This book explores the many and diverse ways in which nothingness is weaved into the fabric of our existence. It can express the very ground of reality or a cessation of mind: a winking out, as well as being a guide for painting meditative states. It is inescapably linked with the divine in many traditions as a precondition of our existence. It is the Pleroma before consciousness and the gateway to enlightenment. While these essays are indeed wide ranging and eclectic, they share one theme in common: nothingness is not nothing.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Editors' Introduction
Existential Grounding
1
Your Cosmos Needs You! From Nothingness to Quantum Existentialism -
Dean Rickles
2
Of Mind and Void: Understanding The Duality of Existence and Nothingness -
Ian Durham
Experiential Possibilities
3
Varieties of Experiencing Nothingness -
Harald Atmanspacher
4
Who or What Experiences Nothingness? Reflections from Psychoanalysis -
Leslie Stein
5
Nothingness in Meditation: Making Sense of Emptiness and Cessation -
Vismay Agrawal and Ruben E. Laukkonen
Logico-Philosophical Forms
6
Ex Nihilo Omnis Fit -
Graham Priest
7
Hegel on Nothing (in particular): A Greek Alternative to the Problem of Infinitesimals -
Paul Redding
8
Nothingness: Martin Heidegger and Georges Perec -
Inja Stracenski and Daniela Helbig
Artistic and Cultural Forms
9
The Vitality of Nothingness in Jing Hao's Notes on the Art of the Brush -
David Chai
10
Thoughts on Nothingness from Japan -
James W. Heisig
Theological Expression
11
'Something Formless Yet Complete': Nothing and Divine Consciousness -
Gerard Guiton
12
Apophaticism and Deifi cation in Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa -
Ken Parry
13
Nothingness and the Desire for Being: Der Nister's Modernist Zoharic Theogony -
Nathan Wolski