Thinking about Zero
Now we have some common ground, and we can start moving on to even more interesting things… because what we’re doing is we’re talking about nothing. It’s what we’ve been talking about all along. But now let’s address it directly.
How do we talk about nothing? Zero? We have to develop some common stories, common words, in order to talk about it. Hopefully we’ll be surprised. We might think we know what zero is until we look closer.
Let’s look closer.
The tone of our conversation is going to change. I am now talking to your full spatial mind, not just the place with words and concepts. We’re going to do a lot of visualizing.
The Mystical Zero
In order to talk about zero we have to come from that mystical part of our minds, to access it at will. To allow it to form its pictures without analyzing it.
So… let’s straight out talk about nothing. Nothing. Zero. It’s incredibly interesting to look at zero, the idea of zero. It’s bigger (or actually smaller) than you may think!
We were all taught zero in kindergarten, so it makes sense to us. Like a zero, yeah. I know that thing. Draw a circle… that means zero. I know exactly what it is.
Look at all the stuff we know about zero. You add it to eleven and the eleven doesn’t change because zero is nothing.
But wait… did the zero just change? Did it change into 11? Or is it still zero? Is the zero gone now, or was it never there? You can subtract it back out of 11 and there it is again. Where did it come from then?
Zero is very powerful. You times it by anything and that thing turns into zero. Zero times eleven = zero. Did the zero turn the eleven into nothing, or is it just stating the fact that there never were eleven things to start with?
We learned zero during math class and simply accept it the way it was taught. Most of us have probably never deeply explored it. Zero does its thing when we need it, but other than that we simply ignore it.
The History of Zero
Zero is not a natural concept. It’s not a natural thing for the human brain to understand. For instance, the human brain naturally understands monkey. You can look at a monkey and there it is, chattering away. Monkey. We can understand food. Every human being and every pre-human being that’s ever existed would understand that concept.
But zero? Not so much.
As a matter of fact, for most of human history the idea of zero didn’t exist. Our ancestors of 80,000 years ago, the first human beings that were genetically identical to us, wouldn’t have known our words for monkey and food, but they knew monkey and food. They didn’t know zero.
The understanding of zero didn’t happen until centuries after written history began so there is a record of it. Scholars can trace its formation. They can track societies that didn’t have it, see how they used to add things up, see when it first started to be understood. They can measure the effect it has had on our success as societies from economics to religion.
Written history is a small flick of time at the end of the 80,000 years we’ve been a conscious species. Nobody thought of zero all that time because it doesn’t exist! How do you think about something that doesn’t exist? How do you understand it?
The idea started as a mystical, spiritual idea and took forever to be brought into mathematics. Matter of fact, remember Archimedes? Many people call him the father of mathematics because of his complex calculations about spheres. He didn’t have the idea of zero. All the math that he did was without the numerical system that we have today.
Why was Zero Hard?
Zero seems so easy to us now. Why was it hard for the natural human brain to understand zero?
Well, it’s very simple. Imagine a herd of sheep. That guy over there has four sheep. That’s easy to understand. The sheep are standing there, you can see them and count: one, two, three, four.
This other guy has three sheep. You can see them and count them: one, two, three. It’s natural and easy to add that together and quickly understand that all together there are seven sheep.
But what about that other guy over there that doesn’t have any sheep? It’s not natural to think that he has zero sheep because you don’t see anything. If you think about it at all you think, “That guy doesn’t have any sheep. Poor guy. He needs to get some sheep.”
You would never think to add it all up this way: one guy has four sheep, one guy has three sheep, one guy has zero sheep. That’s seven sheep. No, you would just ignore the guy that doesn’t have any sheep.
The idea of zero in math never existed until about the 1400’s. There are some smatterings of math with zero in the 1200’s, but it’s pretty scattered. The idea came from the Middle East and it was one of the things that created what we call the Enlightenment in Europe. It rapidly transformed society.
With zero, suddenly we were able to do math that is easy to do and makes sense of the world. We were able to have double entry bookkeeping which made Capitalism possible?
Think about Zero
Now the idea of zero seems so natural to us we never really think about it. We ignore the fact that we don’t understand it. But now, for a second, let’s pause and think about it.
Picture zero. What do you see?
