Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

I asked him about a line of his I recalled reading, something to the effect of: The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything. Elaborating on that passage, Weber said to me, “If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.” Well, I’m not sure it logically follows, but apparently it seems like inexorable logic if you’re in the state Weber is in. He continued, “If you are nothing, instead of just disappearing and becoming a void, you find out that in some strange way—you actually see this, you perceive it this way—that everything is all one thing. This is a cliché, mystical statement, but it really is perceptible: you can deeply sense that everything is all one thing. And somehow, strangely, it’s inside of you.” It didn’t take long for Weber’s comments to get blowback in the discussion forum. Some of the blowback was the kind you’d expect: people finding the paradox at the heart of Weber’s experience inscrutable, if not worse. One student wrote, “ ‘I am nothing means I am everything’ is pretentious twaddle which actually means ‘I am on such a high spiritual plane that you can’t possibly understand me.’ ”