Lawrie Douglas (Lawrie.Douglas@btinternet.com)
Sat, 10 Jan 1998 05:46:30 +0100
Folks,
Here's my contribution to the everything-nothing debate, and the attempt to
define Quality.
First premiss: Nothing does not exist. There's no such thing as nothing.
Whenever we use the term, what we actually have in mind is a relative
absence of something. When we have finished a bottle of wine, we habitually
refer to it as being empty; if someone asked us what was in it, we'd say
nothing. But of course that wouldn't be true; there'd be some dregs left in
the bottom. And even if we dried it out and pumped all the air out, there'd
still be something there.
We can possess a concept marked "nothing", but not the meaning which it
implies. That is entirely virtual. It does not exist; we project its
existence. The same goes for the idea of a perfect circle, say, or infinite
beauty. We can assume the existence of these things, but never actually see
them. The moment we interrogate them, try to locate them, pin them down,
they collapse, fragmenting into individual, limited parts. We can find
relative absences of things, and relative beauties, but never absolutes.
To acknowledge this, is to do away with the problem of trying to define
"everything", and with it that of trying, in the interests of defining
Quality, to isolate it from the common usage of the word. To say that,
"Quality is everything," is not too obvious and vague to be of any worth.
That nothing does not exist means that existence truly EXISTS. (Sorry, write
in capitals, and you start start to sound bonkers, but you can't do italics
in this format.) Existence must exist, for nothing does not. There has
always been something here and always will.
(Big point to spin off from this: those cowardly physicists, who won't dare
to speculate on what existed before the Big Bang, even that there were such
an existence, preferring to let you know, with one of those laughs that
disguises itself as a cough, that, "That's a matter for religion," while
twinkling their eyes to let you know they don't rate the intellectual
credentials of religion in the slightest, and thus manage to sweep the whole
matter under the carpet - they can be out-argued! Science is a mere branch
of philosophy, which therefore outranks it.)
When we say, "Quality is everything," we mean "Everything has Quality," or,
to put it another way, "Life is ALIVE." (There I go again.) In separating
that which truly exists from that which we merely assume to exist, that
virtual reality which we project, we understand that the abstract is only
abstract, and with that, that our ideas of reality do not constitute a world
in themselves, but are taken from, and are a part of, a wider reality, which
is both substantive and dynamic. Existence has to exist; that makes it holy.
There is no higher dimension, no world apart from the one single system of
Existence. To understand this, is to know that when one says, "This is it,"
that this life is all we've got, it is no cause for depression, for there
never were an other world, and so we are deprived nothing. To realise this
is to wake up, to discover that one is on the cutting edge of life.
As for the definition of Quality: The idea of "Quality" is a way of
referring both to existence being a single closed system which is eternally
alive, and to its living aspect in the present moment.
(We could see the first part of the above definition as referring to
Quality's static element, and the latter to its Dynamic.)
Thanks for the welcome. Hope you all had a good Chrimbo. Looking forward to
conversing more,
Richard McNeill Douglas.
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