The Infinite Potential of Nothingness

Pluripotent cells and the nature of reality

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We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.

— Rumi

It was in my first graduate level Neuroscience class on cellular and molecular neurobiology that I learned about pluripotency. Little would I know that nearly thirty years later that notion would contain my deepest understanding of the nature of reality, God, and us. We were learning about stem cells. I knew this was a new (at that time) treatment program that held hope for many diseases, but I didn’t have any idea what a stem cell was.

In this amazing class I was taught that stem cells have the capacity to be “pluripotent’, meaning they are at their stage in development where, given the milieu they are inserted into, they can become whatever type of cell is needed. I pictured these cells, undifferentiated, not yet knowing who they are or what they are going to become, being placed into an environment, and somehow slowly morphing themselves into exactly the type of cell needed to enhance the whole and ultimately cure the organism.

From Biology to Being

Now what I know is that we are the same, that we are pluripotent and have the capacity to become the most useful and healing members of our collective body. The way I came to understand this required a journey through quantum physics, Kabbalistic philosophy, and spirituality. Quantum physics points to an extraordinarily incomprehensible level of reality, which I”m coming to believe may be the point of it, as it requires a quantum leap for us to let go of our staid conceptualizations of how the world works and shake us out of the constraints of standard scientific materialism.

Many quantum physicists now agree that lying at the “bottom” of reality is something referred to as the “zero-point field”. The zero-point field is one of the strangest consequences of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It is what is left when everything is stripped away, every particle, every atom, all heat, all light, every thing and every energy. What is extremely interesting about this field is that what is left is not empty. It fluctuates and “jitters”, never at rest and full of potentiality. It is the underlying reality of all that is. Everything emerges from it, but it is kind of “nothing.” It is an empty fullness.

Why does this field jitter and create “things” and not remain empty? We normally consider the uncertainty principle to describe the fact that we can’t determine both the momentum and the position of particles simultaneously. But the uncertainty principle is more general. It also applies to energy and time (E and t). So with respect to the zero point field, according to the uncertainty principle we can’t ever discover that it has zero energy. And that is because to do so would be to imply that it’s true at every moment in time, since zero energy cannot ever fluctuate.

That would mean we could know its energy perfectly for all time, making the uncertainty in energy (ΔE) = 0. But the uncertainty equation says if ΔE = 0, then Δt must be infinite. We would have to observe the zero point field for an infinite amount of time to confirm that its energy never wavers, which is impossible. For this reason, according to the uncertainty principle, there will always be movement even in the emptiest of states.

The Overflowing Nothing

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Kabbalah, an ancient, extraordinarily beautiful and intricate form of Jewish mystical thought, was not something I had ever encountered in my life until I was tasked with writing an essay on this forum on the brilliant and extremely unique Kabbalist, Abraham Abulafia. It was through a deep dive into his world that I learned about the notion of Ein Sof. I came to see the correspondence between Ein Sof and the other forms of pluripotency and began to suspect that this was a deep truth about our reality. Ein Sof literally means “without end” or “the Infinite.”

It refers to the utterly unknowable, limitless divine essence of God before any act of creation or manifestation. Ein Sof is beyond comprehension, thought, or attributes. It is the source from which all creation emanates. Prior to manifesting, it is absolute potentiality. One of the most profound and difficult questions in cosmology is why is there something rather than nothing? The Kabbalists grappled with this question. Why did the Ein Sof, the formless, infinite, no-thing, a perfect state of wholeness, ever become something?

Kabbalah has a beautiful description of the reasons Ein Sof stirred itself out of its undifferentiated state. Ein Sof, wishing to share its hidden radiance, drew itself back in a great breath, tzimtzum, making space for something other than itself to arise. This way, a relationship with something outside of itself could be had. This way, love could have a beloved. Creation blossomed as a way for the Infinite to behold itself reflected in countless mirrors.

The uncountable worlds were born so that the One might be known through the many, and so that beings might journey from separation back to Source, each act of return adding something precious to the perfection from which they came. In this unfolding, even the deepest difficulties have a purpose, for through brokenness and mending, the light becomes brighter.

The Kabbahlists have told us an important quality about Ein Sof: that “it is the nature of the Good to bestow goodness.” But isn’t this a contradiction? How does something undifferentiated and with no attributes hold the attribute of goodness? We can find traces of an answer to this in other mystical sources. In order to explain why something emerged from nothing, they claimed that the Infinite, being the epitome of fullness itself, overflows into being. I love this explanation. It is just a natural quality of something “full” to overflow.

Like the big bang. The infinitely dense, infinitely small singularity at the start of the universe was so full it couldn’t help but overflow into being. So Ein Sof does not choose to create, in the human sense. Rather it emanates, as light from the sun or fragrance from a rose. So while Ein Sof is beyond qualities, the first trace of its emergence, Keter, the highest sefirah (sphere), is associated with Divine Will, or Desire to Give, or Infinite Compassion. Such paradox, but somehow it feels right. The nothing which is Ein Sof is an overflowing will towards relationship and love. Perhaps Kabbalah gives us the why and quantum physics gives us the how.

Touching the Void

When I began to meditate many years ago, I unexpectedly became “nothing.” I lost myself. I had never experienced anything so shocking, or so alien, or so astonishing, in my life. I was in an immense spaciousness that felt like a “place” but with no coordinates. Time stood still. Nothing happened. But it was the most profound nothingness imaginable. And when I emerged I was changed. What I didn’t know then is that many spiritual traditions refer to this “place”.

Across spiritual traditions, the deepest reality is often described as a vast, formless ground, called the void, emptiness, ground of being, Brahman, or Wuji. In Buddhism, śūnyatā (emptiness) means that nothing has a fixed, separate essence; everything arises interdependently within a boundless openness. Hindu and Advaita teachers call this same empty ground Brahman or pure awareness, not empty in a barren sense but overflowing with potential. Taoists speak of Wuji, the undifferentiated source from which yin and yang emerge. Mystics in the West describe it as the ground of being or divine nothingness. Meditatively, it may be experienced as samadhi, a still, luminous state beyond thought. This is likely what I experienced that fateful day. Though the words differ, all point to the same ineffable reality: a silent fullness that underlies and gives birth to all things. The pluripotent underpinning that is at the core our true selves and everything else.

And today, in a spark of synchronicity I read these words in a beautiful little book called “The Black Hole Survival Guide” written by the physicist Janna Levin. “Black holes are nothing. Black holes are special because there’s nothing there. There’s no thing there”. And still, everything is there. This prompted me to read more about black holes. What I discovered was that at the singularity within the black hole, density and curvature become infinite, and therefore it becomes “no-thing”, Yet, paradoxically, black holes contain the most information of any object in the universe. That’s why some physicists call a black hole the ultimate storage device of the universe. Black holes also hold everything within their nothingness. Pluripotency seems to permeate our reality in diverse and surprising ways.

When we touch into the void, into the pure potentiality, we have the capacity to become pluripotent. To tap into the infinite information at the center of all that is gives us infinite capacity. When we touch there we find out we are capable of becoming much more than we thought possible. And somehow when we touch there there is a deep experience of goodness, joy, and love. Why is love at the center of this nothingness? Many have found this to be true. It’s worth a shot to go there and explore. And just like the pluripotent stem cell holds within itself all information about the countless numbers of types of cell it will be asked to become, perhaps we are the same. What do you want to become?