Avoid the Void

Souls plunge into the Void, but the face that the Void reveals is an enormous confusion: it is an ever-changing flux of constant change—and its extent seems limitless. Making sense of this cosmic storm eventually produces an enclosure. At first it’s nothing more than an enclosing wall—something to keep the chaos out. Let us call this thing a cell, a world within the world. Mind you, it’s a very tough assignment. The wall itself is made of bits and pieces of the confusion—and only after the nature and behavior of each bit is minimally understood can we, the souls, link them together to make that wall. It gives us a momentary sense of place and of control. The wall’s no sooner made than it starts making trouble. It won’t stay in place; it comes apart. It must be constantly renewed. We must fashion better tools to capture and align the few bits and pieces we’d managed to understand. The wall is all.

Now mind you that plunge into the Void was probably something typically human, some kind of reckless self-assertion. We had probably been told that the Void is something to avoid. But we plunged in anyway and discovered the harsher version of that initial, gentle teaching. The harsh one says, Pay me now or pay me later. The descent did not elevate us, as we thought it would. It made us do tedious work. Finds those bits. Coax them together. Build that wall so that we can, if possible, collect our wits enough to look around.

Thus I imagine the origins of chemical civilization which, these days, we refer to as life. The cell is the first attempt to separate ourselves from the flux. Instead of exalting us, it drove us to near despair. Making that first habitation practical and self-sustaining took us, like, forever. And after we had done that job, we could still not see much of anything. So the labors continued, and they continue still.

The odd thing about that Void, of course, is that while ever more of it can be coaxed to reveal itself, after each vast billion-year step, we are still caught in chaos, as it were. We’ve made lots of tools since our cell days. Lots. And now our satellite-born telescopes provide us visions of the Void so massively thick with galaxies and nebulae that dizziness makes us reach for the nearest chair or desk (yet other tools) to hold us steady. Meanwhile we, ourselves, have formed, by our billions-great multitudes, yet another smaller kind of void called collective humanity—which it takes a lifetime vaguely to understand. Yes, we’ve built many other walls since then; call them ideologies, religions, philosophies, and such. They too keep coming apart and letting the original harsh Void come in again as doubts and upheavals, bloodshed and the rest.

Boy oh boy. The labor’s never done. Won’t be done until, at last, we find the wormhole by means of which we can wiggle out of here.

Gnosis Writ Small

Once I became genuinely persuaded that I was neither my body nor that my inner self is a product of a physical process, a radical change in attitude set in. This happened fairly late in my life—but that’s because it takes a long time really to understand what now seems to me an obvious but still very strange fact. Once the real gnosis takes hold, one realizes that something else must explain embodiment, something other than having been created at conception or being some spark that fell into the void. I for one have difficulty seeing this condition as part of a plan, call it divine. The artificiality (the engineered character) of life powerfully suggests to me that some sort of collective effort well below the level of divinity is in place to help us make an escape. Embodiment therefore serves a purpose; and since this purpose isn’t really bliss (this life just isn’t blissful), it must be a rescue effort. Several conclusions follow.

One is that simple knowledge of this fact is probably sufficient to escape. Whatever clouded one’s awareness up to that point where it dawned has been wiped away. No one having a strong awareness of another dimensionality, having seen a full lifetime here, can possibly want to “do it again”; and if the escape genuinely works, thus if the gained knowledge is enough to carry one out of the material range, that person won’t come back again—except on purpose, i.e., voluntarily. Another conclusion is that the “collective effort” must work on reasonably large numbers of people else it’s most deficient. We shouldn’t need earth-shattering satoris, and so on. Awareness of the spiritual reality—and that we belong to that—should be sufficient.

Where that dividing line manifests for different people is hard to pinpoint, but clinging to life would be a kind of negative indicator surely. Those who so cling don’t “instinctively” feel the other dimension. Here language is lossy. We use physical concepts, like visceral, in the gut, heartfelt, etc., to mean the hard sort of internal gnosis, and by hard I simply mean genuinely knowing. That gnosis then changes one’s attitude to life. Those still strongly of the world perceive my stance as negativity; in fact it is just realism. Hardline Buddhism is that stance—and it is incompatible with the conventional belief in life-at-any-cost. Those not yet at that stage can’t understand that the negative attitude is basically well-meaning, indeed benevolent. I don’t want to make life harder for people; I don’t want them to suffer. But they are hurting themselves by blindly living their lives in a sleep.

