Do you like to think? When I say, “think,” I don’t mean playing chess, reading a book, or solving a crossword puzzle. I mean rather, the type of thinking that led to the ancient Greek Atomists discovering the atom. To further clarify, a “yes” answer to the above question precludes the fact that you sit or lie alone without any distractions and contemplate a single idea; contemplation so intense, it could be said to be meditation.
If you said, “yes,” have you ever tried to contemplate oblivion? Oblivion, in the sense that nothing has ever existed including the potential for anything to ever exist in the future (there is no future, or past, or prestent, for that matter). This is something I began meditating on around the age of sixteen and return to, from time to time. Yet, after seventeen years, I am not certain that it is possible. As a matter of fact, my failure to fully understand the concept has led me to believe that it is a physical limit of the human brain’s capacity to fully understand a world in which it does not, or has never existed.
Sure, I can understand and work with the concept of oblivion, but that is far off from true understanding. If one wishes to undertake this exercise, yet has not sat in deliberate thought before, then they may not see this distinction. They may declare success after having grasped the concept only and this would be premature. The difference between concept and understanding is similar to the lay person who can work with relativity and even discuss it intelligently, but who does not truly understand it as in Einstein’s own mind?
I think that ability to distiguish the differneces between conceptual understanding and true understanding is an acquired skill. When true understanding has been reached, the developed intuition simply knows it is right.
Primers to cultivate this skill would be trying to imagine one’s self in the “shoes” of a person very different from themselves or someone who lived in another time. Soon, the feeling of “rightness” will come and will be commit itted to one’s neural muscle-memory. If this sounds arrogant of me, it is only because I have failed to reach a true understanding of oblivion in my own exercises, and only wish to rationalize my personal short-comings.
If you are interested in contemplating oblivion, you can either do it your own way, or try it the way I do. Here is my method:
This is an inherently visual process. You should not try to progress to the next step without having fully accepted the current state and found the “rightness”.
Contemplating Oblivion–as if it always was and always will be:
1. Acquire solitude and comfort (not so much comfort that you’ll fall asleep)
2. Begin my visualizing the earth as it is today
3. Remove civilization
4. Remove intelligent life
5. Remove all life (plant and animal….you should have accepted Earth as lifeless a ball of dust…remember, you have never been born nor has anyone else.)
6. Remove Earth (Your vantage point is now the solar system—I’m sorry if this screws up the orbits of the planets for some of you, but don’t worry…skip to the next step if this is the case)
7. Remove the solar system.
8. Remove ALL planets
9. Remove ALL stars
10. Remove all things that populate outer space. (What is left? Black? White?)
11. Remove the blackness of space. (What is left? White?)
12. Remove the assumed whiteness that remains as a space-holder for the blackness.
13. Remove the space.
14. Remove the potential for anything to exist and any point in time, ever.
15. Remove time.
16. There is nothing. There has never been anything. There never will be anything.
17. Remove the assumed supreme being.
18. Nothing.
19. Nothing.

Could you do it? What did you learn. What new ideas did you have?