Nothingness

 NOTHINGNESS

 by Alan Watts

When I consider the weirdest of all things I can think of, do you know what it is? Nothing. The

whole idea of nothing is something that has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western

world. We have a saying in Latin,

 Ex nihilo nihil fit 

, which means, "Out of nothing comes nothing."

In other words, you can't get something out of nothing. It's occurred to me that this is a fallacy of 

tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in

many parts of the East as well. It manifests as a kind of terror of nothing, a putdown on nothing, a

 putdown on everything associated with nothing such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine

 principle which is often equated with the negative principle (although women's lib people don't like

that kind of thing, when they understand what I'm saying I don't think they'll object). To me,

nothing—the negative, the empty—is exceedingly powerful. I would say, not

 Ex nihilo nihil fit 

, but,

"You can't have something without nothing."

How do we basically begin to think about the difference between something and nothing? When I

say there is a cigar in my right hand and there is no cigar in my left hand, we get the idea of 

is

,

something, and

isn't 

, nothing. At the basis of this reasoning lies the far more obvious contrast of 

solid and space. We tend to think of space as nothing; when we talk about the conquest of space

there's a little element of hostility. But actually, we're talking about the conquest of distance. Space

or whatever it is that lies between the earth and the moon, and the earth and the sun, is considered to

 be just nothing at all.

But to suggest how very powerful and important this nothing at all is, let me point out that if you

didn't have space, you couldn't have anything solid. Without space outside the solid you wouldn't

know where the solid's edges were. For example, you can see me in...