“The ultimate purpose of the void is for us to look perfectly within ourselves.
If a person looks deeply enough within themselves, they will find the light
that can bring them forth from the darkness.”
Kevin Williams .
The Ninth Direction
Before the beginning there was a Void. And the Void was without form or substance and it was unaware, as if It were eternally sleeping. Because the Void was not a thing, it was no-thing, It could only wait eternally unaware as no-thing, as a vacuum, a Void.
Qualities, Aspects and Traditions
One step beyond anything akin to American Indian traditions, I come to the ninth and final Direction, The Void. It is perhaps the most difficult of them to write about because it is new territory in this lore of Self Knowledge. In looking at what each of the other Great Eight Directions represent about their particular piece in the total package of the “Whole Me,” one might think of them in terms of some “thing” that one might see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or sense in some way. But not here; not in The Void.
There is simply no thing there with which to paint a metaphor. The closest I can come to suggesting one is the conceit that it is the “Pre-All” canvas upon which Creation paints Its Own image. There is just a total absence of any “something.” Except IT. Nothing. An Infinite Nothingness that is eternally pregnant with Creation.
Stanislav Grof, a preeminent figure in the field of Transpersonal Psychology and one of its founders and chief theoreticians, calls it “a primordial emptiness of cosmic proportions and relevance;” so big as to be far larger than all of Creation, and so cosmically “relevant” because all in far-flung Creation rests on it.
In the field of Quantum Mechanics, David Bohm, among others, has postulated the existence of the Explicate and Implicate orders, the former contains of all “seeable” matter in the world of the totality of the measurable physical, mental and emotional detritus that exists in Creation. The Implicate Order contains all in pre-existence and abuts every point of the Explicate. It is the steady state of potentiality. But beyond these two Orders, there lies the ever vaster “Holomovement” which is the vessel of both of these sub-orders. And just as the Holomovement “holds” Its components, so does The Void hold all of Creation, both actual and potential.
And “as above, so is below” that unimaginably vastness is also within us; the Void is both beyond and within. It has no Color, no Plant Totem, Part of the Plant, Element , Animal Totem, Spirit Guide , or Medicine Stone, as these are all qualities of “something,” none of which exists in the uncaring and emotionless State of the Void. And it is the final Direction, both within and without, simply because it is there; always has been, always will be. In that state there is no you, no me, neither Consciousness, Creation nor Creator. Only the silence which calls us to it.
It does not, however, indicate some specific lack, as having a “lack” indicates a state of something less that Perfection. In regards to these Directions, these Voids are neither Imperfect or Perfect nor are traversable by even Creation Itself and actually pre-exist It.
The Void is the canvas upon which Creation paints the manifest. Go there and one enters the realms of Non-existence, scrubbed clean of both the Imperfect and Perfect, and out of which One calls Its Creation into being, in the only ever present moment of Time, The Now.
So these are some of the attributes of The Void, and as you know that YOU are the Wheel, so you know too that IT is an element within YOU.
Know this to be so, embrace it in your heart, feel it within, and say: I AM/WE ARE the Void!
Aho!
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The Image above is of trails left by circumpolar stars, as viewed from Star Axis, a monumental work of land art in the New Mexico desert. Photo courtesy of Charles Ross, as adapted by Johnny Mirehiel.