Nothing is Everything?
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- pinkfloyd
"Nothing is everything, and everything is nothing"
Someone told me this phrase many many years ago, and I still don't understand what it means. I believe it comes from Taoism. What does it mean?
- CALLES0
Watch true detective... Rust
- scarabin0
it's a zen thing. the buddhists believe the path to happiness is freeing one's self from all attachments. it's a sort of self-protection trick wherein you detach yourself from everything so you never have to feel the pain of not having that thing.
- uuuuuu0
One thing I learned from reading about buddhism is that these weird sayings aren't meant to be answered literally they are meant to be contemplated in meditation. If you tried to explain what this meant you would just confuse everybody, including yourself, playing word games and miss the point entirely.
So as what scarabin is saying, detachment from the material world is a big thing in Buddhism so you could interpret it in that sense. The more you meditate on everything as nothing and nothing as everything than the more you can free your mental attachment to things. Don't try and understand it just put that image in your mind 'nothing is everything' 'everything is nothing'.
- prophetone0
"Everything is awesome."
- teh0
but what about anything?
- utopian0
Not too many people in the world that we live in, interested in subscribing to that philosophy.
- cannada0
Everything is made out of atoms.
We are made of exploded stars.
- cannada0
OR like a song or something, love is everything, but it's not something you can buy or measure.
- cannada0
- is that a photo of the universe? It looks prettyIanbolton
- Apple background?freedom
- lolpinkfloyd
- that's a picture of hte universe to someone who has very little understanding of what science has figured outmonospaced
- that's literally a 75 year old version of a layman's understanding of the universemonospaced
- that picture IS the universe. and so is everything else.sarahfailin
- a miniscule part of it, yesmonospaced
- drgs0
"less is more" taken to the extreme
- son0
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- yurimon0
fluctuation of energy into and out of existence if thinking in quantum
- pinkfloyd0
So rephrasing in modern terms:
"fucks given..........0"
- set0
'nothing' does not exist
- no?sarahfailin
- Of course not, how can nothing exist? By it's very definition it doesn't. No thing can be nothing...set
- sarahfailin0
uuuuuu is right that sometimes in buddhism paradoxes are meant just to be meditated upon. but this statement does allude to the buddhist concept of emptiness, that every thing lacks a permanent essence, but rather its value is contingent upon all the other things around it. since literally EVERY thing lacks a permanent ego, essence, or non-illusory nature, the whole of the universe is 'empty,' all meaning is contingent, all being temporary.
i think it's cool that given how physics understands the structure of atoms and the distance between objects in space, it seems that the whole universe is both literally and figuratively empty
- lessfloor0
Read Fiesta 1982