Early this year, I went through a period of deep introspection. I was trying to resolve any issues I’d left in the background of my life – working through who I was and what that meant for how I moved through the world. I set about the process of identifying baggage I was still carrying, and forgiving both others and myself for everything I still held onto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When that process was complete, I realized I was still holding on to two issues that hadn’t resolved themselves: worries about the future, and what I’d mislabeled as a fear of death. It wasn’t really death I feared. It was cosmic impermanence – the idea that nothing lasts, that everything eventually dissolves into nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I decided to look for answers by trying to understand how reality actually works. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was creating a koan of sorts. I was imagining a generative void – the idea that reality might emerge from nothing itself. I was meditating on a single question: “If nothing becomes, then what does reality look like?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I closed my eyes, letting myself be swallowed into that void. To become nothing. And in an instant, I saw it all – a vision of reality based on nothing becoming. That single moment altered everything about me: my sense of self, my sense of time, and my view of reality itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew I had to understand why that vision had such a profound effect on me. And I knew I had an obligation to share that story once I understood it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s what led me to write both Nothing Becomes<\/a><\/em> and Living in the Moment<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing Becomes<\/em><\/strong> details my search for a way to explain how I was living after that experience. The first part of the journey led me to discover the strong ties to Eastern religions, especially Taoism and Buddhism. I had aligned with Taoist and Buddhist thought simply by reflecting on how reality operates at a fundamental level – without ever having studied those traditions in depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second part of the journey was scientific. My vision wasn’t a mystical vision – I’d been asking the same question subconsciously my entire life: how does reality work at its most fundamental level? This vision was the culmination of a lifetime of rumination. I didn’t have physics training, just a lifelong interest in the subject, but my mind had worked out a rational answer to how nothing becoming could be a basis for reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The remainder of Nothing Becomes<\/em> details my journey chasing down scientific theory after scientific theory that aligned with what I’d already seen, until I arrived at scientists who were extremely close to my vision. What was remarkable was that I was coming to these conclusions before<\/em> having read the science behind them. That convergence – my intuition aligning with both scientific research and ancient Eastern philosophical thought – leads me to believe there’s something fundamentally true in these ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Living in the Moment<\/em><\/strong> is a practical guide to provide others the opportunity to have the same experience I had. I lay out the framework of actions that I took to get to that moment of insight and provide guidelines for living in the moment once all the obstacles to a life of presence have been removed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a book for anyone struggling with overthinking, with mental loops they can’t escape, with the feeling that their brain won’t shut up and just let them live. But it’s especially important for those who yearn for spiritual meaning but reject belief – people who want a transformative experience without the supernatural framework. That’s what I found, and that’s what I’m offering: a path to presence that doesn’t require faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Early this year, I went through a period of deep introspection. I was trying to resolve any issues I’d left in the background of my life – working through who I was and what that meant for how I moved through the world. I set about the process of identifying baggage I was still carrying, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7,16,8],"tags":[15,17,14],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bobhoyng","category-books","category-livinginthemoment","category-nothingbecomes","tag-bobhoyng","tag-livinginthemoment","tag-nothingbecomes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/substratebooks.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}