Technically speaking, there are no "things". There are only events. All material entities we perceive or of which we are aware - these are all temporary coalescences of smaller entities, atoms and matter. They are not eternal. They too must pass.
We tend to think in terms of "things" in the world but the reality is in many ways far more a matter of "events" or "happenings". Distinct material entities or objects are only distinct in an illusory manner. All things must pass.
The theory of "Tabula Rasa" is one in which we are all at birth considered to be empty potentialities, literally blank slates into which an empirical experience of the world will inscribe and layer knowledge and intellect into our minds. There is something beautiful in the concept of a purity of mind unsullied by the world in all it's inevitable corruption and polluted squalor.
It is perhaps the most beautiful minds who manage or strive to keep something of this elemental innocence even while learning, growing and creatively engaging with the world. There is something in a creative thought or action which retains and in some way even generates this "blankness" or "emptiness" which we we are so quick to exchange for the worldly glitz and glamour of things, differentiations, possessions, attachments and mundane repetitions.
A truly creative mind may reach so far back into it's own pre-linguistic past that in it's activity it touches that part of all us in which we recognise an indescribable generative beauty. Acts of creative genius are like the unborn children of our future - they represent in themselves the infinitely creative void of our own potential and we can rarely fail to recognise their power.
If we were to raise the stakes a little and consider a spiritual "blank slate" we may arrive at a place quite unexpected. Consider the 14th Century Christian mystical text "The Cloud of Unknowing". In this book we find that rather than additively or cumulatively approximating towards knowledge or experience of God, we might (and in contradistinction to the contemporary trend to self-improvement through notional growth and augmentation) diminish our thoughts, peel away our unnecessary worldly accoutrements until all that we are left with is our "naked intent" or "blind love" of God. We find here that the idea is more or less of removing everything in your mind that is not God until all that one is left with is God; all that remains is our knowledge or experience of God.
Like the innocence and purity a child at birth, our spiritual purity and existence (however one may choose to interpret the nature or significance of such a thing) is always already there from the start and is merely shrouded by the myriad narratives and mythologies we fabricate around it. We are all born essentially intellectually and spiritually free. If the ways we may each individually seek to return to our source may at times differ this is nowhere near as important as the fact that whatever way we choose to understand or traverse this path - we are all travelling towards the same goal.
