This book explores the many and diverse ways in which nothingness is weaved into the fabric of our existence. It can express the very ground of reality or a cessation of mind: a winking out, as well as being a guide for painting meditative states. It is inescapably linked with the divine in many traditions as a precondition of our existence. It is the Pleroma before consciousness and the gateway to enlightenment. While these essays are indeed wide ranging and eclectic, they share one theme in common: nothingness is not nothing.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Editors' Introduction

Existential Grounding

1 Your Cosmos Needs You! From Nothingness to Quantum Existentialism - Dean Rickles

2 Of Mind and Void: Understanding The Duality of Existence and Nothingness - Ian Durham

Experiential Possibilities

3 Varieties of Experiencing Nothingness - Harald Atmanspacher

4 Who or What Experiences Nothingness? Reflections from Psychoanalysis - Leslie Stein

5 Nothingness in Meditation: Making Sense of Emptiness and Cessation - Vismay Agrawal and Ruben E. Laukkonen

Logico-Philosophical Forms

6 Ex Nihilo Omnis Fit - Graham Priest

7 Hegel on Nothing (in particular): A Greek Alternative to the Problem of Infinitesimals - Paul Redding

8 Nothingness: Martin Heidegger and Georges Perec - Inja Stracenski and Daniela Helbig

Artistic and Cultural Forms

9 The Vitality of Nothingness in Jing Hao's Notes on the Art of the Brush - David Chai

10 Thoughts on Nothingness from Japan - James W. Heisig

Theological Expression

11 'Something Formless Yet Complete': Nothing and Divine Consciousness - Gerard Guiton

12 Apophaticism and Deifi cation in Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa - Ken Parry

13 Nothingness and the Desire for Being: Der Nister's Modernist Zoharic Theogony - Nathan Wolski