To sum up, nothingness is not nothing but the quality of thingness/ manifesting existence also coexists with this. And, when this thingness quality becomes strong enough to break the shackles of nothingness, existence manifests itself. So, we have two forces coexisting, the quality/potential of not to exist and the other one is the quality to exist. A very important point to understand here is that these two forces are not opposite to each other though they seem so at the first glance.

One is positive force while the other one is neutral force, not a negative one. To understand this let us take our previous example of sweetness again. we all understand that the opposite of sweetness is bitterness not blandness. Nothingness is blandness, not bitterness. Blandness is merely the absence of sweetness, not its opposite. intellectuals often miss this subtlety thus not able to get Buddhism clearly.

with love
sanjay