Understanding nothingness - part 2
In the previous article we discussed why nothingness is not, absence of a thing. Closest explanation we can give for nothingness is, it is something which never have been there. As this is a difficult concept to grasp, and also a wonderful thing to know we will try to understand this with more and more examples.
Nothingness Is in everything.
You would admire nothingness, is something which is present in everything. For that matter we need to know workings of the mind. One important question to ask is when and how a thing became a thing in your mind?
Imagine you take a walk, on a country road which you have never been before. And you see houses, and people, footpaths and trees you have never seen before. Forget about the perspective of others. When did these things became things in your consciousness?
When I look at this question in mindfulness, I see they became things in my mind only when I was aware of them. Until I took the Christmas Walk, a nude oak tree was not a thing for me. This nude oak was not a thing for me every second I was not aware of it. Only when it comes to my consciousness that it becomes a thing for me.
This observation leaves us with a fundamental rule. Our minds are simply mechanisms to register and observe things in the so called outside and inside world. We can call them mental objects. However as, we cannot separate ourselves from the things we observe someone can argue it is even singular like a lump of clay. Then what is the duality of the nature?
It seems duality of the nature is nothing but the imaginary place where things are not there which is another thing. However, the problem is this also is not the nothingness itself.
If things in the world becomes things only when I am aware of them, for vast majority of the time, individually they behave as nothingness. So how can I see the nothingness of a thing when it is a thing in my mind?
Did you get the question?
There is no point reading further if you do not understand the question. I know if you have just landed to this page by a random Google recommendation, I suggest you follow at least some of the simpler articles I have written before in links. As it took me 1.5 years writing 350 articles to ask this question. It's unfair by you if I expected you to understand.
Back to the question: How can I see nothingness of a thing when it is a thing in my mind?
And that is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is not just another meditation to teach you how to focus on your breath to make you sleep better. Mindfulness is a path to wisdom, to identify true nature of things we see hear smell touch taste and think about all our lives. Mindfulness is the practice to observe how things arise from nothingness and go back to nothingness when you are no longer aware of them. Mindfulness is the investigation to question things that you observe and identify nothingness in them. So, our strong attachments to the materialistic and imaginary world gets loosened day by day, until we are liberated from all the suffering arise from things.
If you ask me a question, have you seen nothingness? I would say, no, it is not something we can see. I just try to see the lie, which is present in everything that I see. Including nothingness itself. Then only we can reach what is unreachable. I try to understand how, a life which can be cornered to a fraction of a second makes sense. How can I get a meaning out of a millisecond called life?
Who is this mad man called me, creating things out of nothingness?
What about you? What is your way to nothingness?
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