Mina Wardakan 900020871 Philosophy of religion Dr. S.

Stelzer Mid-term paper Fall 07 Nothing It is absurd, the title, I dont think many people would pick that up to read it if it were for an article in a magazine. Who wants to think about nothing let alone read about nothing? It seems to be the last thing on peoples minds, which are always filled with one thing or the other, stimuli busying our senses and on the inside, hopes, worries, and regrets among other tumults. I wonder what reaction Id get if I said that nothing is all around and underneath us, that its even the way to reaching God. This is what many philosophers, mystics, and saints have attested to, whose works I will be referring to here. In this class weve been reading and discussing Religion and Nothingness by Japanese Professor Keiji Nishitani. To Nishitani, nothingness is absolute and it is the way by which one can change ones ordinary mode of self being which is based on an ego resulting in a self-centred view of things which is anything but truth. And that by realizing this absolute nothingness one may be able to live in truth and be truly religious, in the sense of a quest for true knowledge, knowledge which pervades the totality of man, which makes man real. It is not a thing to be thought about nor is it a concept to philosophize about.

Nothingness is the very ground on which everything takes its place, as masks. Masks of different forms such as me and you and him and tree and book, behind which lurks nothing, and you couldnt just take off this mask and find something called nothing, because there is nothing at all. This may be reminiscent of Platos Forms, but they are present here not in a hypothetical perfect realm. This Nothingness is the clear light and the void Buddhist scripture attests to. At the material level it is like pure vacuum. Were nothingness to be thought of apart from its mask, it would become an idea. (Nishitani 72). Yet the idea here is to have done with it all, including ideas and concepts. Descartes philosophy falls short of this for it goes through doubting the existence of everything but self which is doing the doubting, whereas for Nishitani this self too is included in nothingness, which is the ground on which anyones conception of their own self is built and the reason why this very conception keeps falling to nothing. Such is one, as is written in the Holy Bible, who has built his house on the sand when the wind came it blew it, and everyone in it, to nothing. Such is the spider from the parable in the Quran, which spins his web out of his own body, and stands and lives on it until it is rendered nothing by the slightest disturbance of its environment. This nothingness is to be lived in order for one to be able to really live and arrive at Truth. In the words of Attar in his mystical poem The Conference of the Birds, First lose yourself, then lose this loss and then Withdraw from all that you have lost again.

Go peacefully and stage by stage progress Until you gain the realms of nothingness. (Attar, 205) Meister Eckhart also says that only he who realises that all creation is nothing can know God, and that the soul must lose itself in order for that to happen (The Nearness of the Kingdom). What is to happen after this nothingness no one really talks about, only things like utter joy, a consuming fire or dissolution into an endless ocean are expressed, often poetically. And that is why it is so scary to venture towards nothing; not only do you not know how to, you dont know what happens then. That is why the spider would rather keep to making new webs even though they in turn will keep failing him. It is its quest to make a web and live in it, regardless of the wind or the rain. As is described in the first step along the way, called Valley of the Quest, in Attars poem, Misfortunes will deprive you of all rest, Each moment some new trouble terrifies (Attar,167) . This is also what faith is for, And if He seems elusive He is there Your search is incomplete; do not despair (Attar,168) And it is also faith that keeps the pilgrim going through every moment of weakness or thought of turning back or abandoning the journey at any point along the other valleys. In a letter to a novice monk, Father Mathew the Poor, a Coptic ascetic and mystic (died 2001) states that it is the self that is the cause of separation from God, and that after this

is annihilated it is simply a process of bringing back to God what is His, through his own attraction to it (again a rather obscure description). But he also says how painful it is to get to that and how much faith is required (Letters, 111). To conclude from all these examples from different traditions, the self may only be lost by accepting, indeed by thriving towards this nothingness and living through it. The title of a book by Gurdjieff is Life is Real only then when I Am., and Nishitani explains that I can only be by the actualization of nothingness. That in this mode of being, the personal self discloses itself as subjectivity in its elemental sense, as absolute selfhood (Nishitani, 73) Platos cave allegory comes to mind as Nishitani explains that as the self realizes nothingness ones experience becomes as shadows projected on this nothing, that the shadows one sees are like projections from within; that the very boundaries separating inner-outer, subject-object dissolve. This suggests that the purer one becomes, the more one realizes ones nothingness, the less projections there are until one literally dissolves into it like a drop in an ocean. I am tempted to say that this must be the life of the anchorites and there utmost goal. So however many webs the spider weaves, and however tightly woven they are, they remain in the realm of samsara, an unsatisfactory existence. His very existence is bound to his web, grounded on unreality. His life is really not worth living much as the unexamined life is to Socrates, in the sense that its not even worth the energy put into or spent by living it because in the end youre not really alive. In reality, one has only one

shot and that is to journey towards absolute nothingness, and re-emerge.

Works cited: Nishitani, Keiji; Religion and Nothingness Attar, Farid Ud-Din; The Conference of the Birds Fr. Mathew the Poor; Letters Meister Eckhart; Sermons, The Nearness of the Kingdom