rectification of zero

A vulgar variant of concept stealing, prevalent among avowed mystics and irrationalists, is a fallacy I call the Rectification of the Zero. It consists of regarding "nothing" as a "thing", as a special, different kind of existent. This fallacy breeds such symptoms as the notion that presence and absence, or being and non-being, are metaphysical forces of equal power, and that being is the absence of non-being.

Ayn Rand

"Genuine utterances about the nothing must always remain unusual. It cannot be made common. It dissolves when it is placed in the cheap acid of mere logical acumen."

Heidegger

I would like to know more about this theory that you despise. I have spent a lot of time thinking about nothing, (if you can believe that that is even possible). Zero, the void, has played a very prominent role in my sculpture, and much of my painting. I have come to see it as not only pertainent to my own life on an emotional and even physical level (mortality, sexuality...) but an area that requires redress in our society. People will do anything to avoid the void, or to try to fill it. I'm thinking in particular of rampant consumerism and the drowning of our senses in mass media, but the list is tireless. Why is it not reasonable to think of zero as a thing? If we see it as a thing, we can face it.

The practice of meditation by avowed mystics leads to an alternative consciousness which does not contradict normal, rational, thought, (like your law of causality for example), but it frees one from the stress of being locked into that mentality, and from the fear of zero which haunts us. Free your mind and the rest will follow.