Befriending the void

a brief harangue

We’re scared of the void, scared of what will happen if we stop asserting our existence constantly. We can’t sit for thirty seconds and just enjoy the presence of being without trying to fuck with it—not without a lot of intentional practice. So we continuously bat the void away with compulsive thinking, repelling oblivion with another opinion about something. This process of rejection is, in part, what we call our identity—the barrier we put in the way of transience. And yet, we get tired of this constant avoidance of unmediated experience. It’s hard to hold an identity together. So we take drugs, or drink, or chase adrenaline—in order to temporarily touch the void that we’re so tired of running from!

These aren’t horrible solutions, I like all of these things, within reason. But you can also just get to the nub and learn to befriend the void. “Befriending the void” is one of the million ways you can paraphrase the direction that contemplative practice takes you. 

This is not a simple process, even when you know that you want to do it. Earlier this week, I met a really nice guy at a party, who told me, “I don’t know why I spend so much time trying to have the right opinions, to have good takes on everything.” Because I am annoying sometimes, I said, “why don’t we try the opposite? Why don’t we just sit here and pretend that you don’t have to do that?” He relaxed for a second. I mean literally about one second. Then, a look of terror came over his face, and he started regaling me with more of his good takes.

In my experience, it’s like getting over any other fear—you need exposure. In the quiet, you open yourself to all of the feeling, all of the sight and sound, and say, “okay, I don’t need to control this, I don’t need to fight myself right now.” You listen to this directive for literally about one second. Then, something in you springs up and starts re-litigating an old dispute. After getting carried away for some period of time, you soothe yourself and return. Eventually, you start to feel the void-rejecting reflex coming, the urge to freak out in the face of eternity, and you relax, instead of freaking out. 

And then, one day, somewhere deep down, your system realizes that raw experience will not crush you. For me, the moment right before that acceptance felt terrifying, like falling slowly towards a cosmic wood-chipper. I prepared myself to be destroyed by oblivion. But nothing happened, I didn’t disappear. This is the weird thing: once you consent to nonexistence, you get a lot more existence.

Once you befriend the void a bit, it becomes hilarious that you were ever scared of it. The void is a generous thing. It continuously spawns every moment of your life, the spectacular and painful display we all get to enjoy. It doesn’t want to destroy you. It seems to want to create you. When you get close to it, it’s kind of like getting close to a garden hose on a hot day. Everything is fresher and more immediate. During contemplative practice, sometimes you can feel it flickering in and out, and it’s like the shutter of a movie camera, slicing into the light of experience with unbelievable rapidity, and choosing, every time it contracts, to expand just as rapidly. 

Dharma teacher Ken McLeod, in his book The Magic of Vajrayana, suggests: “Make death your constant companion. Make it a secret practice, unbeknownst to others. Feel death’s breath on the back of your neck in everything you do, driving to work, taking a walk, playing with your children.” I think this is something like what I’m talking about—getting right up close to the knife’s edge of nonexistence and sitting with it, until your fear of it transmutes, changes into a kind of luminosity that stays with you, as you understand that everything about you is a flashy costume that transience is currently wearing.

I like running into people in the wild who are comfortable with the void. My friend Aella calls it “void smell”—this sense you get that people are walking around with a chunk of companionable nonexistence in their midsection. One sign of this is comfort with silence, another is comfort with eye contact. When you meet the eyes of people who are comfortable with the void, you get the sense it doesn’t need to end, ever, because they don’t need to protect their being. They might break eye contact out of social nicety, but not out of the fear of annihilation.

And when I think back to the times in my life when I was most unwell, it looked like the opposite of this. Mental illness often looks like agitation—constantly militating against every circumstance. The sun is too hot, the shade is too cold. The room is too small, the music is too loud, the silence is too quiet, the horizon is too distant. Everything is felt as a threat, and defending against these perceived threats, ironically, ends up ruining your life. 

When I talk about enjoying the void, I’m aware that this might sound like a kind of suicidal, or life-denying impulse. It’s the opposite, though. It’s not that I don’t want more life, or that I act without concern for my physical safety. I really like life and the body I happen to live in. It’s just that I experience it as gratuitous, something precious I’ve borrowed, rather than something I can protect, or have an essential right to. The void can take me back any time it wants to, and I’m grateful that it hasn’t yet. The void could’ve been nothing, but it chose to be the opposite. 

This piece was inspired by a conversation with Govind Manian and this tweet. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.