Anonymous: Notes on Nothing

What if you could never be bad, or good?
Or wrong, or right? Or a failure, or a success?
What if there was never a “you” to begin with?
What would be left?

“My old friend went into his garden one day and had an experience of nothing. Of being nothing in the midst of everything. It’s a very hard thing to put into words: impossible, actually. But sometimes poets and musicians and wise souls gesture towards it, beautifully. That’s what my old friend has done here. Give your self the slip for an hour. Read this book.”
— ZADIE SMITH, author of White Teeth and The Fraud

FROM THE AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION:
This is a book about Nothing. You could also say it’s a book about Everything. Most accurately perhaps, it’s a book about Nothing-as-Everything and Everything-as-Nothing.

It takes as its spine an account of a specific experience that seemed to happen to me, during which there wasn’t very much “Me” around. There have been many names given to these kinds of “non-experiences”, depending on what tradition or viewpoint they are being seen from.

Here let’s call it a meeting with Nothing, that never actually happened.

This book is meant to be read by those who may identify as “spiritual seekers”, those who would never dream of doing so, and everyone in between. These pages make no such distinctions. I have tried to write as much as possible from direct experience, and to avoid using other people’s frameworks or phrases. So you won’t find explicit references to things like “Advaita Vedanta” or “Zen” or “non-duality” 
and so on.

I’ve chosen not to use my name on the cover of this book. This is because who I am does not really matter. The story of me is only a story - it’s no more and no less important or ordinary than that. These pages don’t seek to teach anything. They don’t prescribe anything. I don’t claim here to be any kind of “expert” or “guide” or even to be credible on these matters.

If this can be my story, it could be anyone’s. It could be yours.

You might call this account only a suggestion of a possibility. A kind of report from Nothing, written as evocatively as this writer is able. Some readers might find these words frustrating, or irritating, or even nonsensical. Others might find that the words resonate. They might find with one reading or repeated readings that there can be an inducement of something in the words, beyond the attempt to intellectually understand them.

If you choose to read these pages as a work of fiction, or an imaginative projection, or “thought experiment”, that’s also fine.
Either way, take heart, dear friend: Nothing is really gained or lost.