On the Nature of the Nothing
A brief reflection on the Void and a curious link between mathematics and spirituality.
The final stage of meditation (of which one can talk of anyway) is that of the Void, also known as Emptiness, or Shunya in Pali and Sanskrit. The idea is foundational to Indian thought in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. It is a peculiarly Eastern concept that I’ve found most western minds struggling to grasp, including Asians like myself who’ve been educated in the western tradition.
It is not a surprise that the culture that furnished the idea of the Void also supplied the world with the conception of Zero, the numerical seed that sprouted all of modern mathematics.
Before exploring the void, let’s take a brief excursion into the more familiar mathematical idea of zero.
A Brief history of Shoonya
The Romans whose number system lacked the concept of Zero (I, II, V, X, L, M etc). As a result, despite their great feats of engineering and architecture thet were unable to make any progress in mathematics. Though they reached a very sophisticated level of human civilization, the Roman’s made almost no real advances in mathematics and science, and many scholars have attributed this deficiency to their failure of comprehending the nature and meaning and nothing, or zero.
While several ancient cultures had anticipated the idea of Zero — ancient Babylon, Classical Greece, Mayan and Incan civilization as well as imperial China — it was the ancient Indians who conceived of it most clearly and concretely as a number, a quantity, as real as any other number such as one, two or ten. The Bakshali manuscript that was discovered in 1881 near Peshawar in modern day Pakistan, dated between 200 AD and 800 AD, contains the earliest known representation of zero as a numeral. The rules governing the application of the concept to mathematical calculations was elaborated, not without errors, by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta around sixth century AD.
It was a revolutionary leap, to grasp the essence of nothing, to give it a concrete reality through a symbol, a meaning, and even a measure. The fact the nothing, denoted by the symbol ‘0’ represented something real, was a remarkable feat. The simplest of ideas are also the most elusive, but when they’re realized, they also become the most powerful.
![Bakhshali manuscript - Wikipedia Bakhshali manuscript - Wikipedia](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff08cd592-6637-465e-8843-c49546d5c0f7_1200x687.jpeg)
Later, in the eighth century, during the Islamic Golden Age, Arab and Persian scholars such as Al-Khwarizmi and Al-Kindi, who imported the idea of Shoonya from the Indians and synthesized the modern number system, known as the Hindu-Arab numeral system. This was later appreciated by the great Italian mathematician Fibonacci in the twelfth century, popularized in his classic book Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculations).
It was Fibonacci who set Europe on the path to the most creative era of mathematics during the Renaissance that produced the greatest flowering of of the subject, during which nearly all the rules and formalities of modern mathematics was codified.
A long and fruitless period in the history of numbers had thus been brought to a close by the introduction of an idea that was as simple as it was elusive — Zero, the Void, the idea of Nothing. Quite a feat of human imagination!
For a comprehensive biography of the number Zero, check out the book Zero: Biography of a dangerous idea
![Algorithms, Algebra & Astronomy: Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi Algorithms, Algebra & Astronomy: Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8116137-60e8-4f74-9c06-30b9e8469321_640x360.jpeg)
In the context of eastern contemplative traditions, however, the Void has an equally profound and powerful implication, in a more spiritual sense than an objective and rational one of its mathematical counterpart.
The Cessation of the Mind
In his classic book Yogasutra, the ancient sage Patanjali provides the most concise and complete definition of yoga in a single phrase: Yoga is citta-vritti-nirodha.
Citta is a Sanskrit word that means mind, vritti means waves, and nirodha means to cease. Yoga is, therefore, simply the cessation of the ripples of the mind. Though it sounds simple and trivial, perhaps even banal to some, it is an immensely powerful state of consciousness with far-reaching implications to mental well-being, creativity, understanding and insight.
Experiencing the Void
The Void is experienced in advanced meditative states when the internal mental chatter of ordinary consciousness has been silenced. In that state, where all thoughts have ceased and every emotion has been dissolved, what remains is a pure, whole, luminous awareness, a state of unity without any fragments or divisions, an integrated state that is silent but active, and pregnant with infinite potentialities.
This state is prior to language, prior to names and labels, prior to judgements and classifications. It is human experience in it purest form, like that of a newborn child’s. It is still but active, stationary but dynamic. It resides at the core of every human soul, like a blackhole at the center of a galaxy. It creates the totality of our being and has spawned all of human culture.
In that state, where all thoughts have ceased and every emotion has been dissolved, what remains is a pure, whole, luminous awareness, a state of unity without any fragments or parts, a state that is silent but active, and pregnant with infinite potentialities.
This state is not a void in space, but something that contains space itself. It is a supra-temporal state — beyond time, at least in our limited understanding of time anyway.
The Void, according to the oriental traditions, is the source of love, kindness, courage, strength, wisdom, creativity and of Nirvana, that pure unmanifested bliss beyond joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perhaps, it is the core of the universe that Tesla referred to in the well-known quote often attributed to him (see above).
Having discovered the Void within oneself, one can enter it at will at any time and remain there as long as one pleases. It is a sanctuary for the anguished, refuge for the confused, a vast unexplored ocean for the pilgrims of inner worlds, and a goldmine of ideas, associations and insights that fuel the imagination of artists and thinkers.
The only way to enter it, it seems, is through pure and unsullied silence. Have I been there? No, but I’ll never stop trying.
Cheers and Peace.