![]() ![]() From the point of view of the human mind, He is most void. “The Absolute void is Bhairava who is beyond the senses and the mind, beyond all the categories of these instruments. According to the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, the void is thus imbued with great power - the greatest power of all - creation. But instead of running from it, devotees are encouraged to seek it out like the headwaters of a great river. The void is the from which all else originates. What is real, in a permanent, constant, comforting way, is the nothing from which all else originates.Įven in these schools, however, the voidness or nothingness of sunyata is again the centerpiece of creation. Upon reaching that state, a sufficiently meditative person realizes that all is ephemeral the entirety of existence is no more real than the foam at the crest of a wave. Not in the bland sense of an empty cup of water, but a state of existence in which one’s entire identity is completely subsumed into the cosmos, neither giving nor taking. It generally refers to the idea of emptiness or voidness. ![]() Like most deeply personal and religious concepts, it’s tough to translate exactly and has been the subject of considerable debate and splinters of thought over thousands of years. Take for instance the concept of ‘sunyata’ found in Buddhism and related religions. While Western thinking tended to be rather antagonistic of the void, wondering whether it even exists, and eventually only admitting its possibility in a supernatural sense, Eastern philosophy, theology, and mysticism embraced (and continues to embrace) the idea. ![]() Meanwhile, with regard to spiritual voids, Catholic theology surmises that hell is the one place in the cosmos where you are cut off from communion with the divine, and a lousy place to spend eternity. Aristotle rejected the notion of physical voids, arguing that with a true vacuum there would be nothing to impede movement and thus nothing would ever slow down. Formless, shapeless, and probably very boring, but still something that a creative power or physical reality can take inspiration from. In this sense, nothing is a blank canvas, but still an entity in its own right. To have a cosmos full of things, we need to start with nothing. The Bible starts with: “In the beginning, there was nothing.” From there, the usual process of creation unfolds. In Western thinking, the 5 th century BCE Greek philosopher Democritus started with the concept of ‘emptiness’ so that he could go on to fill that emptiness with something - the indivisible ‘atoms’ that made up all of material experience. These are not mere games of wordplay and semantics, but questions that force us to reckon with the limits of our knowledge and our ability to define and organize the world around us. What is the nature of the ‘nothing?’ Is it physical, supernatural, or undefined? Is the void the thing that begets (indeed, it’s the ultimate begetter) and allows creation to proceed? Or does it stand alone, apart from us? How do we define it? Can we define it? The vast emptiness of the cosmos and the indefinability of the extreme has shaped public imagination and philosophical musings through the ages. ![]()
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