The Healing Powr of the Void
Judy is caught in her mediocrity drama, in which she swings back and forth between her indulgence and self-discipline about smoking, pizza eating and weight-gaining. She feels her life was better and healthier when she was disciplined, but she gets tired and lazy and falls back into self-indulgence. She complains that she takes the easy route. She fights with herself constantly about this vacillation. In working with this particular struggle in therapy, we noticed that everyone seems to have struggles and makes excuses and resolutions. So I asked her what is higher than such a struggle. What else could she focus on besides that? She drew a blank, but we kept on working with it. I asked her if she could step outside the drama and observe the Judy that is struggling? She could. I asked her if this struggle involved some kind of self-sabotage and she observed that it did, because she ends up getting what she doesn’t want.
Finally as the observer, she saw a bigger issue: that it is better to have problems and dramas to stew about than to fall into the void. She said that the void, the emptiness, is so painful, that anything is better than that, even her self-blame for the lack of self-discipline. I asked her if she could see that she has a story about the void, a story which makes the void seem painful. She had never thought of that. She said that everyone avoids the pain of the void, no matter what the cost. Any kind of drama, including self-sabotage, she said, is preferable to the pain of emptiness, insecurity and loneliness. I reminded her again that we are assuming that the void is painful rather than investigating our story about the emptiness.
If the so-called void, however, actually is the world of spirit (invisible potentiality), and we have labeled it meaninglessness, we can see why it is painful, and why we would prefer to be struggling with the form world, the visible world, the finite world of smoking, pizza eating, and weight gaining. And so we are hooked on drama, and we prefer its costs, rather than focusing on the higher knowledge of the spiritual being that we are. We are in the habit of thinking of ourselves as bodies in time, as just members of a particular tribe or society, and we sacrifice a great deal in order to feel that we “belong” to this mixed-bag society.
We are ignorant of the unlimited and unknown, and stuck with the limited and the known. We call the unlimited and the unknown by the name of the “void” or “emptiness,” and we complain about the limited and the known. And so here we are, stuck with anxiety. We give absolute meaning to our story, unconsciously, and to its opposites. We attribute absoluteness to the relative and infinity to the finite. We get caught in a forced choice about which side of a polarity is right and which is wrong, which is good and which is bad, and we can never decide. We vacillate back and forth, giving ourselves various excuses, reasons and explanations. The good is boring and the bad is fun but costly. Which world will we live in? We don’t see the perfect world at all. We only see the visible good-versus-bad world.
To see the perfect, the infinite, we would have to deal with the invisible, the intangible, the void-like world. Because the perfect world is invisible, we call it the unknown, the void, the emptiness, and we attach great pain to it. Pain because we cannot control what we call the unknown world. So the unknown becomes the bad, and the known becomes the good but lacking world. So let us stand before the invisible and unknown, without judgment, and let us observe it and the pain we have attached to it. Let us just stand and look and not run from the pain of our judgments. Let us investigate our story about this most horrible assumption imaginable. And so, Judy’s daily mediocrity and self-sabotage behavior has a purpose, to lead her to inquire into what she is assuming and overlooking, her unlimited spiritual potentiality, which has been called the void. That self-examination we call the enlightenment process. It is that place or process of which Rumi said: There is a field beyond good and evil, I will meet you there.” It is that which Jesus called “the Kingdom of God in you.” It is that of which St. Paul spoke when he said “The Christ is being formed in you.”
And so let us inquire into our self-limiting story and watch for the appearance of a higher realization, a higher passion, an uplifting energy.
Finally as the observer, she saw a bigger issue: that it is better to have problems and dramas to stew about than to fall into the void. She said that the void, the emptiness, is so painful, that anything is better than that, even her self-blame for the lack of self-discipline. I asked her if she could see that she has a story about the void, a story which makes the void seem painful. She had never thought of that. She said that everyone avoids the pain of the void, no matter what the cost. Any kind of drama, including self-sabotage, she said, is preferable to the pain of emptiness, insecurity and loneliness. I reminded her again that we are assuming that the void is painful rather than investigating our story about the emptiness.
If the so-called void, however, actually is the world of spirit (invisible potentiality), and we have labeled it meaninglessness, we can see why it is painful, and why we would prefer to be struggling with the form world, the visible world, the finite world of smoking, pizza eating, and weight gaining. And so we are hooked on drama, and we prefer its costs, rather than focusing on the higher knowledge of the spiritual being that we are. We are in the habit of thinking of ourselves as bodies in time, as just members of a particular tribe or society, and we sacrifice a great deal in order to feel that we “belong” to this mixed-bag society.
We are ignorant of the unlimited and unknown, and stuck with the limited and the known. We call the unlimited and the unknown by the name of the “void” or “emptiness,” and we complain about the limited and the known. And so here we are, stuck with anxiety. We give absolute meaning to our story, unconsciously, and to its opposites. We attribute absoluteness to the relative and infinity to the finite. We get caught in a forced choice about which side of a polarity is right and which is wrong, which is good and which is bad, and we can never decide. We vacillate back and forth, giving ourselves various excuses, reasons and explanations. The good is boring and the bad is fun but costly. Which world will we live in? We don’t see the perfect world at all. We only see the visible good-versus-bad world.
To see the perfect, the infinite, we would have to deal with the invisible, the intangible, the void-like world. Because the perfect world is invisible, we call it the unknown, the void, the emptiness, and we attach great pain to it. Pain because we cannot control what we call the unknown world. So the unknown becomes the bad, and the known becomes the good but lacking world. So let us stand before the invisible and unknown, without judgment, and let us observe it and the pain we have attached to it. Let us just stand and look and not run from the pain of our judgments. Let us investigate our story about this most horrible assumption imaginable. And so, Judy’s daily mediocrity and self-sabotage behavior has a purpose, to lead her to inquire into what she is assuming and overlooking, her unlimited spiritual potentiality, which has been called the void. That self-examination we call the enlightenment process. It is that place or process of which Rumi said: There is a field beyond good and evil, I will meet you there.” It is that which Jesus called “the Kingdom of God in you.” It is that of which St. Paul spoke when he said “The Christ is being formed in you.”
And so let us inquire into our self-limiting story and watch for the appearance of a higher realization, a higher passion, an uplifting energy.
posted by Dr. Joe at 6:10 AM
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