Nothing has been on my mind lately, and how nothing is really the everything we’ve been looking for. I’ve been practicing TM for almost three decades. It’s a form of meditation that uses a mantra and although you may think of a mantra as a sacred sound, which it is, it’s also something else; a vehicle to help us arrive at nothing. Strangely enough this nothing we arrive at is the everything we’ve been searching for. It’s not a nothing that’s absent or vacant, but alive and full of luminous being, presence, and silence.
I think it’s easy to get confused about what everything and nothing really are and how we delineate the difference between the two. In many ways they are just the opposite of what we thought. In the end, the everything we so hectically try to amass and hold onto in order to feel worthy, whole, or put together is really nothing at all. And the nothing we thought was endless emptiness is where we find the very essence of who we are and what we’ve been missing. It’s a bit more cosmic, less defined and impossible to enumerate. Left-brain logic can’t help us here.
Nothing is the place we arrive at where we are not obsessed, over-thinking, over-planning, or constantly worrying. Arriving at this kind of nothing is where we leave behind the incessant thinking about what we owe or want, the big worries and small irritations, the blunders and suspect decisions. Coming into nothing is our chance to let go of everything that isn’t feeding our soul and arrive in the now, purely in the moment and at the doorstep of everything that matters and makes a difference.
It’s not nothing that has us sidetracked, it’s everything we’re consumed by and the millions of ways we divert ourselves that keeps us from what’s most real. And what’s most real is where we are right now. In fact, now and nothing actually have quite a bit in common. Nothing asks us to leave this overly agitated everything behind for the openness and spaciousness that’s always alive in the now. It’s where we discover the peace, place, and presence we’ve been trying so hard to buy or plan or make happen.
So why is nothing so hard to get ahold of? To start with it shapeshifts out of sight, it’s not a concrete substance that can be seen, held, or named. We have to feel it and live into it and it’s not easy to wrap our minds around a reality that feels so foreign, unfamiliar, and slowed down, and make that the foundation from which we live. This is why meditation and mindfulness become such important vehicles, they get us thinking in different ways so we can see more fully the value, expanse, and beauty of all that magnificent nothing.
When we shift gears into quiet and calm, we find everything that’s been eluding us hiding in nothing. It’s infinitely easy to get lost or stuck in a rut and end up missing out on the deeper reality of nothing or living all around what we long for without ever noticing or letting it in. We get preoccupied with endless thoughts, with planning and projecting, or minimize ourselves and what we’re doing. We can stay swamped in a very narrow version of ourselves that keeps us from arriving at everything that nothing has to offer.
None of this leads to where we want to be. It’s coming closer to nothing that helps us get more familiar with our purest essence and the fullness of the truth of who we are. It stops us from simply defining ourselves by what we do and what we own.
Stop spinning your wheels, start coming home to the silence of your deepest self, and let nothing show you everything you already are.
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