Varieties of Nothingness

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