When I think of the Fool, I think of that which lies beyond thought... the emptiness of all phenomena which is their true nature. Nothing, radical nothing. Not "nothing" as an idea, an abstraction, or as some actual phenomenon which we call nothing. Just nothing.
Lon DuQuette puts it this way in his book,
Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot:
The Fool propounds the ultimate riddle. Creation and the meaning of life are an incomprehensible joke. The Fool is more than God. The Fool is the "nothing" we refer to when we say, "Nothing created God. Nothing is beyond God. Nothing is greater than God." The Fool is perfectly empty-headed, for if there were anything inside, his innocence would be destroyed.
In the
Book of Thoth, Crowley himself says,
The really important feature of this card is that its number should be 0. It represents therefore the Negative above the Tree of Life, the source of all things. It is the Qabalistic Zero. It is the equation of the Universe, the initial and final balance of the opposites; Air, in this card, therefore quintessentially means a vacuum.
There's more than one koan in the Zen tradition which goes something like this:
The Zen Master held up a staff. He said, "Anyone who tells me that this is a staff receives thirty blows. Anyone who tells me that this is not a staff receives thirty blows. Now tell me, what is it?"
Anything you say is already a lie. "Open mouth, already a mistake." The Fool points us to this, the stark nakedness of reality beyond the filters of our concepts of it. The Fool is the ultimate nature of reality, and that nature is beyond form, beyond understanding and beyond description. It can, however, be experienced when the veils of the mind drop away.
I think when the Fool comes up in a reading, it's an invitation to drop all the old baggage and all the old bullshit. Just to throw it all away. To tap in to the freshness of the moment, the innocence of not seeing things through the filter of some preconceived idea or expectations. Things simply are as they are. No more, no less. Period. Fresh. New. Immaculate. All things are always fresh and new, always innocent, always pure and always total. The only problem is that we usually fail to see this.
