Actually, when I give it more thought, I come to realize that In a sense we can experience `Nothing' in an indirect way. `Nothing' is a very interesting phenomenon. It is what I carry around at the back of my head.
When I keep my eyes fixed straight in front of me, and then pay attention to what is happening at the edge of my visual field, I find there the borderline of `Nothing'. Hold your finger directly in front of you at arm's length, then move your finger horizontally toward the side of your head. keeping your eyes fixed directly in front of you, but paying attention to your finger as it approaches the line of your shoulder.
When your finger approaches the extreme edge of your visual field, it becomes dim, shapeless and colorless, until it finally vanishes away. It simply ceases. The extreme edge of our visual fields does not plunge into `blackness', it plunges into colorlessness and shapelessness. It becomes transparent like a pane of glass, but a pane of glass with nothing behind it - infinite transparency.
So we all carry Nothing around with us every day and everywhere we go. It is a key feature of our experience as humans, but one we ignore almost every moment of our lives.
I find it very significant that our visual field plunges off into nothingness. Our minds do not compensate for this lack of sensation by imposing a `cognitive black' to fill the gap. Our vision simply ceases. Before observation. I might be inclined to think that the mind would compensate for this lack of sensation the way an eye, starved for light, induces hallucinatory colors into the visual field. But this does not happen.
I've also heard it often said by non-specialists that `black is the absence of light'. Not true. Black is a color, and, as with all visible (non-hallucinatory) colors, we must have a source of light and a perceiving eye for the color to arise. The blackness we see in caves is a psychological experience - in this case, the eye is imposing a `cognitive black' upon our visual field to compensate for the lack of sensation. People who are born without sight do not go through life with the experience we would call `seeing black'. People born blind go through life with a lack of sensation much more akin to the nothingness we experience at the backs of our own heads.
By paying attention what happens at that area where our visual field leaves off, we can get a dim sort of awareness of what `Nothing' is. This complete lack of sensation is what the universe must `look like' when nobody is looking at it - infinite, ceaseless transparency.
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