I AM NOTHING MEANS THAT I AM EVERYTHING. WHAT IS EVERYTHING? LET US PLAY WITH PHILOSOPHY
Blog post description.
Currently, I am reading Frederick Copleston (1946). A History of Philosophy. (New York: Doubleday). Volume 1. This volume covers the origin of Western philosophy; it did an excellent review of all the seminal thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome. Since we are talking about philosophy, below are some of my philosophical ideas for you to chew on. If you are interested in philosophy, please feel free to talk to me about Copleston's book and or the below synopsis of my metaphysis, epistemology, and ontology.
I am nothing means that I am not anything in particular. Not being anything means that I am everything. But what is everything?
If you get to this point in your intellectual evolution, you are at a dangerous point. Your mind could go into a delusional thinking mode. It does so when it tells you that you are something special, that you are better than other people. If you are everything and yet you are better than some things, then you are contradicting yourself because everything cannot mean that some are special, and some are not.
There is something unknown in our lives, and one should not pretend to have understood it because it is not understandable to our current ego-separated minds; that thing is a whole and requires a wholistic pattern of thinking to understand it.
When you embrace the world of thinking, the world of philosophy, it takes you to strange places. Try philosophy and think and wonder about the nature of things. You will learn that you know nothing for certain and are just making noise when you claim to know something.
What we currently call science, in a thousand years, will seem laughable to people; they will wonder how we believed in such infantile science.
I plead ignorance (which Socrates told philosophers to plead because to say that one knows something for certain in a universe where the collective humanity does not know one percent of what is knowable is to be a compound fool).
Now, go read Dr Copleston's book and call me, and let us talk about his rendition of Greek and Roman philosophy. The most joyful thing on earth is the habit of philosophical thinking; it leads to the acceptance that one does not know anything for sure and, as such, that one should keep learning.
As Buddhists say, go cultivate your farm so that you may have food to eat and have a body that worms will eat, worms that bacteria will eat; in time we and everything in the universe will decay to nothingness.
We are nothing which is everything but what everything is we do not know for certain.
Occasionally, do wonder who is asking all these interesting questions. Who are we? Who am I? I do not know. I accept not knowing and the attendant silence it gives my chattering ego mind; the ego chatters away, thinking about all sorts of things but in the end knows nothing!
In this essay, I established that our bodies are made of matter and that matter came from nothing and, as such, must be nothing; I have asked the question, did something produce the apparent nothingness called matter? I am unable to answer that question. I, of course, understand the attempted answers to that question by religionists.
I am not a religionist. I am a philosopher and would like a philosophically minded person (s) to answer that question for me.
What I believe is that there is a unified spirit self. Each of us is a part of that unified spirit self. In it, we are eternal, permanent, and changeless. While in that eternal unified spirit state, we dream that we are in universes where we are temporary, feel fear and anger, and fight with each other.
Eventually, we remember that we came from a unified state and that union is love and we regain the awareness of love.
To love, one must also forgive the person one loves, so we love and forgive all those who seem to have wronged us in the dream, our temporal world.
When you have had certain so-called spiritual experiences, you know that you and all people share God’s oneself and his one mind; you know that God is love and that we are love so you love you, love other people, and know joy.
You may still be in our world of space, time, and matter or you exit it and live in the world of light forms or wake up in the formless world of God that no words can explain.
There you have my metaphysics. Make of it what you like.
After UCLA College of Letters where I obtained PhD is Philosophy, Psychology and Religion I got a teaching job at the University. I felt uneasy teaching. I applied for a job in the mental health field; I got many offers and within two years was running the mental health center where I worked, supervising psychologists and psychiatrists who have been in that field for many decades.
Eventually, I felt bored by the job (of been executive director...I was barely thirty two years old when I was the executive director of the largest mental health agency in the city where I lived) and quit and tried doing other things.
Nothing I tried worked out for me. So, I did other executive director jobs but eventually wound up quitting and returning to college teaching until I felt that teaching is too easy for me; I felt unchallenged being a college professor (I filled my time writing on assorted subjects that interested me).
Eventually, I realized that I have a destiny and fate. My normal routine is to read until I go to sleep (although there is a huge TV in the house, I seldom watch it) and get up around 5 AM, think for a while, and then go to my computer and type the thoughts that I just had in my sleep.