Have you ever thought about, what is nothing? If you did, did it make your head hurt?

by miseryloveselders 29 Replies latest jw friends

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  miseryloveselders

  As a born in JW, I've always believed that Jehovah had no beginning per say. He's always been there, and always will be. At the same time I've had the house and watch having a creator argument stamped within my brain for use against evolutionists. Some days its difficult rationalising God's existance as having always been, with everything else needing to be created by Him. Yeah I capitalized the H, Bohm. Sorry.

  Have you ever thought about nothing? What is your definition of nothing. Would it be immense darkness, or would it be white space like you see on your empty post before you actually type anything? When I try to think about what is nothing, my head begins to hurt. Its as if I'm doing something I ought not.

  What is nothing?
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  superpunk

  You rang?

  I remember trying to imagine infinity before (as in god with no beginning or end, and how that would be like in the New System) and it kept me awake some. My wife said the thought of never dying used to make her physically ill. We're the lucky ones, though, we get to die. :)
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  The Finger

  I don't think we can comprehend nothing just as "it is impossible to conceive .. the process of division carried on to infinity" (Mansel.)
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  journey-on

  I think of it as "no thing". Just like consciousness or thoughts, they don't exist in space or place and are limitless and infinite.
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  Franklin Massey

  Totally blows my mind and I love it. Greek spiritual thinkers and the Vedics used to meditate on what God is until they could process no more. The goal was to get to that big, empty, undefinable place where your mind is blown wide open. That point of acknowledgment of not knowing was where they said we are closest to God. After reading about this practice of meditational discipline, and trying it for myself, I've never been able to go back to the JW definition of God. Come to think of it, I can't land on any defintion of God. It's a wonderful feeling.
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  snowbird

  Thinking about eternity and infinity makes my head hurt, also.

  It is my belief that, in the distant past, something was lost that we can, on our own, never recover.

  Syl
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  brotherdan

  Some days its difficult rationalising God's existance as having always been, with everything else needing to be created by Him.

  Eternity is beyond our comprehension. And that isn't just a theist argument. Even atheists are hard pressed to discuss eternity. They shy away from talking about "The Beginning" because it naturally turns into a discussion of how nothing can create something. Or how an effect can come without a cause.

  The most reasonable conclusion, IMO, is that there MUST be a higher intelligence. I think that is less a leap of faith than saying that "nothing caused something".

  Oh and silly superpunk! That is Gmork! He represents the Nothing. Kinda like the GB represent...NOTHING.
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  tec

  I can grasp the concept of nothing, and the concept of eternal/infinite... as in 'get a sense' of it, without fully understanding it. I can understand 'without end' far easier than I can understand 'without beginning/always having been'. But I don't dwell on these things, or my head probably would start to hurt :)

  It is hard to understand something that we have never actually experienced (and no one has ever experienced nothing, because, well...it's nothing. You can't experience 'nothing'.)

  Tammy
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  brotherdan

  misery, that argument about eternity is also what I bring up when speaking of the Trinity and the nature of God. The Watchtower says that because we can't COMPLETELY understand the Trinity then it CAN'T be correct. That just isn't true. Just because you don't understand something fully, that doesn't mean that it's not true. I can't wrap my head around eternity, but it must be true either within the physical universe (like atheists claim)or outside time and space, like God.
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  tec

  Oh... and to answer your other question, if I do try to see what nothingness would be, then I picture darkness - as in void of light.

  Tammy