It’s easy to picture the little circle, 0, right? But picture the nothing that zero represents. Picture a field with no sheep in your mind’s eye. Ignore the grass, and flowers, and all that. Picture nothing.
Try to do it. Stretch your brain a little bit. There’s nothing there. There’s like… It’s even hard to describe it. You probably feel your mystical brain kicking in. The mystical part of you can feel nothing, but there is no picture. Maybe, just a hum.
Good thing we’ve been practicing with our mystical mind… right?
Proving Nothing
One thing that lawyers know is that it is impossible to prove innocence. You can’t prove that you didn’t do something… unless maybe you have a good alibi. That’s why we have the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” in our justice system. It’s the only way to make a fair system. If we were guilty until proven innocent we’d all be in jail.
You can prove guilt, but you can’t prove the absence of something. You can’t prove that you didn’t do something.
Like, say the candy bar is gone, but I didn’t eat it. I can’t prove I didn’t eat it, so I have to go out and find the guy that did, and then I have to prove he did it.
Nothing. Zero.
Stretch your brain on it and really try to picture zero. Once we realize that zero is a concept we can’t see, then we can start seeing the magic in it.
There is nothing there.
Zero.
It’s tempting to put zero into a line and assign a value to it. You can have below 0 in your checking account. Your credit cards are always below zero because they are debt. It’s easy to understand zero that way.
We have temperatures that are below zero and above zero. We have negative numbers and positive numbers and fractions and can use that kind of math to figure things out.
But stop and think about zero itself. Imagine space. There’s nothing there.
Nothing.
Now access your inside world. Shut your eyes and see nothing there. Pause and do it. Gently, with confidence.
It’s easy to drift into that for a second.
When we imagine zero we access the silence in our consciousness. In reality there is nothing inside your mind. It’s nothing. Thoughts may drift in and appear to fill the void. But they don’t really exist. There is always nothing there. Mystical brain. Easy to see it for a second. It’s when we try to meditate for, like, a whole hour that it becomes a problem.
Actually, I take that back. If you are able to meditate for a whole hour you probably spend most of the time in nothing. If you are just starting with mediation, though, you likely don’t stay in nothing for very long. Especially if you’re really worried about something and thoughts are going through your head like a boomerang.
Back to zero for a moment though. Shut your eyes now and see it. The more you relax, the more you will see this zero, this nothingness. It’s alive because someone is looking at it.
Nothing is mystical because it’s nothing. It’s much like the mystical experience we were talking about in the last module. If you relax your thinking brain goes quiet and that mystical experience is just there. Zero gets us there quickly. We’re going to this place of pure nothing where even the mystical experience isn’t there. It’s not a feeling, it’s just the reality of nothing.
The Heaven of Nothing
It’s easy to turn nothing into a thing. The mind naturally wants to do it. It’s how we’ve invented all our gods. Wonderful Nothingness. Oh heavenly nothingness!
But don’t do it. We want nothing but zero.
We’re talking about actually nothing. As you read, pause and look. Stop again and again and come back to nothing. Maybe do it for only seconds at a time. It’s easy to do it very quickly. In fact, it doesn’t need time to see because something that is this obvious can be seen very quickly.
So what is zero then? What is the absence of things? What is the absence of thought?
Non Duality
Now we’re getting closer to the basic teaching of Non-duality: whatever I can see is not me. Right? What if you see nothing? If that happens all that’s left is the one who is seeing.
Now we ask: Who are you?
You are nothing.
It’s not that… it’s not that… it’s not that… if you can see it then it’s not that. But if you are looking at actual nothing, the absence of anything, then only you are looking. Nothingness.
This void is not separate from you. Nothing inside nothing. There’s no longer a you over here looking at something over there.
Zero. Nothing. You are looking at nothing. You are nothing. Nothing looking at nothing. There’s no separation because there’s nothing that you are looking at. Down the rabbit hole, eh?
Buddha Didn’t Have Zero
So if you are this far along in the course, you can start calling yourself a Mystic now because you understand all these things.
It’s easy now to uncover your mystical experience. You know that whatever you’re looking at, if it’s any kind of thing, is not you. We’ve had our first taste of nothingness, of zero.
Think about how far we’ve come, and how much of it has been story. Much of it has been a new story, different from what we’ve heard before.
We have the story of the left brain and right brain too. It is what led us into this experience with each other.
