• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Is Nothingness the Basic State of Existence?

The Sum of Awe

The Sum of Awe

Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
(Needless to say, this is implying there isn't any form of afterlife or life before life)

Is nonexistence primary?

Is life an intermission of a forever oblivion?

On one hand, that is what surrounds the time of our life, before birth and after death.

On the other hand, there can't exactly 'be' nothingness, nothingness is the lack of something.

Those are my two thoughts, what are your's?
 
Politesse

Politesse

Amor Vincit Omnia
The Sum of Awe said:
(Needless to say, this is implying there isn't any form of afterlife or life before life)

Is nonexistence primary?

Is life an intermission of a forever oblivion?

On one hand, that is what surrounds the time of our life, before birth and after death.

On the other hand, there can't exactly 'be' nothingness, nothingness is the lack of something.

Those are my two thoughts, what are your's?
Click to expand...
Nothingness doesn't exist; it's an abstract idea that comes from our inability to see most of the gases we swim around in. How could it be the basic state of existence? Our consciousnessness does not exist before the apparatus that powers it forms, but the components do. And have, for eternity. Sure, we aren't conscious before we are. But then, I'm not happy before I am either, and that doesn't mean that I have a basic emotion of nothingness.
 
Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

wind and rain touch not this brain
Staff member
Premium Member
I think nothingness cannot be the default. Your question seems to me similar to asking whether we create ideas or discover them. My position is that we are like concepts, neither dreams and nor empty. I do not rule out an afterlife, but our existence is real without one, without any ghost, without any invisible separate copy of ourselves. Everything and every relation is conceptual, and all that we think is real is actually the concept of us thinking that it is. I believe this, because concepts are the only things I know of that are eternal and that do not need to be created.
 
Twilight Hue

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
The Sum of Awe said:
(Needless to say, this is implying there isn't any form of afterlife or life before life)

Is nonexistence primary?

Is life an intermission of a forever oblivion?

On one hand, that is what surrounds the time of our life, before birth and after death.

On the other hand, there can't exactly 'be' nothingness, nothingness is the lack of something.

Those are my two thoughts, what are your's?
Click to expand...

I dunno. Defining possibilities and impossibility would be quite a task.

Is there any compatibility with those notions?
 
idav

idav

Being
Premium Member
The idea of nothingness is interesting considering energy balancing to zero. I'm not sure that is the same as saying it is nothing, surely even a universe that is sum of zero is still something. At the formation of the cosmos, dealing specifically with energy there were particles and their opposite were antiparticles which annihlated each other on contact. If I were a believer in mythology, I might say it sounds like a beginning war between good and evil.

In the comparison basically "good" won out thus existence is here, but it really could have been just an annihilation of everything cancelling each other out. There is a bigger antithesis to existence, not a nothingness, something that escaped nothingness.
 
George-ananda

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
Is Nothingness the Basic State of Existence?

Put me down for a 'No' vote. I believe the basic state is infinite pure undisturbed consciousness; God/Brahman.
 
George-ananda

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
Brickjectivity said:
I think nothingness cannot be the default. Your question seems to me similar to asking whether we create ideas or discover them. My position is that we are like concepts, neither dreams and nor empty. I do not rule out an afterlife, but our existence is real without one, without any ghost, without any invisible separate copy of ourselves. Everything and every relation is conceptual, and all that we think is real is actually the concept of us thinking that it is. I believe this, because concepts are the only things I know of that are eternal and that do not need to be created.
Click to expand...
You asked if what I said 'I believe the basic state is infinite pure undisturbed consciousness; God/Brahman' is the same as what you said above. I would say 'No', because there must be something more fundamental in which concepts can be formed (as a derivative of the fundamental). Concepts can't come from nothingness.
 
Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

wind and rain touch not this brain
Staff member
Premium Member
George-ananda said:
You asked if what I said 'I believe the basic state is infinite pure undisturbed consciousness; God/Brahman' is the same as what you said above. I would say 'No', because there must be something more fundamental in which concepts can be formed (as a derivative of the fundamental). Concepts can't come from nothingness.
Click to expand...
"Concepts can't come from nothingness" is not something I agree with, so it appears we are not saying the same things. The reason I suspected otherwise was that you did not consider Brahman to come from anything. That is at least one thing that you feel exists without any need to be created. What I refer to as concepts are not thoughts but are just mappings or relations, such as order. There is no reason that 1 + 1 must equal 2, but it simply does. This seems to me as uncreate as what you say Brahman is, so the two seem to coincide possibly. Is there a reason for Brahman to exist or does it simply abide?
 
jonathan180iq

jonathan180iq

Well-Known Member
The Sum of Awe said:
(Needless to say, this is implying there isn't any form of afterlife or life before life)

Is nonexistence primary?

Is life an intermission of a forever oblivion?

On one hand, that is what surrounds the time of our life, before birth and after death.

On the other hand, there can't exactly 'be' nothingness, nothingness is the lack of something.

Those are my two thoughts, what are your's?
Click to expand...
Depends on the point of view of the answering party.

Nothingness, to this point in human understanding, is merely a lack of understanding of something. Each time we've assumed nothingness, we've discovered something new.

As a living entity, I am fairly certain that I did not exist before I existed. I am reinforced in that belief by the daily observance of others popping into and out of existence while I'm existing. Those who have died while I have been alive no longer exist from my perspective. And those who have been born while I've been alive did not previously exist before that point... That being said, and as I said, I don't know everything, and my perspective is limited. So, who knows?
 
VioletVortex

VioletVortex

Well-Known Member
Existence can only form in nothingness, but nothingness does not even exist. Nothingness is the antithesis of existence. The basic state of existence is existence.
 
Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

wind and rain touch not this brain
Staff member
Premium Member
Philosophy usually relies upon logical predicates. Logically speaking we cannot prove our own existence. There is a Math theorem called the Incompleteness Theorem which states that no logical system can prove its own consistency. It implies that no matter by what argument we would try to prove that we exist, we cannot know that our argument is consistent. We cannot prove that we exist. It is an assumption or not.
 
HonestJoe

HonestJoe

Well-Known Member
I’d suggest that “nothingness” can’t exist and that it’s “change” which is the basic state of existence. Everything is constantly changing. The matter than makes-up the form to bring about our consciousness changed to reach that state and will, one way or another, eventually change to the point where it no longer does. The matter will still exist, as it did before, just in a different form.
 
Willamena

Willamena

Just me
Premium Member
The Sum of Awe said:
Is nonexistence primary?

Is life an intermission of a forever oblivion?
Click to expand...
"Non-existence" doesn't describe it for me, because life (this existence of beingness in the world) doesn't differ from the environment that supports it. There was no one point of "first" me, and I don't anticipate a point of "last" me. There is just the world/being.

Basically, the world/being as I think you are talking about here is ineffable, not anything we could properly describe because it doesn't differ from anything we could describe. It certainly isn't non-existent, as we exist.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top