The Void and I: A Story About Everything
Scene one: I don’t believe in God, I think to myself …Numbers make sense to me. God doesn’t make any sense.
Thus begins a longish essay by Zat Rana. I marvel at the parallel paths in our writing and experience. He reminds me of me, never mind the difference in age & life-experience. I can easily understand how, in today’s cultural kaleidoscope, we can easily conclude that “God doesn’t make any sense”.
For the word is used in myriad senses. You can say the same about the word “sense”. So how can we possibly grasp anything from words? I don’t know. We just can. Some of us can, from some of what’s said. Today, I say this:
I have come to know God through the senses, despite having learned that in the Middle Ages it was widely believed that the surest way to God is through denial of the senses.
I could call this Scene 1 of my story, one that sounds completely different from Zat’s. That doesn’t make it incompatible. We are all different. Nor is my discovery of finding God through the senses incompatible with the experience of mystics and monastics in the Middle Ages. All will be explained. Zat presents a different conception of God, I’m sure everyone has a different idea, but it doesn’t prevent meaningful exchanges. As he says in his Void & I,
The words on the page themselves are secondary. It’s the dance they create that matters — the context in which they are meant to be understood.
The dance they create, the great organ-stops and keyboards of sonorous words and resonant meanings, in plainsong or counterpoint. Something is exchanged, we encounter something deep in one another, through reading and writing.
And if I lean toward what I call the poetic, and Zat favours the logico-scientific, both can mislead, both are fallible. Still it is worthwhile. Zat says:
Reading is an interactive activity … you have to go into the mind of the writer and try to replicate their thinking patterns in your own mind.
To me, at the latter end of a lifetime, God makes sense only in terms of Love. I’m glad to see Zat’s story end by bringing both together:
Questioner: “Then is love changeable? If everything is a movement of change, isn’t love also part of that movement? And if love is changeable, then I can love one woman today and sleep with another tomorrow.”
Krishnamurti: [after starting with an abstract answer]: “God, or whatever name you give it, is when you are not. When you are, it is not. When you are not, love is. When you are, love is not.”
Along with Nietzsche, Zat accepts that God is dead. The story of evolution has superseded Genesis. In the beginning was Consciousness:
I don’t think Consciousness is a product of evolution. I think that Consciousness is primary
Yet he consistently identifies “God” as a “creation of culture”:
….I don’t believe the existence of culture has improved average individual happiness….This switch — from God being a creation of culture that then transcends itself to give us objective morality and, subsequently, purpose and meaning to culture essentially being its own life-force….
Whether you call it fluidity or meta-modernism, today, culture itself is God.
This is quite a switch! I recall having said in my own writings, or in conversation with a commenter, that we don’t just disentangle ourselves from God and free ourselves in a single bound. We find a replacement god: whatever possessions or ideas we cherish, they hold us in thrall, captive.
Culture isn’t my God, especially when it condemns its own past. Staying away from its slipstream is worth the considerable effort involved, in my experience.
The thing I hold most dear, and give my life to, is nothing other than what gives me life. I don’t see this as Primal Consciousness, at least not in the sense which Zat assigns to the term.
What does give me life? Nature, of course, but within Nature I detect Love, whether conscious or not, as a force which remembers the primal unity, keeps binding it together in oneness. We cannot normally see this unity because that primal consciousness has been elaborated in the human mind to construct a necessary ego, which gives us a sense of embattled aloneness.
By comparison with us, the struggle of other animals to survive depends largely on instinct. Georges Bataille in his Theory of Religion says that “every animal is like water in water”, which is to say they are not separate from the One. Yes, they kill and eat one another, but not from hate.
In my view advanced human consciousness, which Zat celebrates, along with its great project, generating cultures, stands as a primary obstacle to Oneness. The only way to reach oneness is through “perfect love”.
I have to call it this, to separated it from that prevalent notion of love which engenders disappointment, heartbreak, jealousy, revenge, covetousness, vainglory and so on. Every emotion other than perfect love stems from a single stem: fear.
All fear in the human being can be traced to a fear of death. For some reason, my most-read post on A Wayfarer’s Notes is the one on Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, I suspect by students given essay assignments. Becker has a point when he says
the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.
Fear is love’s only enemy.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18)
Perfect love is expansive. Free from fear, there is nothing to stop us from loving everyone and everything. When Jesus said “love your enemy” it was to acknowledge the existence of a real enemy, someone who wants us dead. Of course we ought to take suitable evasive action necessary in the circumstances. But if we are free of fear, we can do this without hate.
