"Buddhism continues to peel your reality, layer upon layer, destroying the illusions, the dreams. And just as it happens when you peel an onion, ultimately nothing is left in your hands.

"That nothing is the source of all. Out of that nothing all arises and slowly, slowly disappears back into that nothing. Now physicists are coming very close: they call that nothing 'the black hole' – where matter disappears into black holes, is utterly annihilated, becomes nothing. Now, after black holes, there is talk in scientific circles about white holes, too. Out of white holes, matter arises. It seems black holes and white holes are just two aspects of the same reality. They are like a door: on one side of the door is written 'Entrance'; on the other side of the same door is written 'Exit.'

"When things appear out of the womb of nothingness, the door is called a white hole – white because it gives birth, white because life comes out of it. By calling it white we are appreciating it, we are valuing it. One day everything disappears back into the same door, and then we call it black. We have always called death black; man has always been afraid of blackness, of the dark, of death. But it is the same reality: from one side it is a black hole, from the other side it is a white hole. Buddha calls it shunyata.

"There is every possibility that modern physics will come closer and closer to Buddha. It has to; it has to recognize Buddha's insight into reality, because nobody else ever dared to call nothingness the source of all. How did Buddha stumble upon the fact? He was not a physicist, he was not working into the deepest reality of matter, but he was working into the deepest reality of his own psychology.

"Let me remind you that Buddhism is not metaphysics. Metaphysics is always a concern with the ultimate. Meta means beyond – beyond physics, beyond that which can be seen, beyond the earth, beyond the visible, the tangible, the sensuous. Metaphysics means always the faraway, the distant reality, God.

"Buddhism is basically purely a psychology; it is not concerned with metaphysics."