What is nothingness?
In my understanding which is very subjective, nothingness is the Source of all there is...we the creation from the nothingness are like peas in the soup, so to speak, nothingness is the soup, to put it simple!
Nothingness is that space where thoughts and creation are born…
Your thoughts are created in the 'nothingness' or space between thoughts - I think!
Well, the way I learned (I'm Jewish) was that there is basically an emotionless, senseless utter void that you plunge into immediately upon death. And that's where you stay until the Messianic era. But since it is a complete void, there is no real passing of time, so your stay there seemes instantaneous.
I can never imagine nothing, when I do I just think of blackness.
Nothingness is what fills the gaps between matter and what spans the distance between stars.
I was thinking about this last night, because my husband and I were talking about the christian problem with death. I noticed that when I encounter a christian who probably isn't used to talking to atheists, the first thing he invariably says is, "you're an atheist? Well, where do we go when we die? Answer that one, big man!" He thinks he has a trump card, because he cannot conceive of death. Getting deeper into the belief, he cannot picture nothingness, and that bothers him.
The truth is, he can't picture nothingness, and neither can anyone else. The word "nothingness" is a problem, because it implies a noun, which implies existence. The individuals above have made nothing into something. You just can't do that! Nothing doesn't exist. You can't float around in nothing. The last guy, who said "nothingness is what spans the distance between stars" is wrong. It's called space. It is actually something. A vacuum, a distance. Stop thinking that nothing is like space!
I was like these folks. I thought of death, and I had an image of a person floating around in blackness. Imagine an astronaut, like in 2001 a Space Odyssey, flung into space, without being pulled apart by the vacuum, floating around, limp. I also thought that somehow you might wake up and death becomes a hell of lying inside a coffin for all eternity, with nothing to do but sleep. Death's eternity is boredom.
But none of this is nothing. I understand why people relate it to death, but here's my take on it. Neither you or I can ever be dead, because it's impossible to be dead. There is no more I in death. It is also impossible for something to not exist, because there is no something in nothing. So when they ask, "why something rather than nothing?" I answer, "because there is no other possibility. No other choice. Existence has no opposite, because it is the first, the prime, the irreducible.
Once again, the religious have it backwards. It is not I who believes in nothing. They do.