ZERO: If completeness is taken away from completeness, Only completeness remains

Pujya in Sanskrit, or Zero, means blankness or emptiness. In Indian philosophy renouncing the material world and surrendering the ego gives the individual access to eternity, to collective consciousness, a kind of complete and in that sense, full, nothingness. Such philosophical hypotheses on the nature of existence lead to the concept of zero as a mathematical reality, in the 5th century AD, in Sanskrit, Chandra Sutra and Brahma Phuta Siddhanta. 

Before Fibonacci’s introduction of zero to the West, which he had learned of from Arab traders around 1200AD, who presumably picked it up from travelling to the Indian Subcontinent neither the Romans or the Egyptians had any symbol for the concept. Babylonians had a mark for nothingness but treated it primarily as punctuation. In the Greek culture the concept was pretty much overlooked.

Mathematicians still baffle over the concept of Zero – what happens to a non-zero number if you divide it by zero? The answer is not the non-zero number, it is not infinity and it is not not zero but it isn’t quite zero either! In other words you can not differentiate from nothingness and infinity. Existentially, this means you can not take away from life’s essence and neither can you add to it. This underpins the concept of emptiness as completeness, and is an essential part of understanding Yogic philosophy.

What does this mean for you?