Longing for the void (of eternity)

What is this mysterious, timeless "void" experience?

If you enjoy my writing, please feel free to give it a❤️ or 🔄. I appreciate your time! 

---

Recently on a beach one night, I had a sudden and profound encounter with “the void”. 

It started rather innocently: I was contemplating death with a friend, trying to deconstruct what constituted whatever “fear of death” remained in me. 

Then, all of a sudden I had a vision of my life forking out in two directions. They were not ‘visions’ in the sense of something extremely visual – more like a palpable, energetic sense of knowingness that carried a flurry of images and was saturated with intense emotion.

On the one side, I saw what I call the “narrative me” playing out the life she had planned for herself. She had the dream house, the career, the kids. The checklist of adventures and nice holidays in tropical locations. She fell in love, experienced heartache and cried over life’s usual disappointments and griefs. She carried her newborn and cared for her parents in their old age. It was a perfectly worthwhile and decent life. And yet at the end of it all, she stood at the closing chapters of her life story, peering into the face of death, as though something had been missing. What had it all been for? 

Then on the other side, there was “the witch”. She was alone in a dark forest, staring into what I’ve learned to call “the void”. This woman had no worldly possessions or accomplishments to speak of, but she had access to something else: the great mystery of being. She was steeped in it, oozing with a dark, sticky, all-pervading sense of mystery. Through her eyes I saw the great expanse of the universe. The exaltation felt by lone wanders on mountaintops. The radical freedom of sky-divers in freefall. The wide-eyed wonder of free-divers entering timeless space. The self-annihilation of lovers embracing. It was the same deep mystery that has captivated mystics seeking the divine and the sacred throughout the ages. The same thing that propels meditators to devote themselves on the cushion and in monasteries. And what everyone sees in the final moments when we stop running and peer into the face of death. It was absolutely riveting. 

And it was also totally clear that from the vantage point of this witch, gazing into the void – which I knew instinctively to be no less than “seeing the truth” – that nothing else would satisfy. The void tasted better than anything else imaginable. Finally, all seeking could stop, and the existential thirst of the soul could be quenched.

I saw the life of “narrative me” appear as nothing but a cute little charade – mere child's play by comparison. From the Buddhist perspective, it was like seeing another cycle of birth and death play out, where, because one didn’t “wake up” to discover one’s true nature, the same charade was just going to repeat itself again in the next life. 

In that moment, I felt a huge amount of pity for “narrative me”. To have come to the end of life without knowing the truth of one’s nature – what a wasted opportunity! This seemed so sad, so pathetic, so tragic and futile, that I began to cry (much to the confusion of my friend).

But what is this mysterious “void”?

In Buddhism, the void, or "Śūnyatā" in Sanskrit, isn’t just emptiness or nothingness. It isn’t nihilistic. It’s crazily alive. It’s where we experience a profound understanding of the nature of reality. Adyashanti describes it as the great "mystery of being", where we realize our true nature which is beyond the ego and the ordinary mind. In the void, we encounter a great depth of existence. We feel unity and boundlessness. Peace and freedom. 

There are parallels in other spiritual traditions too. In the Tantric tradition I study, I think of encountering Shiva, the divine universal consciousness.  

Or I think of the goddess Kali, the destroyer of illusions, the devourer of time. 

In classical Tantra, deities are seen as energetic patterns of consciousness that can be conceptualised in anthropomorphic form. Deity practice is thus about connecting with the fundamental vibratory patterns of energy that any given deity represents. Which are also, by the way, patterns that exist already within us, as an aspect of our own essence-nature. 

Because my breakthrough from the confines of ego-centric existence to momentarily touch the void wasn’t enough – I was hungry to return to that mysterious, silent place – I wanted to know, how could I hold on to and re-enter the space of this mysterious ground of being? 

One way I’ve tried is to call forth Kali, who is said to embody the experience of total timelessness and the void of absolute awareness. This feels right to me, because there is something about the void that feels timeless. In it, you're aware that there's no past and no future. At the same time, both feel infinitely accessible. Practices like those detailed in Awakening to Kali, including imagining and feeling her dark energy body in front of me, have brought me back to a sense of the void, to the sense of an “eternal now”.   

But there are many ways to enter the void. Sometimes you find it by silently gazing into the open sky, or listening to the silence beneath the sound of crashing waves, or by looking into the eyes of another human being who is deeply familiar with the void. 

I’ve noticed that I find myself being drawn to more quietude, and to being around people who are comfortable with silence and eye contact – as though we’re mutually searching for that recognition of ourselves in the other. 

The void is a rather beautiful place. In it, you have no name and no story. And yet it's deeply familiar – a remembering so ancient, it comes without words. 

I wonder if after all, what matters is to fill one’s life with as many moments of contact with the void as possible, however that comes. In a way, perhaps this is what it means to choose to live in a more awakened state.