Nothingness.

Consistent with my general habit of setting modest goals, this blog's opening entry shall be about nothingness – which is not the same as nothing. Nothing is just nothing. Nothingness is about being nothing, which consequently becomes something (being is necessarily about being something or other...) This is not trickery with words. There must be something about nothing; otherwise there would be nothing to say or think about it. The latter would be absurd, since we are always fussing about nothing: doing nothing, getting upset over nothing... even basing religions and belief systems on the pursuit of pure nothingness.

Could it be, that on a thought (about nothing), nothing became something? Is that how life and the universe came about? On a thought? Whose? Back on planet earth, I recall, as a first-year philosophy student, that one of my tutors was especially fond of saying, that “there is more that exists than meets the eye.” A rather clumsy way of saying whatever she wanted to imply, I thought, like something lifted off an '80s detective drama; and worst of all, a Caucasian American woman teaching Chinese Philosophy. What evil did Confucius do to deserve this? Needless to say, I paid her no heed. Young, brash, relatively untamed by experience, I fancied myself an empiricist, that only things that can be measured, held, captured by the senses (mainly sight, we are so blinded by our eyes), exist.

Ain't that a lovely, modern notion; reality squeaky clean and safely, triumphantly self-evident, freed from ghosts, goblins and assorted creations of myth. I forgot about me. The ghost in the machine. Even if all other real things were physical, my mind/consciousness is not. The moral of the story: don't be in a great hurry to stuff unknown/vague things into the bag labelled “nothing”, for no better reason than to free our scope of life from the straitjacket confines of physical reality. More on this later.