Andre Halaw - God Is Nothingness: Awakening to Absolute Non-being

God is Nothingness:

Awakening to Absolute Non-being

Andre Halaw

Copyright Andre Halaw 2014

I dedicate this book to one of the greatest sages this world has ever known, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Your words opened my mind and heart to the magnificent reality of the Absolute. Praise be to you and the Parabrahman you reveal. With the humblest of intentions, I hope this book honors your teachings.

Special thanks to Ellen Marie Chen for her magnificent book, In Praise of Nothing: An Exploration of Daoist Fundamental Ontology. It was an invaluable resource, without which this present work would not have been impossible.

And to Nishida Kitaro, the brilliant founder of the Kyoto School. His insights into Nothingness have helped and challenged me beyond measure.

Charles S. Peirce

Only a fool or a man would believe that God is masculine.

Fathers dont create anything; mothers do.

Common wisdom

There is only one thing to be understood,

and that is that you are the formless, timeless unborn.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

A monk asked Chan Master Zhaozhou, Does a dog have Buddha nature?

Zhaozhou said, Wu [Nothing].

Wumenguan

All things are born of being; being is born of nonbeing [Nothing].

Tao Te Ching

Preface

This book is about Nothingness, the great Void of the holy sages, not to be confused with the nothing of the ordinary person.

Silence. A blank page or space in a book. A shout. Slapping the table or thumping the floor. These are all expressions of the ineffable truth that is the universal nature of reality. Since there is no way to directly capture the highest truth with language, all we can do is point to it.

And Nothingness is the best verbal pointer that I have found.

In the beginning, there was only Nothing.

Now there is only Nothing.

In the end, there will be only Nothing.

There always was, is,

and only ever will be

Nothing.

God is Nothingness

Christ is Nothingness

Buddha is Nothingness

The Tao is Nothingness

Brahman is Nothingness

The Absolute is Nothingness

Nothingness is neither something nor the common nothing;

it is the Great Nothing, the eternal, magnificent, all-encompassing

Nothingness that transcends being,

yet is the ground from which existence itself arises.

In truth, there is only Nothingness,

for nothing else ever was.

Beings suffer because they do

not understand Nothing.

Intoxicated by their senses and minds,

they chase mirages,

construct temples,

conduct empty rituals,

pursue wealth and status,

believing that there is some thing

meaning, purpose, salvation

to attain.

Fools are slaves to their senses and thoughts,

caught in the snare of form and desire,

unaware that all things

arise from Nothingness,

abide as Nothingness,

and return to Nothingness.

For nothing has ever happened.

Existence and appearance are flashes of Nothingness

superimposed upon Nothingness.

There are no beings, no worlds,

no minds, no consciousness,

no souls, no events, no time,

no space, no Buddha, no Christ,

no Self, no God.

There is only the not-that That

the Great, Magnificent Void,

the womb of all existence.

NOTHINGNESS.

Bound by neither space nor time,

Nothingness is dimension-less,

time-less, and form-less.

The Void is unborn, unoriginated, unconditioned, and deathless,

neither coming nor going, creating nor destroying, rewarding nor punishing.

It has never set anything in motion nor caused anything to happen.

Ultimately, there is only Nothing,

which is the final and only truth.

Nothingness cannot be seen with eyes,

nor heard with ears,

tasted with the tongue,

smelt with the nose,

felt by the body,

or known by the mind.

Do not look for it with your senses or mind,

for the Void is beyond color, sound,

smell, taste, touch, form, and

thought.

Transcend them and realize that you are truly

Nothing, that in reality

there is only Nothing.

Then you are free to dance and play

on the waves of Nothingness.

Introduction

This may sound like a very strange book for a Buddhist to write. After all, Buddhism is by and large non-theistic, and not very concerned with the priorities of theistic religions, such as creationism, an afterlife (at least an eternal one), or the fulfillment of prophecy. This, paradoxically, makes Buddhists perfect candidates to write about Godbecause we are not constrained by any theological doctrine whatsoever. Unlike a theologian or theist of any sort, I do not have any sectarian position to defend. This affords me the advantage of an outsiders perspective.

That and I am an atheist. At least I am inasmuch as I do not believe in any traditional, anthropomorphic Creator with human priorities or intelligence. I am, however, aware of the formless reality at the root of all mundane existence. Buddhists call this Nirvana, Dharmata, Tathata, or Dharmakaya; Advaita Vedantins Brahman; Taoists the Tao; and so on.

Astute readers may have noticed that I omitted mentioning God and any theistic religions in the previous example; this is because the term has so many connotations to so many different people that it is difficult to know exactly what people mean when they say, God.

To a New-Ager it might refer to everything.

To Wiccans it may mean Goddess or the Mother.

To a Catholic it represents the Holy Trinity.

To an Evangelical Christian

You get the idea. God is often a mish-mash, blanket term that can refer to anything from the physical cosmos to a higher order or principle governing the universe; it can point to objective matter or a Being who transcends the material world altogether. The word can be very confusing because it encompasses so many varied concepts, expressing everything from an object of deep religious veneration to a meaningless verbal expression (as in, Oh my God).

This is why I generally I avoid using the word. In the many Dharma talks I have delivered as a Zen Buddhist teacher, I have uttered God on perhaps three or four occasions, and primarily for dramatic effect.

I dont oppose the word on a religious basis, but on a semantic one; for as a high school English teacher, I always encourage my students to use language with exactitude. Whenever I hear people utter the word God, I wonder what they mean, to which of the myriad definitions they are referring.

So I will be very clear from the start how I will be using the word God throughout the book. God is...Nothingness.

Defining Nothingness is my first and last goal, not the relative nothing that stands opposite to something, but Nothing with a capital N. And I assure you that there are worlds of difference between the two, as wide of a gulf as between an atom and an atom bomb.

The Nothing that I refer to has no opposite; it is the nebulous source and true nature of all that exists. The statement God is Nothingness, is not the same as saying God does not exist, quite the opposite, in fact.