3939. WHAT IT IS TO BE NOTHING. It was perceived that to be nothing signifies to be nothing but evil, for evil is in itself death; wherefore compared to life it is nothing. That the good and the true is everything, is plain, wherefore the evil and the false is nothing. Hence humiliation goes, as it were, to the point of self-annihilation, [coupled] with an internal acknowledgment of the total want of the good and the true in one's self, and that all goodness and truth possessed is of the Lord. It signifies also that in respect to the Grand Man [everyone] is merely a most diminutive particle, - nothing, as it were - for his all and singular things flow in through the Grand Man, so that he is but as a particle of air in comparison with the whole atmosphere, or as a particle of water in respect to the ocean. Since then he is, in comparison to the Grand Man, almost nothing, he is in the truth of faith when be accounts himself as nothing in respect to the [grand] common or general [commune], whatever it be, which is good and true.