The Case for Nonsense
Shahid Najeeb
(Presented at a Conference on “Between the Notes: Catastrophe and Creativity”
of the Australian Psychoanalytic Society, 30 August 2025)
"The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning. It belongs, in
literature, to the holy fool and cryptic sprite; in religion, to the visionary or the seer; in
philosophy, to the Sphinx and the Zen master. It is animated not by an objection to
meaning, which it intends and reveres, but by a refusal of the restrictive governing of
meaning by will and logic. For the tools of reason, it substitutes the resources of magic;
against the rigidity of the absolute, it suggests the hypnotic power of the evanescent; for narrative, it offers collage or prism; for conclusion, hypothesis.” Louise Gluck (1)
In Elizabethan England, only the Court Jester could get away with speaking the truth, which he did by deliberately concealing it as witty nonsense. In our modern world, the truth lies hidden in plain sight, which we unwittingly conceal from ourselves, by regarding nonsense as truth and truth as nonsense. The version of kissing frogs till you found a prince that I want to put forward, from Ramana Maharishi’s wisdom, is that we must keep kissing frogs till we discover that every single one of them has always been the prince, standing for the truth, which we seek. Nothing hinders that quest more than the myth of individuality and its attendant sense of self-importance.
THE MYTH OF INDIVIDUALITY
The myth of individuality pervades human consciousness so completely that we rarely pause to examine it. I will examine this myth first psychoanalytically then biologically.
Psychoanalytic Perspectives
Winnicott (2) offered a crucial insight saying, “I once said: 'there is no such thing as an infant' meaning, of course, that wherever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.”. From life's beginning, no individual exists without the maternal care that forms part of that infant's being. Equally, no mother exists without the infant she nurtures. Mother and infant constitute an interconnected, interdependent entity—much like analyst and analysand.
Winnicott’s paradox of solitude further illuminates this point: “Thus the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone when someone else is present.” This “someone else” lacks specific identity – it represents a profound sense of presence. We only feel alone when this sense of presence dissolves into absence. From birth to death, we carry this sense of accompaniment. In every internal dialogue, every story we tell ourselves, someone watches and listens.
Biological Interconnectedness
Consider a white blood cell swimming through the bloodstream. Though apparently separate and independent, it maintains intimate connection with every other cell in the body, responding instantly to threats or changes. Similarly, each bodily organ system—cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous—appears closed and self-sufficient yet interconnects intimately with all others, like threads in a spider's web. Touch one part and everything moves.
Our bodies contain heavy metals from exploding stars. Our organs require Earth's gravitational pull to function. We depend absolutely on oxygen produced through photosynthesis—without it, death would come within minutes. The more we understand, the clearer our total interdependence becomes.
Recent medical research reveals that our microbiome—billions of foreign cellular organisms outnumbering our own cells—sustains and maintains our life. Even our internal immune system interconnects deeply with these external creatures.
If individuality is fiction, then "you and I," "us and them" must also be fictions. They are useful linguistic constructs, but constructs, nonetheless. We are always indivisibly "us" and "we."
Whatever dreams we harbor, whatever achievements we seek, pale before what we already are: the indivisible, miraculous expression of life itself. Not drops in the ocean, but as Rumi observed, the entire ocean in each drop—drops that are remarkably self-aware. When Tennyson says in “Ulysses”, “… little remains, but every hour is saved from that eternal silence …” he is talking about this very hour that we share and are alive to, this brief, but immeasurably precious, interlude between the Great Silence from which we arise, and to which shall soon return. Maybe there are a lot more frogs waiting to be kissed!
I will spend the rest of this paper examining our complex, and largely mysterious, reality that we are such an integral part of. I will do so under three headings, first how we co-create the reality we live in, secondly how we sustain it with our love, such that we can, thirdly, appreciate the truth of our existence.
THE CO-CREATION OF REALITY
Historical Foundations
Descartes' seventeenth-century separation of mind from matter established the notion of reality existing independently from observers. David Hume inadvertently challenged this when observing billiard balls: when one strikes another, we say the first "causes" the second's movement. Hume noted that "causation" represents an addition from our minds, not from the balls' movement itself. This observation woke Kant from his "dogmatic slumber," leading him to explore how we add internal categories to observations. Neither explicitly stated we co-create reality, but this conclusion remains implicit in their formulations.
