Sound of the Void
This article is going to take some deep thought and concentration on your part. It might get a bit confusing, but it will all fall together I promise you.
The illusion is powerful, but not total. If we were completely cut off from an awareness of what lies beyond, chances are we would be perfectly content. Think about that for just a moment. There would be no reason to question ourselves or our existence … no drive to continuously experience more. No conscious concept of something beyond … something MORE than just this.
But we are NOT cut off completely. That spark burns inside. A glimmer of the Infinite light from before Creation surrounds and permeates each person who walks this earth. This light is what gives us the profound sense that there is something else out there … and in here. Only the something doesn’t always feel like an actual … “something.” It often feels like …. “something missing” - more like a void. This was what I experienced during my last major surgery in 2013.
I was in pre-op, 55 degrees in a sheet on a stainless steel gurney and waiting for my surgeon who was delayed. I got to lay there and listen to everyone else’s legal rights be explained. Should they not survive to procedure, etc. In those moments … I entered the VOID. There was a feeling of aloneness … or was it all-oneness? In the silence, and before the pre-op cocktail, I found God/Source in the void. The nothing … that is something. The Ayin, the place of total beginning. Where emptiness, nothingness, and a place of what seemed the land of all that is not … yet … this is the voice where limitless and boundless possibilities are formed. It’s like the number Zero. It isn’t “nothing,” it’s a number with value. So … the void is.
I began to think about it … since after I had completed the procedure, I had plenty of time. I was in ICU in intense, unimaginable pain for 15 days. I kept thinking about this void. In some ways I imagined it as total abandonment from God/Source. Having just bailed and left me on my own to fend for myself and the others that had been trusted with my care. But then, this missing element in my mind, began to go from left brain logic to right brain limitlessness … and I understood that what hovers at the edge of our consciousness, threatening our comfortable sense of solidity and bringing with it an essential longing for…. well, for something. Something more.
This sensation of something missing is actually the glimmer of something that is there, but too vast and amazing to be perceived by our ordinary senses. But as physical beings in a physical world, we are not naturally inclined to relate to it in this esoteric way. In fact, the non-physical all too often makes us feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. So, instead of slowly allowing our eyes to adjust to this more subtle light, we avoid the experience altogether, or seek to fill the void with physical things. Things that never amount to “enough.”
The subtle awareness of the void pulls us relentlessly toward the next high, the next success, the more exciting relationship, the bigger, flashier toy. The feelings it triggers - like sadness, depression, anxiety or dissatisfaction – drive us to eat too much, drink too much, work too much, spend too much, need too much; in short, whatever it takes to avoid facing the threatening insubstantiality of it all.
But, as uncomfortable and threatening as it can feel, if you are willing to face the discomfort, to stop running and listen, you can begin to explore the secret of the void, to expand your ability to see and hear things that lie outside your normal range. In that void … in that uncomfortable place of darkness, is where you will find the light.
Like a beautiful dream whose impression lingers, like a song that stirs memories and feelings from long ago, like a perfume that lingers faintly in the air, the music of the void can stir forgotten memories and open your heart. It can speak to you of where you came from, where you are destined to go and who you are destined to be. Step out of your comfortable awareness, and venture beyond … go to those places where you find uncomfortable. Face your fears … and they will dissolve into the illusion that they really are.
Just a thought …
~Justin Taylor, ORDM., OCP., DM.
