So what is the aim of the book? If it were to show how the enlightened brain works, or at least what parts of the brain are energized during flow, trance, drug and prayer, that would be fine. However, both author's claim to have had experiences of "the void", which they interpret as proof there is no God, no afterlife, no soul, just void....nothingness. I think I understand what they experienced, and apparently they are trying to pawn if off as the Buddhist experience of "no mind", or nothingness. Both men claim to be atheists, but nominally open to agnosticism. What I think they saw, was what happens when, during meditation, you suspend your mind's awareness of the senses. Mindfulness completely experienced, is the void, the substrate, upon which our sensations of reality is built. After death, the mind inside our brains, will merge into the substrate of Mindfulness, since we can't use the sense organs in our corpse.It was a review of a book that I was looking at based on a link someone sent me, though the person used a bunch of spiritual stuff that doesn't seem true. To be honest I don't believe in transcendence but the idea that these people think there is nothing that everything is built on isn't even true by a physics standpoint. From what I gather the whole "in the beginning there was nothing" isn't correct, thought the part about turning off awareness of senses seems at least somewhat interesting, though I doubt the insights they claim from that.
As far as we can tell, in the beginning there was a singularity; all space/time and matter/energy compressed into an infinitely small point (a point with no dimensions). We know this from running the math which describes the expansion of the universe backward to see what things would have looked like before, but we have no observations outside of running a proven mathematical process backward.
A lot of the stuff you talk about seems to be “pseudo-wisdom”. It’s when people say something so vague that it’s difficult to figure out what they’re saying, so it seems like it’s wise because your brain can’t easily process it. The reality is that your brain can’t easily process it because it’s actually meaningless babble. But our brains struggle to find patterns and meaning and understanding, so if you actually try to figure it out you just end up making up your own meaning without realizing it.
What I don’t get is how other people can buy into it. I mean…I thought that if someone believes something then there is some truth to it, or that maybe sometimes there isn’t a logical way to put things, or how the change in demeanor of the people who speak about such things is proof of what they claim.
Maybe not from where you are coming from, Xain, but this topic question holds fascination for me.
I wonder whether there can ever NOT be nothing. If nothing existed absolutely, then there would really be nothing. But nothing would be meaningless. i.e., “Nothing compared to what?”
Conversely, it seems to me that something may be even more reliant on the existence of nothing.
My 1st guess as to the answer to the topic question is:
There must always be something thus there must always be nothing (they define each other).
I would say that as long as there is something, which there is, then “nothing” is impossible. For there to be nothing you would need at least a place for there to be nothing in, but even that empty space itself is something. For there to be nothing right now it would have to be separated from all the stuff which exists, obviously.
But on the other side of the coin, so long as the universe and any and all additional dimensions or “stuff” we can’t possibly imagine right now is finite then nothing is kind of necessary. After the boundary of the finite amount of “stuff” there would be “nothing”. I suppose it all depends on how your brain processes what “nothing” is.
Within the universe, however, “nothing” is not a thing. There’s always something within the universe.