Spinoza should be noted here but with a slight difference, for rather than co-creation, he equates the creator and the created—a view aligned with the Advait (Non-Dual) perspective discussed later under Truth. Roger Scruton summarises Spinoza's viewpoint: “the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality.”
Independently, Melanie Klein described how internal emotional states colour our perceptions of the external world. Through psychoanalysis, we've come to understand ourselves as co-creators of emotional reality.
Quantum Perspectives
We co-create, not just our internal reality, but also our so-called external reality. For instance, we learn in the world of quantum mechanics, reality exists only as a probability, such that it comes into existence only at the point at which we observe or measure i.e. at a subatomic level we create the reality we observe. Einstein could not accept this arguing it suggested that the moon doesn’t exist, till observed, which is complete nonsense. Yet consensus holds he was wrong. So, at a quantum level, we literally do co-create external reality.
There is a parallel, equally strange, experiential dimension to this. Reality exists as a probability and only comes into being with our awareness—because we exist, so does everything else. This experience of all-encompassing Being is shared by everyone.
Neurological Co-Creation
The area of co-creation that I am particularly interested in, is the neurological one. My reason for this is that all perception of reality is mediated through our brains, however we might conceptualise the relationship of mind to brain. For this I turn to Iain McGilchrist’s work on the two hemispheres. I want to focus on just one tiny dimension of this monumental work, and that is this; we have two very different hemispheres which simultaneously take in everything that is happening around us. But they do so in two very different ways, “the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is.” What he means by this is that the right hemisphere is indiscriminately and constantly taking in the stream of information, leaving nothing out. While the left tries to make sense of it, by leaving out some and focussing on other dimensions, to understand and manipulate it to best advantage. As he puts it, the left allows creatures to distinguish figure from ground to eat. It enables predation. While the right, open to all information, prevents creatures from being eaten, while they are eating.
Implications for Understanding
The implications of this hemispheric difference are enormous. First, we need to understand the constant flow of information that the right hemisphere indiscriminately takes in. Secondly, we need to understand how the left hemisphere makes sense of it by adding and subtracting from this reality. The need for this distinction is heightened by the fact that the world, and we in it, are constantly moving and changing. There is no pause, even for a nanosecond. When the observer and the observed are simultaneously moving and changing, how can anything be understood other than by artificially freezing and modifying it? This is essential, but it means that the world as we understand it, is being constantly corrupted by us and in that way, we co-create all objects in our world, by regarding them as static and definable. All our conceptual and theoretical thinking is based on ideas that by their very nature are clearly defined and enduring. They have been created in the mind by the left hemisphere, and exist only in the mind, not outside it. Only the mind can create the idea of a straight line. There are no straight lines in nature. What remains real is the processes by which we connect and understand reality, the relationship to reality.
This is very economically expressed by McGilchrist, “Reductionism envisages a universe of things – and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’, which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with. That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions.”
This description is parallel to object relations theory, where we regard relationships to be more primary than the objects related. However, it goes much further encompassing all objects, including all our psychoanalytic theories and concepts. They too have been culled from experience, but they are “inanimate” objects, much like guide sticks used to feel our way around, as Bion called them in his Tavistock seminars. It is important to stress these are inanimate objects, graven images if you like, that we imbue with life at our peril. What really matters is the live way we relate to them and use them. The same inanimate car can be used as a status symbol or to display the prowess of the diver as it can be used to carry the family or to get away from it.
Thomas Ogden has astutely observed “a movement currently emergent in psychoanalysis toward a new and generative analytic sensibility”, which involves a shift from epistemology (“knowing and understanding”, Freud and Klein) to ontology (“being and becoming”, Winnicott and Bion). This may be articulated as moving from the “what” of the left hemisphere, to the “how” of the right, from content to experience from the inanimate to the animate.
To summarise, through all this discussion of left and right brain modalities, the point I wish to highlight is that both knowing and the experience of being, are composites that involve a co-mingling and co-creation of what are generally considered discrete and separate entities, self and environment.
This brings us to the experiential of dimension of reality, central to which is love.