This is All New
Buddha did not have this information. He only had his inner experience. All the things he talked about came from an experience of the inner world without an understanding of the science of his brain, without knowing about zero. His experience was all internal and interpreted through his world view. He gave us a marvelous description of what it’s like to access this nothingness inside us.
We have new tools now and we can use them.
Everything Buddha said matches up with what we know. We have a new language (we even have some math!) to talk about this. With this totally new paradigm we can talk about these things in a new way and make it easier, clearer, more relevant to our lives.
That’s a good thing because one of the problems with spirituality, with religion, is trying to translate old languages and paradigms into our own. Much better to just figure it out.
We have very little sense of that it was like to be a human being 500 years before 0 AD (Hey look… another zero!)
We can never go back and experience the exact same brain, the same consciousness, that the people who came to Buddha had. We don’t need to because we have our own world. And besides that, our present world needs us this way.
These new stories can change everything for us. We need these new stories so we can talk to other people about this and create different kinds of communities around it. That’s the power of an ongoing story. Especially a story grounded in reality and conscious experience.
It’s also the power of deeply questioning the stories and belief systems that we’ve been given.
You can see how easily, with these little exercises and these little stories, we’ve moved beyond things that we used to accept blindly as gospel.
Difficult Enlightenment
One of the stories we’ve been told is that enlightenment is very difficult. We’ve been told you must go through years and years and years of study locked in a cave, even lifetimes and lifetimes, in order to become enlightened. We’re starting to see that, No, no, no. There might be a different way. Our new stories have come at just the right time in human history. Awakening is a simple, natural, relaxed thing that we can work towards and attain.
Sorry I used the word attain… that’s a terrible world word to use about enlightenment (we could have a whole other course just about that) but lack of good vocabulary doesn’t change the power of our new story. We can work towards this. We can work together towards this.
We now have a different language we can use to talk to each other about it. Most important is to start seeing it for yourself. Most important is that it makes sense to your experience of life.
As we’ve moved thought this course do you see how easily you are able to access these different states?
In this course I didn’t sit you down for hours and weeks and years of meditating. All we’ve been doing is listening to stories that have brought us to a different way of seeing who we are.
I hope that you’re starting to see that, yes… This is simple. It’s doable and possible. Maybe it’s even your birthright.
We’re looking for Who are you? What are you? That is the ‘who’ you have always been. We’re trying to get to something that’s completely natural and normal. Hopefully you can see how and why relaxing opens up the mystical mind.
Understanding zero helps. Zero, nothing, is what we’re looking for.
So, this is a good time to for a pause. Before you move on in the course spend some time with zero. Spend some time with nothing. Why did it take human beings centuries of advanced civilizations to start using the concept of zero? Why did mystics find it before mathematicians?
Notice how the idea of zero informs so much of modern life. Notice how through your whole life since kindergarten you have just accepted that zero is zero. But never really looked it it. It’s easy to understand why we never look at zero… it’s because there is nothing to look at!
We’ve simply accepted it as a number, when it’s magic. We’ve accepted it as a thought, as a concept, without really looking at it.
So, take a little time looking at it, thinking: What is the absence of everything?
Zero and a Giraffe
Finally the Giraffe! Let’s do an exercise.
We’ve had a lot of fun playing around with crazy ideas and busting through some concepts.
We know that whatever you see is not you… because it’s “out there.” There’s me and there’s the things I’m looking at, so that can’t be me.
What is zero? What’s a mystical experience? What’s the left brain? What’s the right brain?
Simply playing around with these things has changed our experience of ourselves. Hopefully it has made us a little more pliable than we were when we started this course.
So let’s do a simple, simple exercise. Are you ready? Read each step and then do it.
Step #1. Close your eyes and look inside and find a giraffe.
I’m not talking about a thought of a giraffe or a spiritual experience of a giraffe, or a smell of a giraffe, or, a concept of a giraffe. I’m saying to look inside and find an actual giraffe.
Here we go. OK, stop and do it for two seconds.
—————————
There’s no giraffe in there. There’s nothing in there. Right? There’s the absence of a giraffe. Inside your head, there are zero giraffes.
You just saw nothing.
Step #2. Close your eyes again and, on purpose, look at nothing.
Then step back into that nothing and become it.
Exercise over.
Do it over as often as you need until you’ve seen nothing.
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