The Void of My Own Mystical Nihilism

Mystical Nihilism is seemingly a war waged between two words. They do not belong together, do they? What can the experiences of the saints say about the impossibility of knowing or experiencing any ultimate truth? I have pondered this question for some time. Because I've always had a sense of a Void and I've always had a sense of there being something spiritual about that Void. It feels so very French of me. (Cioran, a Romanian who lived a long while in France, also seemed to feel it.)

I change belief systems more than most people change their clothes. It's all an effort to put something into that Void, or explain the Void, or humanize the Void. But still I sense the Void in all its Void-ness. I have beliefs that mean a great deal to some of my many personalities. I can swap them on a daily basis if I so choose. They remain, after being swapped, as lingering longings in the shadows of myself. They do not remove the Void. They appear like reflections on the rippling surface of the Void. Parts of myself staring back at me from something both more and less than oblivion.

The Void that I sense is the place where nothing that is matter can be known or conceived. It is the place where even the energies that animate us as living beings have their particles barred from entering. It is the place where Being is not even exterminated, it just never is, never was, never will be. Even in the dead of space, there are particles, particles of light, for example. But are there particles where the consciousness of a being is at the moment of death? The energy and matter that cause us to live have to go on somewhere, in some way, but the consciousness itself, not the thoughts, not the feelings, but the space inside us that recognizes those thoughts and feelings by contrasting them with its own emptiness, that consciousness, where does it go when we leave this world?

Some would argue that it's the soul. All rational thought is apparently eliminated when the saint directly encounters God. They write of their raptures and it is an experience they can not easily define with words. John of the Cross resorted to vague but beautiful poetry to explain it. St. Teresa of Avila was similarly too awestruck by her experiences to make any kind of description that would make complete sense to someone who hadn't experienced what she did themselves. And we can't forget the many Buddhist and Hindu and Sufi mystics who also had experiences with something so utterly alien to human existence, it defied being contained in words.

But these experiences, and the spiritual experiences of many other religions, magical traditions, occult systems, etc., do not prove any such thing as the existence of an immortal soul. All they prove is that, with time and effort and training and the grace of the incomprehensibility of the universe we live in, one can confront something with our material brains that is beyond the realm of matter. Since it is common to so many belief systems, it seems irrational to label it as truly belonging to any one of them. There must be something innate in existence that these experiences arise from.

This is where I married the words "Mystical" and "Nihilism." Nihilists have long talked of a Void, people of a spiritual nature have long talked of mysticism. But what is to prevent us from joining the two? Where the particles of energy and matter in this physical universe are no longer permitted, we confront with that so fragile and faint that it is hard to even say it exists consciousness of ours a Void that is immanent, transcendant, God-like in its Eternity, but with no characteristics to it that we mortals can even relate to except in those moments where we enter pure consciousness, the place that is not ruled by the physics and chemistry and biology of this world.

This is very close to what Buddhists have been saying for centuries. And they choose, generally, not to try to describe their Nirvana in words. The original Buddhism, before it became dressed up in the clothes of a ceremonial religion, was very much based on thoughts like these. But even there, they believed that some part of this consciousness went on into other lives, was reborn to suffer again and again until it finally escaped the Karmic wheel. And, to the extent that we are composed of matter and energy, neither of which is truly capable of being destroyed, this makes perfect logical sense. Parts of us are reborn in many many ways. Our energies disperse, our matter becomes fertilizer for other matter, so on and so forth. But scientists have yet to measure the existence of the plain fact that consciousness even exists. Is the fact that there is something within us aware of existence a simple trick of matter and energy? Is it proof that a God or Gods imbued us with souls? Or does it mean that we are flickering images playacting on a stage that, when we die, doesn't even vanish because it was nothing but Void to begin with?

I incline towards the Void explanation for two reasons. One, the mystical experiences that are beyond words all happen in people for whom a state of pure consciousness beyond thought and feeling has been achieved. And also because we can only define consciousness itself by what it is not. It is not our thoughts yet it is aware of our thoughts. It is not our feelings yet it is aware of our feelings. And no holy book or saintly experience or scientific experiment has ever proven that it is anything other than a gaping nothingness upon which images roam for a time and then disappear.

So, if we have a soul, perhaps it is a fragment of the impossible and yet only truly real thing in this existence: a never-ending, never-beginning Void. When we pass from this world, our physical existence will continue in a number of concrete, scientific ways. But in the spiritual realm, it might just be possible that we go to someplace where, not only do we no longer exist, but we never truly existed in the first place.