LOVE – PATERNAL AND MATERNAL
I wish to examine the complex emotion called love, through an arbitrary division into paternal and maternal forms, which are purely descriptive and functional, that all of us manifest in various proportions at different times. Many women express strong paternal love, just as many men, maternal.
Paternal Love
By paternal love, I mean what is generally covered by the term love. It includes romantic love, love of ice cream or cars or garments or jewellery. It also includes the love of ideas, of country, of ethnicity, of truth, of justice. It has characteristics of being relatively clear, linear and acquisitive, usually prefaced by “my” as in, my love, my beliefs. It corresponds to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, familiar in its idealised and part-object nature.
An important dimension of this love is its passion, frequently paired with violence, in thought, speech or action. Sometimes the violence is conscious and deliberate, serving “truth” or “justice” or simply “tough love”. Sometimes it hangs as an unspecified threat. But more commonly it is just an attitude of superiority or triumph.
The highest manifestation of this kind of love is expressed in the taking of life, the subjects’ or the lives of others.
Maternal Love
The love that I am keen to explore, is much rarer and more complex. Calling it maternal love gives it the connotation I would like it to have. My first description is from Winnicott, who approached the earliest mother-infant experiences with notable insight and sensitivity.
“The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date.”
In contrast to paternal love, there is no pairing with violence implicit or explicit. The mother may hurt and hate, but she doesn’t retaliate.
A second description comes from the Bible, in King Solomon’s judgement about the two women –
“And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spake the woman, whose the living child was, unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.”
Observe how the real mother’s gut yearned for her son, but she was prepared to lose him, rather than allow any harm to come his way. This placing of the interests of the other, before one’s own interests, is such a contrast with our usual preoccupation about our hurt, our rights, our love – the acquisitiveness of paternal love. The other woman expressed paternal love in wanting justice. Notice how we “get” justice. Maternal love gives generously, bringing depth to life and is the essential ingredient in maternal reverie, enabling the transformation of emotions from toxic to non-toxic, much like sunlight sanitises damp darkness. Without this empowerment, reverie would remain mechanical and lifeless.
Intuition is another dimension of maternal love because it encompasses mother and infant as an interconnected unit. The mother intuitively "knows" her infant's experience as though it were an organic extension of herself, a knowledge with clear evolutionary and survival significance. Since male children also experience this form of communication, intuition is not exclusively feminine.
Calling this love "maternal" deliberately includes a women’s cyclical physiology, reflecting the greater solar and lunar cycles of the seasons, the tides, and life's intricately intersecting mega and micro cycles. This leads us to love's profoundest dimension: while paternal love expresses itself most completely through the taking of life, maternal love expresses itself most fully through the giving of life or creation. The intimate nexus between life and maternal love can be expressed in this way - life is the deepest expression of love and equally, love is the deepest expression of life. Nisargadatta Maharaj expresses it with lyric simplicity when he says -
“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing. Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.”
This concept parallels the Sufi notion of “fana,” or complete dissolution of the self in love for God—referred to as “Mahboob” or “Habib” meaning the Beloved. Some Sufis see creation as God’s desire to be known, making every aspect of existence an expression of the Beloved. Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem "Please Call Me by My True Names" also reflects the idea that “Love is knowing I am everything” –
“I am a mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.”
This all-inclusive maternal love allows us to appreciate the marvellous, interconnected, interdependent wholeness of our lives, where at every moment, every blade of grass, every note of birdsong is unique, yet a part of an amazing musical mosaic of life that we are such an integral part of, but which is usually obscured by our self-preoccupations.
Now to the third dimension of reality, truth.
TRUTH
There appear to be two kinds of truth, conventional and absolute.
Conventional Truth
Conventional truth is contained in the mind and is our familiar and common understanding of what is meant by truth. It is conceptual, limited, comparative and located in place and time. I will shortly show why this truth is a misnomer, for it is in fact a lie.
Absolute Truth
Absolute truth is not contained in the mind or space or time. It contains mind, space and time. It is not conceptual and is unlimited and eternal. It includes the sense of awareness or being. But it is being that includes all reality, and it is all reality that includes a sense of being. There are probably many expositions of it, but I will say a few words about just four, which are all equivalent; each description approaching the issue slightly differently to help better understand this eternal truth.
