Read time 5 minutes. Everything and Nothing is a stand alone article in our series regarding paradox.
Let’s continue to dissect paradox in its many forms. Today: the paradox of everything and nothing. Nothingness holds the potential for everything. Yet if we fixate on that potential, we’re still lost in illusion. The two are aspects of a single, greater whole. Can we let the distinction fall away? Can we experience the union of everything and nothing at the same time?
There’s an irony baked into the way we use the word everything. If it truly contains everything, shouldn’t it also contain nothing within it? Everything contains the potential for nothing because nothing is already there.
Everything and nothing as experience
There’s a scene in I Heart Huckabees that captures this perfectly. An idealistic environmentalist says, “I’m talking about not covering every square inch with houses and strip malls until you can’t remember what happens when you stand in a meadow at dusk.” A young man asks, “What happens in the meadow at dusk?” The environmentalist shouts, “Everything!” At the same time, the young man’s conservative mother shouts, “Nothing!”
Who’s right? Both. What happens in the meadow at dusk? Everything and nothing—at the same time.
“The Tao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; and three gives birth to all things.”
—Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42
The embodiment of Tao
We can’t discuss everything/nothing without Tao. Tao embodies the truth that everything and nothing are the same thing at the same time. Everything arises from nothing. All manifestation sustains itself through the interplay of dualities, then returns to nothingness. That interplay animates existence. It’s convincing because it was made to convince. The perfect illusion.
What’s real is the unity beneath the apparent oppositions.
The illusion of “everything”
Here’s the vicious circle. We believe dualities make life real and worth living. So we go hunting for ultimate truth inside more dualities. Illusion layered on illusion. The challenge—and the goal—is to participate in life recognizing both the fullness and the emptiness of every experience.
The egoic self is just another something inside the sea of everything. Embrace nothing. Become nobody in particular. Nothingness isn’t negative and it isn’t the opposite of everything; it’s a critical part of it. We spoke last time about reconciling dualities—how the boundary that seems to divide them falls away when we stop clinging to the conflict.
Everything and nothing as absence and presence
Ideally there’d be a single English word that exudes this unified everything/nothing. David Hinton gets close by speaking of Absence and Presence as one fabric:
“Absence and Presence are a single existence-tissue: the 10,000 things are not born out of Absence, never separate from Absence.”
“However separate the center of identity may seem, with its thought and emotion and memory, it too is part of existence-tissue Absence, wholly unborn….”
The ramifications are practical. Hinton notes that Tao is “appearance and disappearance in a process of perennial transformation.” Shift the seat of awareness from ego to Tao and you emulate Tao’s traits: calm seeing, clarity, a freedom from false divides—“he inquires where nothing is false.” From that ground, even meaning loosens. The “meaninglessness of meaning” isn’t nihilism; it’s the end of being trapped by interpretations. Do we lose ourselves in illusion, or see past it and rest in Absolute Truth?
Eliminating bias
The boundary between existence and non-existence, being and non-being—everything and nothing—is the greatest boundary of all. Suddenly the everything of living and the nothing of non-living oppose each other. That imagined wall between the manifest and the transcendent seeds a quiet distress underneath daily life. It conditions motivations. It colors experience. And there is a path forward.
Emulate Tao’s traits. Let non-living be present within living. Die while you are alive. That phrase can sound morbid, but refusing it leads to a different kind of death—spiritual paralysis.
Paradox breeds more paradox. Sit at the hinge between living and non-living. What is your definition of living? How much of it is entangled with past and future—and with fantasy? Do you instinctively view non-living in the negative, even though some aspects of non-living (stillness, emptiness, silence) are exactly what invite presence? Can you find a healthy balance? Can you live at the hinge of Tao?
The invitation isn’t to abandon life; it’s to live it fully—where everything and nothing are not opponents but one.
Explore more:
This article by Aaron James Wendland on CBC explores the “continental-analytic split” in Western philosophy.
It was a debate exemplified by the split between philosopher Martin Heidegger and scientist-philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Carnap held the view that poetic interpretations hold little to no scientific value. Heidegger, on the other hand, said, “For human existence, the nothing makes possible the manifestness of beings.”
Wendland quotes Sacha Golob from King’s College London. ”When we ask ourselves; ‘what’s the point of all this?’, the world around us starts to seem kind of valueless. We lose our grip on things. And Heidegger thinks this existential anxiety points to the ‘no-thing-ness’ of our everyday activities.” For us, every-thing and no-thing are variations on a single thing.
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