Four Ways to Live Over the Void

Cronos (or Chronos, Time) devouring one of his children (in the Void).

   You know. That Void. It popped many decades ago in my poetry and is always under my feet. It's the unknown beneath all knowns, sustaining everything until it doesn’t. I lean back on it without falling when I meditate and let past and future float over my head like wind-blown clouds. Meditation is one of those things, like exercise and a pure diet, that I’m forever tempted not to practice (pricked by a thorn in the flesh) but celebrate doing. It’s a freedom as frightening as it is fulfilling. Richard Rohr calls it “five or twenty minutes of ‘dying,’ of letting go of the small mind.” The void smells of death, black dirt at the bottom of an open grave, but it’s much more. It’s everyday lack of control, moment-to-moment uncertainty. It’s looking into chaos and trembling to know that things unseen ground all seeing. Cynically put, it’s discomfort at not being God. It is the “without form and void” out of which which existence flickers moment by moment.

   Mystics say that by emptying ourselves of self we become one with God—that or see God’s face. In comparison to mundane life, the two are indistinguishable--the distinction a quibble--and either way, it’s a hard slog up Zion’s hill. Our personal selves, our baby egos, totter on the unrailed edge of unknowing, a lip indistinguishable from the void itself in the darkness of mortality. Mystics shout to us over the din of instinctual life, shout from high box seats for us to trust the void, to throw ourselves into it like rockers into a mosh pit. They say invisible hands will fan us up. They call the faceless darkness light and promise joy beyond imagining, but for little ego this seems a siren song. Is this call nothing more, ego fears, than a call to defeat? Ego wants more, in love with the kaleidoscopic phantoms of life, not just its pleasures but its pains, its yammering thoughts and tingling cocoon of flesh. With Dylan Thomas, it begs, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The void beyond the peace that even beginners feel in meditation can be terrifying. We can’t stand it for more than a few minutes. It's an infant's instinctive fear of falling.  

   Ordinary life is a futile struggle to fill the void. I read a review that praised  a paint-by-numbers set because it “passed the time.” Video games—all games perhaps and most theatre, even most work and conversation—do the same, as if time weren’t barreling toward eternity already, rattling at breakneck (all but literally) speed toward the void with no brakes. Recreations are about ignoring time, averting eyes from the cliff we race toward willy-nilly like Wiley Coyote. Christ, how far can I run on thin desert air before I look down and see where I am?

    Blase Pascal, who claimed a vision of God in the void and wrote the Pensees as trumpet call to belief—croyance, whatever that word meant to him—saw the void clearly. He saw its starkness absent a salvific deity, and that vision has stuck with me since I read him in undergraduate Philosophy of Religion. Pascal describes two abysses, the infinitely small and the infinitely large, between which we are “a nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes” (Pensees, sec. 199). We are like prisoners chained in impenetrable ignorance and randomly butchered without knowing why (sec. 434). This is the horror of secular being, as if the Saw films were true images of life. This leads to our addiction to “diversions” as Pascal calls them, to paint-by-numbers sets and a million other distractions: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things” (sec. 133).

    I see four strategies for living over the void (not all of them mutually exclusive), two that deny it and two that accept it. The first and least satisfactory is the one I have already described, entertainment, and another one seems to me suspiciously similar: denying that the void exists. The problem, again, is that little ego is in love with itself and the rubbish on which it enthrones its identity in the middle of a perishing kingdom. It wants that kingdom to last forever. The void denies this, so one solution is to deny the void--not to look away from it, but to look straight at it and say it ain't real. The apparent pit is the door to a paradise where little ego will be cuddled and spoon-fed everlastingly. Hallelujah! This is a common religious position, and to the extent that you believe it (in the usual sense of taking it as fact), then the void vanishes. God’s in his heaven. All’s right with the ego. No Saw. But, if this conviction were indeed robust, no believer could be held at gunpoint. We would celebrate death, welcome it, and hope to die today. But as the song says, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Even the faithful tend to love this world and see nagging evidence that little ego’s kingdom is passing. After all, brain injury and Alzheimer’s can erase ego, and there have been no reliable reports back from the dead (as opposed to the near-dead). Also, it’s hard not to suspect that proposed schemes of eternal bliss might not be eternal or blissful for the sensual ego we love and feed ice cream to.

