Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 52.

I am your host Noah Rasheda, and today I'm talking about the Sound of Silence.

I left this long awkward pause here at the beginning, hoping to trick you that this whole

episode would be silent.

After all, the Sound of Silence.

The truth is, even if it was, you could still gain a lot of insight and wisdom by listening

just to the Sound of Silence.

So this topic came up because I've been reading through some of the stories in Ticknot

Hans book is nothing something.

It leads questions and Zen answers about life, death, family, friendship, and everything

in between.

That's the title of the book.

And one of the first questions addressed in the book is the question, is nothing something.

The answer that Ticknot Hans gives is that yes, nothing is something.

You have an idea in your head of nothing.

You have an idea in your head of something.

Both are things that can either create suffering or happiness.

This made me think of another quote or teaching by Ticknot Hans, where he says the secret of

Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to

penetrate, to reveal itself.

When I correlate these two ideas of nothing becoming something, or nothing being something,

...