Now, I want to get down to the simplest possible nitty-gritty of what we’ve been talking about in a very easy way, to ask ourselves the question, Quite fundamentally, what’s all the trouble about? In other words, what is your state of mind when you contemplate the possibility of everything becoming nothing? Alright, so the universe is a transitory system—like a bubble, like smoke, like foam on the water—and so, how easy! Just go along with it; dissolve.

So what’s the problem? Why don’t we want to give up? What do we think we are going to get by holding on, and by resisting the dissolution? Now, I’m not saying, at the moment, that I’m a sort of preacher advocating giving up. What I’m interested in for you to feel is: what do you really feel like inside at the prospect of there being nothing; of this whole thing being a bubble that dissolves?

You see—about death, the reality of approaching death—people are apt to feel chilly, cold, lonely, scared, because it’s an unknown. The most frightening thing about death is there might be something beyond it and you don’t know what it is. You remember, facing the world as a child—or at any time—the world is full of threats. Mostly from other people. And there are monsters. There are all sorts of things which scare you, but beyond every monster is death. Dissolution is the end of it all. And by and large, the art of government is to fill that void beyond death with threats of a rather unspecified nature so that we can rule people by saying, If you don’t do as I tell you, I’ll kill you. Or you’ll kill yourself. And so long as we can be scared of that, and so long as we can be made to think of death as a bad thing, then we can be ruled.

That is why no government likes mystics. Because if we define the mystic as the person who is no longer scared of death—because the mystic is, in the simplest possible language, the person who understands that you have to have nothing to have something. So you can’t fundamentally scare the mystic with death because, say, well, what end can it all come to? What’s all the trouble about? The most it can come to is nothing. I mean, there may be some troubles on the way of resisting this; basically resisting it. I mean, as you might say, the cells in your body resist their dissolution. And so in this resistance there’s an experience called pain, which we’ve been discussing. But beyond pain is annihilation—or so it seems, anyway.

What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? Nobody can think about it. But what is that state when you are teased out of thought? See, get with it: going to sleep and never waking up. This is not—as you would fantasize it—a state of being in the dark forever. It is not like being buried alive, because then there is an experience of darkness. Now, I remember a little while ago having at one of my seminars a girl who was born blind, and I had the most interesting discussion with her because she doesn’t know what darkness is. The word is absolutely meaningless to her because she’s never seen light.

Now so, when you really think about nothingness, it becomes like—what I’ve often referred to—is how your head looks to your eyes. And behind the eyes you don’t see darkness, do you? Right now. You’re not aware of a contrast of light here and black there. Behind the visual field, this way, you can’t see darkness; there is simply nothing conceivable at all. Neither darkness nor light, see? Alright, so: might one venture to say, almost, that that area of blankness we call ‘death’ is what lies behind the eyes? In other words, it is what we can’t think about that’s what’s watching.

In other words, the farthest we can go in thinking about nothing, you see—we get to the root of the matter. Let me put this in another way. The world is form. Now, you cannot look for the origin of form in form, because what you would get then would be a universe where you couldn’t make out any form at all because there was so much of it. It would be like writing a letter on top of a newspaper, and then putting a picture over that, and then doing something else until there wasn’t a single square millimeter of paper left of blank paper. Nobody could read anything. But one can read, one can see form, one can see the world, simply because there’s always emptiness behind it.

So you see, in this way, emptiness being the mother of form. And you can always say yes, only the form is there; that’s all that’s real. But that is only saying it is all that is figure. What about background? It always has to be there.