Nothingness occupies a peculiar and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus: it is never merely the absence of something, but rather a charged ontological ground from which being, consciousness, and psychological transformation may emerge. The corpus registers at least four distinct valences. In the Buddhist and Taoist streams, Nothingness (śūnyatā, wu, sunyata) is construed as the very medium of liberation — not nihilism but the silent substrate that permits things to ‘be as they are.’ Aurobindo and the Vedantic tradition complicate this by arguing that a philosophic ‘zero’ is in fact a plenum, an indefinable Infinite that mind misreads as vacancy. Heidegger’s formulation, relayed most forcefully by McGilchrist, insists that Nothingness ‘noths’ — it is an active ontological agent, not passive negation. The Sufi tradition as read through Vaughan-Lee recasts Nothingness as the telos of annihilation (fanā), the realized emptiness of the self before the divine. Schopenhauer, via Sharpe and Ure, presents the ascetic’s transition into ‘empty nothing’ as redemptive precisely because it negates the world of willing. The clinical register, represented by Yalom, treats Nothingness as an existential anxiety-generator — the groundlessness encountered in isolation and confrontation with finitude. The through-line is paradox: Nothingness functions, creates, and transforms; it is, as Eckhart says via McGilchrist, ‘simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness.’
Actually when we examine closely the Nihil of certain philosophies, we begin to perceive that it is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions, but is in fact the only true Existence.
Aurobindo argues that philosophical Nothingness is not vacancy but a misread plenum — the Infinite itself — demonstrating that ‘Non-Being’ is a conceptual fiction produced by finite cognition.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’). There is nothing to which
McGilchrist, channeling Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts selbst nichtet,’ establishes Nothingness as an active ontological agent rather than mere privation, making it productive rather than inert.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Nothing, like Being, is no thing. Neither is it the mere absence of a thing: it is a subject of action, Heidegger implies (it positively ‘noths’). There is nothing to which
Parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist’s reading of Heideggerian Nothingness as generative action rather than empty negation.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness. As mentioned, the philosopher and Christian mystic Jakob Boehme called the ultimate ontological ground of the cosmos the ‘unground’ (Ungrund).
McGilchrist synthesises Eckhart, Boehme, Kabbalah, and Taoism to show that across traditions Nothingness and supreme fullness are co-constitutive, not opposed.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God as negatio negationis is simultaneously total emptiness and supreme fullness. As mentioned, the philosopher and Christian mystic Jakob Boehme called the ultimate ontological ground of the cosmos the ‘unground’ (Ungrund).
Parallel passage establishing the perennial paradox that Nothingness is the ontological ground of fullness across mystical traditions.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
‘The negation, abolition, and turning around of the will’, he observes, ‘is also an abolition and disappearance of the world, its mirror’. Put another way, Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer’s ascetic nothingness is here explicated as the dissolution of the world-as-representation, making Nothingness equivalent to the cessation of willing and its phenomenal mirror.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
this will seem like a transition into an empty nothing’ (WWR 1: 436). What does Schopenhauer mean by ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ in this context?
Sharpe and Ure interrogate Schopenhauer’s redemptive ‘empty nothing,’ identifying it as the negation of the will-to-life and the world of representation.
, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
How could the state of ‘Nothingness’ be the unconditioned and uncreated Self, when he knew perfectly well that he had manufactured this experience for himself? This ‘Nothingness’ could not be absolute, because he had brought it about by means of his own yogic expertise.
Armstrong records Gotama’s critical epistemological rejection of meditative Nothingness as final liberation, distinguishing manufactured experiential emptiness from genuine unconditioned release.
, Buddha, 2000thesis
The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself.
Zhuangzi presents Nothingness (nonbeing) as the generative ground of all phenomena and the dwelling place of the sage, making it ontologically prior and spiritually sovereign.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis
‘Nothing’ is evidently ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose,’ and it is only called Nothing because it does not appear in the world of the senses, but is only its organizer.
Jung, glossing Lao-tzu, reframes Nothingness as the invisible organizing principle of meaning — psychologically significant precisely because it transcends sensory apprehension.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
It is through merging within the emptiness of the teacher that one realizes one’s own nothingness. Baha ad-din Naqshband describes how his inner relationship with al-Hakim at-Tirmidhi, who lived five centuries before him, had this effect.
Vaughan-Lee presents Sufi nothingness as the self’s realized emptiness — an ontological state achieved through transmission from teacher to seeker across time, constituting the goal of the mystical path.
, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992thesis
The shunyata principle involves not dwelling upon anything, not distinguishing between this and that, being suspended nowhere. If we see things as they are, then we do not have to interpret or analyze them further.
Trungpa explicates śūnyatā not as nihilistic void but as the non-grasping awareness that perceives things directly, resisting all conceptual overlays including spiritual ones.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973supporting
rising from the realm of the infinity of consciousness, he entered the realm of nothingness; and rising from the realm of nothingness, he entered the realm of neither perception nor yet non-perception
Campbell’s citation of the Buddha’s death narrative maps Nothingness as a specific meditative realm — a penultimate station on the scale of consciousness leading toward Nirvana.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
Even the idea of sunya is itself to be voided. It cannot be called void or not void, Or both or neither; But in order to point it out, It is called ‘the Void.’
Watts, following Nāgārjuna, shows that śūnyatā self-dissolves — the concept of Nothingness must itself be emptied, preventing any reification of void as metaphysical substance.
, The Way of Zen, 1957supporting
There is no knowledge, no nescience, no destruction of knowledge, no destruction of nescience. There is no twelvefold concatenation of causes and effects, ending in old age and death.
Zimmer presents the Prajñāpāramitā’s radical enumeration of negations as the linguistic form through which Mahāyāna emptiness gestures at what lies beyond the range of dualistic cognition.
, Philosophies of India, 1951supporting
Where was he? Where did he come from? Where did God come from? Where did something (rather than nothing) come from? He felt overcome with aloneness, with helplessness, and with groundlessness.
Yalom illustrates the clinical face of Nothingness — the existential shock of groundlessness when consciousness confronts the primordial question of being versus nothing, producing anxiety that drives defensive life-strategies.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
The Way cannot be thought of as being, nor can it be thought of as nonbeing. In calling it the Way, we are only adopting a temporary expedient.
Zhuangzi refuses to hypostatize Nothingness, insisting the Way transcends both being and nonbeing, and that all designations — including ‘nothing’ — are provisional linguistic tools.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting
If one knows Him as Brahman the Non-Being, he becomes merely the non-existent. If one knows that Brahman Is, then is he known as the real in existence.
Aurobindo cites the Taittiriya Upanishad to warn that identifying ultimate reality with Non-Being produces spiritual nullity, whereas recognizing Brahman as Being yields genuine existence.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
‘They are nothings’, he wrote, in a spirit of deliberate paradox, ‘therfore take heed of allowing any of them least you make another’. Nothings, then, that breed – anticipating a richly suggestive paradox of Heidegger’s
Donne’s paradox that ‘nothings breed’ is cited as a pre-Heideggerian poetic intuition of Nothingness as generative rather than merely privative.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside