Our Western cultural conversation, as invented by Plato, is made up of a dialectic between unity and diversity. Plato had thought to harmonize the unchangeableness of Parmenides with the constant change of the thinker Heraclitus. He invented this universe in which we have, up until now, been happily living. Unfortunately, the diversity/progressive side of this conversation has now destroyed whatever unity we could ever hope to have. The universe is kaput.

How this came to be as it is, and what we can do to create a new cultural conversation that stands outside of Plato’s duality, is the purpose of this book.

The first section lays out the facts of the case regarding the science of nothing. Science can do nothing to help us solve this problem, since science itself is in a crisis. Our cosmos started from nothing 13.74 billion years ago, and there is no matter as such, but only a conscious rational mind that is the matrix of all matter. And there is no infinity—as much as astrophysicists like to dream about an infinite multiverse as the source of our own cosmos. No one knows what a number is—we have known this for a 100 years, but scientists still act on the assumption that numbers are reality. They would desperately like to dismiss the nothing, as Martin Heidegger would say, “with a Lordly wave of the hand”.

Our crisis is all due to a trick that was played on Parmenides, and which has become the central pivot of our problem: Persephone forbade us to say “Nothing”.

Though Plato suspected that he might have been wrong in so doing, he excluded “the nothing” from our Western logos. Instead of a trinity of being, becoming, and non-being, we ended up inside of this inherently unstable universe. Becoming has now destroyed being—nothing remains.