Isolated, the Reactional Self is a nullity. When it is in the state of delusion, it is unaware of its inability to perform any true act of will and, therefore, ‘believes’ in its own world. From this delusion it becomes subject to pleasure and pain as actual facts – being unable to see the compensation that reduces them to null-situations. The idea of nullity in polarity is illustrated in the electrical neutrality of large bodies; however intense may be the local electrostatic fields surrounding the atoms, there is a space-distributed compensation that makes the whole body almost perfectly neutral.
Instead of electrical charge we could also think in terms of movement – if we gather together a collection of randomly moving particles, trillions upon trillions of them, all flying around this way and that like gas molecules in a bell jar, and we add up all the vector units of velocity involved, either positive or negative in direction with respect to the X, Y and Z axes, then the one thing we know for sure is that the calculation is bound to come out as zero – the net velocity of all these frantically jostling particles is always a big fat nothing. Overall, nothing is going anywhere. With the specific example of the gas molecules in the bell-jar this is very obvious – if the bell-jar is sitting there on the laboratory bench then of course the molecules aren’t going anywhere! We could also say that the nullity is like the physical universe, which as Stephen Hawkin says ‘always has a net energy content of precisely zero’. In all these cases we can say that on a local scale there may be an imbalance, but on the larger scale there is never any imbalance whatsoever and this ‘lack of imbalance’ is in the nature of an absolute law, like the law regarding the conservation of energy/mass or the conservation of angular momentum.
– J.G Bennett. The Dramatic Universe
Cosmic Flotsam 