It’s a long time since I read Becker’s book, but I’m certain he doesn’t tell his reader how to be rid of fear. He merely points out that it’s in our nature to seek some ersatz immortality as a coping mechanism for that fear.
I have seen the recipe for perfect love embedded in religion, sometimes buried too deep to find. Or it can arise spontaneously, when we find ourself checkmated, and surrender to the fact. My next will consider a modern book offering working notes and snippets towards such a recipe.
There is one essential ingredient for perfect love: total surrender to a superior power beyond the changing culture of this world. Surrender is made possible where there is trust. Trust requires faith in that which isn’t yet manifest. If we equate this kind of faith with beliefs and rituals administered by religion we are on dangerous ground. The human mind is capable of believing more or less anything, and of thus being manipulated for any corrupt human purpose.
I shall not belittle the journey involved in reaching this state of Trust wherein it is possible to feel safe whatever happens, to embrace it as meant to be. It doesn’t come easy. Fumbling by trial and error, I see it as doable. I’ve been there as an occasional visitor.
“Doable”? It can only happen by not-doing, as in Krishnamurti’s enigmatic answer above.
7 thoughts on “Dealing with the Void”
ellielarry
“Trust requires faith in that which isn’t yet manifest”
Yes, but you are right, trust is not belief. We dive into the depths trusting that the unknown is benevolent. Belief pre-formats the unknown into an image of the known. Trust surrenders the outcome to what we have experienced as Love.
Vincent
Yes, you have expressed it beautifully.
ianinverness
These are my first few words on ‘the Retreat’ after being kindly invited to join recently. I have made the occasional cameo appearance on Wayfarer’s Notes, and some of the names quietly tucked away here on retreat are familiar to me.
On God and the Void: I feel more in tune with your words on knowing God through the senses and on Love than with those of Zat. These are themes that time and again you take up and communicate about eloquently. This is quite something, since neither God nor Love are generally amenable to description, explanation (especially explanation) or elucidation through the limited medium of language. These are among the subjects that I love reading about from you: experience, especially ‘heart experience’, shines through. Thank you.
Vincent
Thanks, Ian, for your warm words & making yourself known as a new contributor here. It’s always encouraging to feel one’s words have resonated.
As hinted above with an embedded link, the next post here will take these topics further by seeing what Raymond Sigrist has to say, via his book In Love With Everything. It might take a while.
Bryan White
How did I miss this post? I kept checking back to see if there was anything new.
As for all fears stemming from the fear of death, consider this scenario: you’re immortal, but you’re walking along one day, having passed whatever thousands of years on Earth, and then you fall down into a network of drain pipes, and you get lodged in one really tight, and it’s cold and it’s dark. You’re deep underground and you’re left there forever, or until the sun swallows the planet, and then who knows what would become of you then. Me, I think of that, I’d think I’d rather just die. (Don’t ask me why my mind concocts these types of morbid fantasies.)
So, is this a fear worse than death, or is this still the fear of death, just in some disguised form?
Vincent
All fear in the human being can be traced to a fear of death, so that would be my answer to your question. But what you described was such a scary fantasy, it’s actually a fate worse than death—eternal abandonment.
It reminds me of someone’s draft novel I was recently invited to give feedback on, from Soviet Men: the People’s Blog. I won’t say too much as he (an Australian) works in a hell-hole of an African country and keeps his identity secret in case its dictator sends the hitmen or torturers.
Anyhow, it’s about a guy on Death Row in America who gets the lethal injection and discovers an afterlife, reached by crawling through a long tunnel to reach Hell. I did my best but told him there was nothing for the reader in it.
I conclude the guy lives in his own personal hell, a caricature of masculinity who plans his personal heaven on earth, when he has money enough to have everything he ever wanted: money for nothing and chicks for free
Vincent
Anyhow, the promised next post will propose that this sense of abandonment embedded in your fantasy has a magical possibility. The magic word is “surrender”. Not one you can just say like abracadabra. It can take a lifetime of wandering around stumbling and lost. No matter how or when it happens, you suddenly see a door in that tangle of drainpipes, within your easy reach. You crawl out into the sunshine and know you are safe. And then you are grateful for whatever it took to make you see the light of day.
a wayfarer’s notes 