What Is God? nothingness and Nothingness

I’ve been very informed by comparative mystical literature, in particular a medieval mystic named Meister Eckhart. I think that what most people think of as God is created through worship and ritual and belief in scripture. It’s my belief that God is much more nondual, and not some other. That subject-object division just collapses. It doesn’t even make sense anymore to talk about divinity and humanity. It’s all one. Or, at lease, it’s not two-however, you want to talk about it.

 The joke is that mystics and nihilists both talk about nothing; one of them just capitalizes it. I capitalize it, because I think Nothingness is also a kind of presence, one that is extremely positive and powerful and not at all nihilistic. The tragedy of a lot of modern thought is that it has essentially deconstructed, correctly, our belief systems, but then it’s literally left us with nothing, lowercase n.

--Jeffry J. Kripal, The Sun magazine October 2025 interview, in answer to the question, “What is God?”