   Then, there's a third way: happy secularists who look 20/20 at the abyss and accept their four score and ten (a few more with good luck, diet, and exercise) as sufficient and make the most of it. Eat, drink, and check off a bucket list. “Don’t worry, be happy.” This was the view of most in the ancient world--Epicureans and Stoics, and many Jews as well. Job’s reward was sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys, not everlasting life. Reincarnation doesn’t really alter the situation because ego blanks out with each rebirth. If I’m some late Victorian woman reincarnated, she gets no respect from me. Hell, I don’t even know the lady. In whatever sense her soul is mine, it’s no comfort to her crinoline ego and crumbling bones. Even as little ego hangs over the void like Jonathan Edwards’ spider in God’s hand, some folks manage to celebrate ego-life as all there is (get over it) and leave it calmly because there’s no point in bitching about the inevitable.

   In Sartor Resarus, Thomas Carlyle mocks Utilitarian hedonic calculus by noting that, if happiness is a ratio between expectations and reality, we can achieve infinite happiness by expecting nothing. “Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet” (Chapter 9). Expect not to have been born, and one hour is eternity. Even a momentary ego is a gift. This ignores the instinct for survival, but many people do, I think, succeed in inhabiting their egos in the midst of the void and expecting nothing more, content in a world with edges. Eat, drink, and be friendly. One life is enough. Sadly, more than this was dangled before me as a child, and then—through no fault of my dangling parents—it slipped from my grasp.  I can neither distract myself with recreations, believe happy myths, or be content without them.

   A fourth way to live with with the ego-devouring void is to chasten little ego, to shrug off its insatiable hungers and admit its transience and frailty. This differs from the third way, which affirms ego as real—indeed, as the only basis for experiencing reality—and merely gets on with life while it lasts. The fourth way subjugates ego to something larger and more permanent, whether called God, the Tao, Brahman, or Being. Broadly speaking, the third is secular, the fourth religious. Charles Finley writes in Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God, “When we sit in meditation, we take the little child of our ego self off to school, where we must learn to die to our illusions about being dualistically other than God. We must also die to any grandiose delusions that we are God.” 

     Dying to ego—which may be achieved without meditation but seldom without some form of prayer—is a persistent message of Jesus in the gospels, a call to radical unselfishness and universal love. As his standing up to Jewish and Roman authorities demonstrates, this is not about letting other egos push you around, not about becoming a doormat, but rather about resisting even more rashly because you don't worry about consequences to your ego. Jesus was prepared to be crucified. He served a higher Self that he saw as seamlessly connected with all humanity and with the source of Being (the Father). The eastern term for this attitude (adopted by many Christians) is non-attachment—a practice described at length in the Bhagavad Gita as right action that neither claims credit for accomplishments nor worries about outcomes. Identical actions may be performed by a grasping ego (“They have their reward”) or by an realized Self in nonattached presence. The actions may appear the same, but they are qualitatively different.

   There is a paradox here. As body-mind, we cannot avoid acting. Even sitting and “doing nothing” is an action, possibly one with catastrophic consequences. All of our actions emanate through (if not from) ourselves. As the center of all we do, we have a finite obligation and benign desire to nurture and protect ourselves. This subsidence in a physical self (and in the company of others) generates an ego that is good in its proper function. However, nurturing degenerates into greed. Self-protection degenerates into lust for immortality. Ego makes an idol of itself, a false god. Sin in its classic definition of “separation from God” (from infinite being) is not primarily about bad actions, but (as the Sermon on the Mount repeatedly teaches) about overvaluing the finite self. Unless we love the source of being and love our neighbors as ourselves—not as a forced attitude, but as a consequence of letting go of our egos—then actions we call sins are inevitable, along with futile and painful anxiety about outcomes. Religions teach that anxiety about things that ultimately do not matter is a source of sin, selfishness, and suffering. Putting little ego in its place goes a long way toward freeing us from its dread of the void. If we can begin to realize ourselves as something transcending the fear and trophy-gathering of ego, to realize ourselves as something beyond the idol doomed to topple, then dread begins to subside.

   I distinguish this from the second strategy because, though it is religious, it is a discipline of action—a contemplative orthopraxy independent of orthodoxies. It is a molding of mind in meditation, thought, or prayer that does not hinge on belief in the crass sense that water is wet and ducks quack. It works without affirming mythologies and analogical doctrines as fact. Like Zen Buddhism, it requires no god and can be all but doctrine-free. We must believe indeed that it is worthwhile to subsume the ego in something greater—something that may as well be understood as Christ as any other name—that reconciles us to the void as parent but not as dragon.