And over time that’s all I wanted, those two seconds of nothingness
Rue, in Euphoria, S1 E1
Rue is a teenage girl in a television series called Euphoria. A teenager who lives on the razor's edge of despair, the need for ecstasy and dissolution, the continuous and methodical compensation of the extreme, through above all drugs of all kinds. She is pushed by that one hope: to be able to re-experience that miraculous silence, that emptiness and that quiet where there are no thoughts, emotions and needs. It is not only teenagers who feel this despair and that need for peace, but also all of humanity and it is enough to turn our attention to human history to easily recognize that it is largely the search for those two seconds of nothing: sex, alcohol, drugs, meditation, religion, wars, gambling, workaholism, addiction to danger, prayer, politics, money. Everything in our collective history speaks of the desire to be able to say one day: at last, I am at home and there is nothing more to do, to try, to prove, to achieve; I can stop and be at peace with myself and the world.
The only fundamental difference between adolescents and so-called adults is that they are generally not yet completely desensitized, anesthetized by years of complete identification with things, with objects, with doing and complete forgetfulness of themselves. In them the wound of betrayal of their true nature is still fresh, still incomprehensible, still on the surface and the pain alive. They are still a little close, and perhaps even remembering, to their innocence. Those two seconds of nothing where the noise of the mind, the images of our personal history, the memories of our wounds and triumphs, successes and failures, where the voice of the inner judge, everything disappears and only I AM remains.
2.
Spiritual search is in most cases confused, groping, with highs that we tend to grasp and low that we try to escape and persecute us because of our attachment to personality and the need for certainty. Spiritual search seeks reasons, meaning, explanations, inspiration, escape from mediocrity and daily grind and is in many cases not much different or more efficient than any drug, shopping, the illusions of specialness that the world offers us continuously through a thousand traps. Spiritual search can, like anything else, be a diversion, a compensation, a way to avoid emptiness and lack; an idealized groping towards those two seconds of nothingness. Any search, even if we do not label it with the adjective "spiritual", arises from a need: to know, to possess, to understand, to balance things, to find ourselves, to justify, to give meaning and so on. And behind the need there is often a sense of lack, perhaps unclear, perhaps unidentified, but somehow felt. An emptiness that is often familiar to us and that we generally tend to avoid or hide from ourselves, until, either by chance or out of desperation, we find ourselves looking. And sometimes there is also just the opposite: the sudden, unexpected appearance of something different, completely and absolutely different from what we are used to. Something that resonates in deep and forgotten parts of us, like those two seconds of nothingness that in their nothingness are full and resonant with peace and freedom.
3.
We don't take drugs because we are socially misfits and we lack contact. We don't gamble because we have little morals. We are not looking for sex or power because compulsively in need of recognition and discharge. We do not abuse ourselves with excess work or alcohol, we do not throw ourselves into prayer or meditation or sport to escape a dehumanizing reality. Of course, there is also this by the side, but the fundamental thrust is: I want to be myself. It is a natural and inevitable drive towards the realization of our uniqueness. An evolutionary need to manifest in a concrete way why we are here, each of us, whatever it costs. In this search sometimes opens the door for an understanding of absolute importance: the recognition that I miss something and that feeling this lack terrifies me. This is what I call the "negative emptiness" experience.
Generally, the door closes, or we close it, with extreme speed because this vacuum can be paralyzing and is generally associated with an immediate sense of danger and indescribable pain. It is as if all the monsters of our childhood, all the most terrifying memories, begin to agitate as deep currents in our psyche threatening to submerge us. The search is not a choice; it is a primordial need for survival of our soul. An absolutely illogical and not rational intuition that that terrifying void is the door to resurrection. That knowing, investigating, surrendering to that nothingness, to that void, I can be reborn like the phoenix. And that's exactly how it is.
4.
When I was little the void did not frighten me, I remember it. I remember it because I remember very clearly how much all the adults around me did their best to get me out of that void. On the other hand, what choice did my parents, relatives, teachers really had when one of the classic sayings of our culture is: An empty mind is the devil's workshop. Being empty is diabolical! Yet, it is enough to observe even with only a little attention and affection a small child to see how his emptiness is only the other side of his fullness, how his vital totality manifests itself naturally and efficiently through a complete process of energetic charge and discharge. When fullness is expressed there is complete discharge and in the void that manifests itself there is life that fills that organism open to receive and recharge. Loading and unloading, loading and unloading, full and empty, full and empty. And then, little by little, they teach us mediocrity, through the fear of being too much and/or too little. We forget what it's like to be totally full, and fulfilled, and totally empty, and fulfilled. The opposite of mediocrity is not excellence, it is totality. Being oneself totally, unequivocally, totally full and totally empty, and everything in between.
Excerpt from Ch.1 of Who is in? Beyond Self-image.
Comments