"...you can't have something without nothing."
— Alan Watts
This line spoke to me, embedded within a longer Wattsian spiel on nothingness. Talk about nothingness is, to my mind, extremely volatile (in the chemical sense) — it tend to evaporate into prattle. This condition of instability seems inevitable with regard to any riff on matters of a philosophical/religious/psychological/spiritual nature*.
Expressions of such matters in terms other than those of a question, an aphorism, a koan or a parable tends to be asking for trouble. Woe unto he or she whom fools** believe has actually explained something.
"You can't have something without nothing" works as an aphorism and a koan. It speaks volumes beyond the boundaries of language.
*At first I felt inclined to list these as a series, separated by commas. Then I realized that writing them that way would imply an arbitrary compartmentalization that does not exist in actual human experience.
**Fools: people looking for and satisfied with easy and/or finite explanations.
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