Proof That I Am Not Living The Void

In my post on the Void of my Mystical Nihilism, I pointed out that this Void exists within all of us. However, it is usually not the dominant aspect of our beings. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, everything from bliss to suffering to boredom and sleep lies in a non-Void realm. A person who had truly realized the Void could do one of two things: become the next Buddha, sit in silence, live in inner solitude, perhaps teach others how to quiet the tempest within themselves. Or, he could take a gun, place it in his mouth, and pull the trigger, without even sparing a moment to bid the world farewell. I sense the Void in me... but I am not myself Void.

Every day proves that to me. Today for example. I had an extremely stressful experience. It caused a great deal of anxiety and sparked some suicidal thoughts. I don't have a gun, but I could have gone out and laid down on the train tracks. I didn't. I agonized. And then I read and listened to music and had fleeting moments of a glorious feeling of kinship with the authors and musicians. The Void is kin to nothing. Kin implies both similarity and difference as well as separation. The Void is one, indivisible, like nothing but itself and different from everything that is not Void, yet the basis for all of it.

The extremes of human emotion are the most human emotions of all and they can give us glimpses of the Void, the most human state there is, since it is the one we will all eventually return to. But they are not the Void. They are like the viewing binoculars on a scenic outlook that lets you see the sites more closely. You can see the contours of the Void but you are not within it entirely.

The extremes of human emotion paralyze the meandering, mundane mind. Utter ecstasy and utter despair are both states of complete freedom from all that makes us less than sovereign beings. I am borrowing a little bit from Georges Bataille here. But the simple joys and agonies of daily life is a challenge existence.... those just mire us in the bland states of hope and faith and worry and sorrow. The images that dance on the reflective surface of the Void without even realizing it.

These smudges hovering near the Void do not contaminate it, nothing of our material world can actually touch  it. But they distract us. And I have proven myself as distracted as anyone else, despite my passion for submerging myself one day in the Void. I flit here, flit there, sometimes with a great deal of intensity, sometimes with a dreary, drowsy laziness. If I were to attempt to walk away to spend my life in contemplation or else put a gun in my mouth and achieve the only possible Oneness, either way, I'd be saying goodbye the entire time. My bird, my fiancee, my father, my brother, my friends, my books and CDs and DVDs, even the jottings in this blog. I could do neither without a long, aching look behind me. And it is very probable that I could not do either at all. So, I am left with a question, a question only I can answer. Do I devote myself with a rapacious thirst to achieve the Void I preach or do I accept the fact that, until I finally pass from this world, I am a broken, incomplete man? I take comfort in knowing I must have reached the scenic outlooks onto the Void a number of times, lived to the extremes a number of times, just to be asking myself this question. It is my solace.