The nothing

Entering the void on psychedelics and through other non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Image by Gerd Altman from Pixabay

Close your eyes. Imagine absolute blackness, darkness so complete that there is not even a glimmer of light, a hint of a symbol, or the ghost of a face in your mind. Imagine a silence so profound that you can’t hear your own breath, or even the quiet whisper of your thoughts – a complete absence of sound. In the void, there is nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to touch or taste or smell. You're disconnected from your physical form, the material world, and the process of thinking itself. You float – if that can even describe what the not fully extant you is doing – in a silent abyss, a brutally vast and lonesome vacuum. The void is neither here nor there, and it is suffocating in its stagnant denseness.

My psychedelic journeys have led me to the void several times, and I find it unsettling. I talked to my plant medicine mentor about it, asking her why I end up here in non-ordinary states of consciousness. “You’ve experienced the nothing. Embrace it, because out of nothing comes everything,” she told me.

Once, while holding an ecstatic trance body posture, I waited for visual phenomenon as had occurred many times before, but nothing came to my inner eye. Frustrated, I said to myself, “Why don’t I see anything?” I heard this reply, “Most of what you humans ‘see’ are generated by the projectors of your minds onto the screen of your inner eye. But the internal screen also displays impressions from outside sources and other conscious beings. Once you lose your mind, or loosen yourself from it, you’ll notice there’s really just a lot of empty space, inside and out. Pay attention to this space. Get accustomed to it, because when you cross over there really is more of this emptiness than anything else.”

The void feels like outer space, absent of planets, stars, or any other objects to interrupt the uniformity of dense, infinite darkness. It is a suffocating, silent, black nothingness that screams, “Alone! Forever”.

I used to employ diverse techniques—breath control, mantras, mudras, and more—to center my mind while meditating. Following a conversation about these void experiences, my mentor suggested I stop relying on techniques and methods and just empty my mind when meditating. Learning to do this took a while, and the effects were mixed. While emptiness meditation sometimes left me feeling refreshed, centered, and at peace, at other times it unnervingly evoked the prospect of oblivion. Meditating on nothing brought me close to the fleeting quality of existence and my own ephemerality.

Despite my practice with emptiness meditation, my subsequent psychedelic journeys continued to be largely unsettling. Often, I’d find myself in this suffocating void, a sensory deprivation chamber where the silence pressed down on me, and I felt myself fading. I’d sense my physical form dissolving, my mind slipping away. I could hardly hold on to any thoughts. Only a sliver of my consciousness would remain, passively watching, a ghost in my own body. I felt like I was teetering on the edge of a precipice and if my mind were to move in the wrong direction, perhaps even this teeny sense of awareness might be snuffed out like a withering flame.

I would however, experience waves of lucidity. During these moments, the heavy, suffocating air vibrated with the unseen struggle of a battle raging in the impenetrable darkness, its purpose a mystery to me. As I slowly came round and was able to use my head again, thoughts of being lost in perpetuity in this timeless, dimensionless space would terrify me. Yet, I’d always return to my body and my life, breathless and relieved.

So how did I pull myself together? How did I get through the desolating emptiness?

In the nothingness, I felt a presence — a sentience that knew me intimately, understood me completely, even though I no longer knew who I was. Because this sentience knew me, I knew I could come back. I knew I’d be OK. And trusting this, I would start remembering the things of this world — a bed, hands, light, a phone, a husband, an apartment, cats — beloved comforts that are mine for now. This sentience — Spirit, God, Creator, Love, or whatever you prefer to call it — has always been here in the void, commander of the nothing. Still and watchful as an alligator. A lonely magician, powerful beyond imagination. It’s been here since the beginning of time. In Islamic theology, one of the qualities of Allah is that of a singular god that is the fundamental, unseen, unknowable energy of existence, a force comparable to nothing. In the Sufi tradition, the name Allah points towards the boundless, formless essence of God, existing prior to creation and beyond all definition. The Sufis understood that the divine essence is strongest in the unformed, un-created state. Tremendous power resides in all that is unmanifested, undefined, unseen, unheard, unspoken, and beyond words. Uncreated, blank, empty — could this be God’s original state?

“You’ve experienced the nothing. Embrace it, because out of nothing comes everything”. I’m beginning to understand what my mentor meant.

After a period of grappling with the void, I discovered a book on Kabbalah that helped me contextualize the nothingness. Kabbalah uses the term “zim zum” to explain how God withdrew to allow for the creation of the world. Zim zum, a Hebrew term meaning “contraction”, depicts the infinite God “Ein Sof” diminishing himself to make way for the world and human life to come into being. To make way for the universe and all of creation, God essentially retracts his infinite presence, a divine act of self-limitation so we (as unique conscious entities) would have space to exist (for a while at least).

To see the hidden parts of creation, we too must contract ourselves. As it applies to us humans, contracting may refer to the diminishing of the ego – that part that of the mind that holds together our identity and our opinions and values. The contraction of the ego can be achieved through meditation, prayer, by fully attending to another person, animal, or task, or if we’re lucky, simply through the process of aging. “Wisdom comes with age,” so the saying goes, though this is not always the case. The physical process of aging also involves contraction as skin, bones and muscles shrink and we become physically smaller. If wisdom is developing a more complete and deeper understanding of life and what it really means to be human, then growing older gracefully can perhaps be likened to zim zum, where we pull ourselves – our opinions, wants and needs – back to accommodate others and our environment the way God did when he created the world. When the noise—the pictures and stories defining God, and what we assume he/she/it wants or doesn’t want of us—cease, we are left with only the silent abyss where we are subsumed by the terrifying and the sublime, but where everything is possible once again.

By Michele Koh Morollo, NUMEN NoSC Therapies