The Tao
The first is called the Tao or Dao, which is generally translated as the Way. It is regarded as the comprehensive guiding principle of existence encompassing the universe, yet it is consistently emphasized that this is not a concept. The Way that can be named or described is not the Tao. An ancient and foundational text, the Tao Te Ching has this to say
“In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the Way one does less every day. One does less and less until one does nothing at all, and when one does nothing at all, there is nothing that is undone.”
The text does not say this, but it is implicit in this description that in the not doing, one no longer separates oneself from the Way, but one becomes the Way and hence there is nothing further to be done.
Tathata (Suchness)
This brings us the second description, Tathata, which comes from Buddhism. “Tath” means “that” so Tathata, means that-ness, generally translated as “suchness”. “That” means this, the whole of reality right here and now, just as it exists and is experienced. Again, if it is seen as something, it becomes an idea and is no longer suchness. The Buddha, generally referred to himself at a Tathagata, which is a compound word meaning “thus come”, “tath-aagat”, and “thus gone”, “tath-gat”. After enlightenment, he ceased to be a separate person, Siddhartha Gotam, but became a personification of “That”, the Buddha, meaning “Awake”. When he said, “Who sees the Dhamma, sees me” he meant that he and the Dhamma, the natural way of the world, are indistinguishable. Further, he maintained he never taught anything new, but merely turned the wheel of the Dhamma, which means he merely set in motion, or re-energised, that which is timeless, without beginning and without end.
William Blake expresses much the same when he says -
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wildflower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Sat (Existence)
The third formulation is based around “Sat”, meaning existence, which is of course synonymous with “Tath” as in the well-known Advait (Non-Dual) Vedantic phrase “Tath tvam asi” literally meaning “you are that”, traditionally translated as “that thou art”, which implies you are the very truth you seek. This is a remarkable formulation for it goes back to the very origins of that most ancient of extant human languages, Sanskrit. The Sanskrit word for truth is Satyam, which is derived from the root Sat = existence. So those ancients had already conceptualised truth, not as something in the mind, but as eternal existence Sat, that includes the mind, Chit, and the experiential dimension of love, which is joy or Ananda. That is why the Vedantic phrasing of what we are calling “tath” or the Tao, is “Sat-Chit-Ananda”. This means that if we experience the truth of existence, it necessarily includes awareness, and the experience of that awareness. The three elements are thus usually pronounced as a single indivisible compound word, Sachidananda. When I wrote this paper, I was unaware that my threefold division mirrored this ancient configuration. How we co-create reality through our minds is awareness. Love is the experiential dimension, and truth is the reality they refer to. So perhaps un-surprisingly what started off as an exploration, turned out to be a mere reiteration. Anything completely new is suspect, for it is likely to be a fabrication, or a lie.
Bion’s O
This brings us to the fourth formulation of eternal truth, which includes its relationship to lies. This is Bion’s formulation, which he calls O. He states “It stands for the absolute truth in and of any object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being; it can be known about, its presence can be recognised and felt, but it cannot be known. It is possible to be at one with it.”” So O is identical to the Tao, to Tath, to Sat. It is something that can be known only by becoming one with it. The Tao or O that can be described, is not the Tao or O. The moment one describes it; it becomes a thought, or a concept that needs a mind to think it. Bion explains “Provisionally, we may consider that the difference between a true thought and a lie consists in the fact that a thinker is logically necessary for the lie but not for the true thought. Nobody needs think the true thought: it awaits the advent of the thinker who achieves significance through the true thought. The lie and its thinker are inseparable. The thinker is of no consequence to the truth … (and the true) thought remains unaltered. … The only thoughts to which a thinker is absolutely essential are lies … ”
The true thought that awaits to be found is O, but once it is thought it becomes a concept. Bion calls it a “lie”, probably for two reasons. The first is to contrast it with the truth and secondly to communicate the necessary falsification, for being a thought, it is a product of the mind and being a product of the mind, it is no longer O.
The consequences of this are enormous. It necessarily means that all thoughts created by the mind, including Bion’s valuable epistemology (the theory of thinking, alpha and beta function, the grid) are all concepts and being concepts of the mind, are lies.