It’s possible, to be sure, to know all this with unquestioned conviction while yet, at the same time, remaining ignorant of the boundaries of our captivity in this realm. It may well be that extreme degrees of spiritualization are required and that, after death, we may find ourselves still stuck in this dreary dimension and, furthermore, even more limited than we were in our bodies. Then, of course, trying again may seem a perfectly sensible course. But my own sense is that once this feeling is present, it is a species of arrival.

Having Trouble Fitting this Odd Piece

The older I grow, and the more I get used to the strange realities all around me, the more a single aspects of “the puzzle” comes to the fore. It is the purpose of bodies. If we accept the reality of disembodied living beings (angels, immortal souls) then what purpose do bodies serve? No matter how I twist and bend, I cannot but conclude that bodies are machines, ingeniously engineered from chemical components making good use of the elements’ electromechanical properties. I mean all bodies, from single celled living beings on up to the highly complex such as ours.

Materialists have it easy. In their definition life itself is these machines. It is whatever they do, those machines, while they function as they should. A little circular. When they stop functioning, life disappears—because life is that functioning. Now that functioning itself first, eventually always ends. Second, while bodies are still working, their only real purpose is to keep on working. I search in vain to find any meaning in this rigmarole. It has no more meaning then the formation and temporary maintenance of a wave-form in the ocean started by some external cause like wind or gravity. Good explanation for bodies, but meaningless beyond that.

Meaninglessness is not a puzzle. It is just a big fat nothing. The puzzle arises when we contrast bodies and immortality. The problem is as real in the east as in the west. In both realms an immaterial real entity remains after the body gives up. In the east, if its illusions continue, it will be reborn. But it is difficult to imagine that “ignorance” and the resulting “illusion,” supposedly the causes of bodily existence, could have created the intricacies, say, of the blood-clotting cycle when, for hundreds of thousands of years people didn’t even know that it existed, never mind grasping its incredibly complex feedback loops. Maya is not an engineer. In the west we have to believe that an omnipotent creator must have engineered bodies, in the most sophisticated sense by arranging the fundamental aspects of matter at the lowest level, in a less sophisticated sense by imagining divine interventions in created nature. And then, in our case, the immortal soul is super-added, as it were. Why do those immortal souls need a “vehicle” to express themselves, to manifest will, motion, intellect? Why this duality when angels—even fallen angels—don’t need them?

The Gnostics gave all this a negative interpretation—much as the east does (illusion, ignorance). They thought of souls as captured by the Evil One and holding them here in a kind of prison. But, for my part, having at least looked at biology deeply enough to see its magnificent engineering, what I see there is something positive—not always elegant (the blood-clotting cycle is not very sleek)—but not a prison. The body is an enabler.

Our cosmologies are missing something. The piece meant for that hole in the logic doesn’t fit neatly. And using scissors isn’t allowed. Well, comes the time when we shed the chrysalis. Maybe then I’ll get the briefing I’ve not encountered on any lecture agenda as yet.

A Full Sort of Silence

The contemplative life trends towards silence, but that silence isn’t empty. It is full. The analytical approach to anything is to take it apart. But if it can be—taken apart—then it isn’t what we’re seeking, therefore the “Not this, not this” of Hindu religion. Not that the restless self is satisfied. Somebody, surely, knows something beyond a mindless, “No, no, not that.” On to the next teaching, the next guru. But if the teaching is promising at all, the Neti, neti once again appears in some other guise or formulation. The odd thing is that if you do this long enough, you actually learn something, namely that there is knowledge beyond words and an inner capacity, able to grasp that, gradually increases. Communicating that, using words, is hopeless, but the power can be felt. All religious teachings, all schools, all methods, sects, movements, and the like, therefore, are entirely introductory to something that only raw experience actually teaches. But the labor itself, the endless analysis, examination, weighing this, weighing that—the frustrations of the quest—are enormously useful in teaching the unlearnable, namely that Unity, as such, cannot be analyzed but is the very core of the self.