Publisher's Synopsis
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
