You can’t have nothing without something. You can’t have a foreground without the background. Do you see this? The painter can’t create a picture without the canvas. You can’t write without a blank sheet to put a pen on. You can’t have motion if you have no space. You can’t have black without white. There’s no such thing as comparison unless you have something to compare things too. You can’t have existence without some form of non-existence. In other words, you can’t have life, without death. Is that not strange? We are all walking around in this dimension, on this planet, seemingly alive, seemingly our own individual characters, and yet, it has seemingly stemmed from nothingness. But like I said, you can’t have nothing without something.
You can’t have a play without the stage. Our existence, as seriously as we take it, seems to be like this. Life, this dimension, the Earth, the planets, the universe, and everything contained within it, has come out of nothingness. It’s turned, or manifested, into what we see today. Somehow, intelligence within the universe exists. Such a vast intelligence. Can you imagine the intelligence required to put yourself together to form the universe we live within? To create forces invisible to the eye, to create all the elements in the periodic table, to create the Earth and everything contained within it. And I am not saying there is a God. Just imagine the intelligence required to create such a thing.
And is that thing separate from yourself? What is separation? How can anything be separate from yourself? Just like we see there cannot be something without nothing, and thus the two are intrinsically intertwined, there cannot be any real separation. The only separation we perceive between ourselves and anything outside of ourselves is created by our mind. It is illusory, how can it be real? If you look at your cat, and you don’t see it by its label, its name, or through any form of memory, but you simply see it, what is to divide you from it? If you see the tree, and don’t label or create an image out of it, don’t perceive it through the lens of your memory, what is to separate you from it? Perhaps when you don’t introduce these illusory divisions, of which have become so ingrained that it is absolutely habitual behavior for most of us, you can truly feel a sense of connection.
What is to divide you from your fellow human beings? You have named yourself ‘x’ and myself ‘y’. In our memories we have both attached to certain images, certain remembrances and the like, but what is there to divide us if we choose not to let it? If we choose to let go of our political ideologies, our beliefs, and all other attachments, if we let go of this illusory creation of ourselves in the memory, what is there to divide us from one another? If you don’t identify as a Russian, or myself as an Englishman, we are one. The goal is not to create one belief system that promotes peace and house everybody under this label. Rather, it is to strip away all these illusory attachments, because it is these attachments that divide us from one another and thus cause conflict.
Remember this, life is a playing between what truly exists and what we have ourselves created regarding what exists. What exists is nothing, and what we create is something, and together they are one whole of existence. You think you’re a recruitment consultant and I call myself an IT manager, but deep down we know we are kidding ourselves. It’s a cosmic joke. There is nothing to divide ourselves from one another, we are all one another. We’re each playing a joke on ourselves. You are everyone around you and everything you see. You are the world. And yet each day you wake up and purposefully choose to forget this. Because you have to forget, in order to realize that anything exists.
You see, nothingness is nothingness. Nothingness is no fun. And so you, the world, the universe, this divine energy, has created something on top of this nothingness, your current experience. It’s an experience and nothing more. In the grand scheme of things, our lives are nothing. You are born and die, in the blink of an eye. All those situations in which we place massive significance, striving for a certain job position or having arguments with people, at the end of the day, at the end of our lives, they all mean nothing. All those moments of hatred, anger, and violence, ultimately were completely wasted. You’ll look back and think, why didn’t I enjoy my life more, why didn’t I express love a little more, why was I bogged down by these crooked emotions?
What I’m trying to get at is that it seems this principle of nothing and something stems into everything. There is a lot one can learn from it. In any given moment you can fall back from the ‘something’, the image that has been created of the present moment, and fall back into nothingness. You can let go. You can be angry, and rather than externalize it, you can be aware of it and choose to not let it reach the outside. And this is all that love is. It isn’t anything complex, it is simply the absence of all the artificial ‘somethings’, our emotional states born out of our attachment to certain thoughts, that we introduce into the world. Love you could say is nothing, while everything that clouds it out are the ‘somethings’.
I think we place way too much significance on our lives, and it stops us from relaxing, from enjoying our actual day-to-day existence. We’re always living for the ‘somethings’, striving to get that promotion, a bigger house, to pay off a certain loan, to be accepted by others, but perhaps the key is a balance, where one is willing to let these things go and fall into nothingness. Of course, these things have their correct place, we each have to function in society. But they also have their wrong place. To solely live through them you will live a life of being nothing but your artificial self, the self-image and mental abstraction that the environmental impressions you have been subject to have thrust upon you. So the key is a balance, to live with the somethings but also be happy accepting and understanding you are truly nothing.
The Candlelight 
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