I just came across this blog post that I found really interesting. In the Tarot Classroom, we discuss numerology in relation to the cards. For the zero, I found a lot of what I had to say were things like “emptiness” and “lack” and “hunger.” But I can finally understand a little bit more about how zero is more than just “something missing.”

I was born and raised Catholic, but some of the tenets of Buddhism make sense to me and I’m reading a lot of things about how to reconcile my lifelong faith with these new ideas. This is the blog of a woman named Debbie who is in a similar situation, but further along the path.

Here’s a snippet from the entry…

From the Heart Sutra, we learn that “form is emptiness; emptiness is form”.  The sanskrit for the word “emptiness” is “sunyata.”  Now, anyone reading on Buddhism comes across this concept quite early on. I think that my experience of this initial encounter with the concept of emptiness was probably similar to most who come to it with a western mindset.  My experience of emptiness had to do with being void,  nothingness, darkness, coldness, alienation, ungrowing and non-living.  This experience I had of emptiness fed into my nihilistic tendencies.

Then I was reading David Loy’s Lack and Transendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism and I came across a discussion of the translation of the word “sunyata.” Loy states that the the meaning of the word “sunya,” and its substantive form sunyata, seems to derive from the root “su” which means “to be swollen,” like a hollow balloon, but also like a pregnant woman.  He suggests that the English translation of “emptiness” “be supplemented with the notion of “pregnant with possibilities.””  “…it is only because everything is sunya that any change, including spiritual transformation, is possible.” (pp 88-89)

I love that. The roundness of 0 IS like the roundness of a pregnant belly… pregnant with possibilities. The Fool setting out on a journey, where anything is possible. Yes. That makes sense to me.