@neologist,
Nothingness, like emptiness--or Buddhism's sunyatta-- is not something we can talk about very effectively. I sometimes think that the great metaphysical question is why is there something rather than nothing? Silly, I know, but it does seem, to me at least, that the greatest trait of Reality is EXISTENCE. But existence in this sense is not of something in the sense of some "thing". There are no things, only processes. Everything is becoming (something else) in Heraclitis' and Nietzsche's sense.
What if we could extract--actually, not just imaginatively--qualities or properties from things, say the roundness, redness, tartness--and all other imaginable qualities from an apple. What would we have left, the apple's "thing-ness?" That, to me, points to the absurdity of the notion of thing. At most the term points to a cluster of properties.
Reality from this perspective is the grand scheme of processes. It has no real things; it is empty, but it is where everyTHING happens. My last sentence shows how absurd it is to talk about nothingness. Gasp!