For psychoanalysis to be disruptive is not new. We know how shocking it was for Freud to prove that we are not the masters of our minds or lives but are driven by forces which we neither understand nor have much control over. But this is the ultimate disruption, that all our precious thoughts and fondest beliefs, are at heart fabrications.
How can we recover from this devastation except through a phoenix-like regeneration, that repeatedly arises and renews itself from ashes, that assumes nothing, takes nothing for granted and that dwells in the eternal now? As Blake says -
“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”
The Implications of O
Connected to this formulation about O, is Bion’s injunction that we need to be free from memory, desire and understanding to experience O. Memories are about the past, desires about the future and understanding about concepts. If O is reality as it is, then as just stated, it can be experienced only now, without conceptualisation. There is no other place, time or modality for O to exist.
If O is to be experienced, it requires a mind capable of such reception – not one saturated with my memories, my desires, my fears. It must be an incredibly quiet passive meditative state of mind open enough to take in the “you” of the world. This is the state of mind the Buddhists call “Metta”, which means “loving-kindness” turned receptively and mindfully towards reality or the world just as it exists with all its pain, greed, stupidity, and injustice, not as we would like it to be. This is a tough call, akin to the Stoic "Amour Fati" (love of fate), until we appreciate that this is just how this marvellous life, with all its infinitely intricately interconnected complexity, flows.
Apart from lies, O carries further unsettling implications. We have such enormous confidence in what we know, but if most of our so-called knowledge is at heart false, then could our confidence just be an expression of human arrogance?
More disturbingly, if we know the truth only by becoming it, we become indistinguishable from existence just as it is. We become the Tao. No thought thus means no suffering, for all suffering takes place in the mind because of thinking. Also to become one with existence, means to become eternal, for existence in its totality, is indestructible.
Perhaps these matters are what the Bible addresses when stating God placed Man in Eden, saying he could dwell there eternally in bliss provided he didn't eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge of good and evil. In other words, we can dwell in a state of complete identity with the Tao or Suchness, which is blissful and eternal, so long as we did not eat i.e. presume, we can distinguish good from evil. This belief seems part of our hubris. Can we really distinguish them when we behave with such enormous cruelty and savagery, sincerely believing we are doing good with carefully reasoned justifications?
The Bible states – “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.”
Being eaten from is also a separation of the eater from an inherent whole. To express this in terms of the conference theme, there is this moment, between the eating and not eating, between the notes, between words, when we can move either towards separation from our basic unity, which is catastrophic (“thou shalt surely die”), as the horrors of the twentieth century have shown us, or we can move towards acceptance of that unity, through acts of loving union (Maitri/Metta), which is the essence of all creativity or life.
CONCLUSIONS
For descriptive purposes, I have talked about three different dimensions of reality. I wish to emphasise that reality has no parts or divisions. It is just as it is, right here, complete, perfect and eternal. Dividing reality into separate parts and believing those divisions, creates confusion and suffering, leading us to see this one truth as imaginary or nonsensical. I have tried to make the case for this so-called nonsense, to show that it is the only truth there is.
Inherent in this argument for truth, is the argument for life, which necessarily contains death. Violence in all its forms, subtle and gross, are expressions of death. Our basic human problem is not evil, as most systems suggest, which usually entails some form of remedial violence, but ignorance (avidya/avijja) of the truth, which is always hopeful, reaching towards enlightenment or life.
In terms of this paper, there is a natural clustering of right brain, maternal love and truth because they all point to that essential unity. Likewise, there is a clustering of left brain, paternal love and lies, which tend to fragment that unity, often with great clarity, eloquence and conviction that the left brain and paternal love excel at.
Maternal love and truth are never forceful. They are always quiet and await discovery. Lies and violence perpetuate themselves in loud, insistent, retributive, mindless, cycles of death. Truth and love on the other hand, lead to quiet transformation and being expressions of life, to an ever-widening growth of mind, expressed as reparation, creativity, generosity, and compassion, till we can feel that “This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body the Buddha.”
I have talked far too much and said too many complicated things, so I conclude with a very quiet and simple Urdu verse that probably says as much as all my words –
“From my wordless eyes these fragments
If understood, are tears. If not, just water.” (or nonsense).