Fearless Exploration of the Void

Syn­op­sis: Only through fear­less explo­ration of the void can we come to terms with and work with the mon­sters of our own creation

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I received an inter­est­ing com­ment from my friend Karen:

I think some­times peo­ple get jazzed by mul­ti task­ing or get warm fuzzies from accom­plish­ing lots of “stuff”. Do you think people’s “Busy­ness” is yet anoth­er attempt to fill that end­less “hole” with­out doing the hard work of being alone with the empti­ness and/or hav­ing con­flicts and dis­cus­sions that need to hap­pen to resolve the hard things? I think busy­ness may be an addic­tion like booze or choco­late, or at least a ter­rif­ic dis­trac­tion from real­ly think­ing about one’s life and doing any­thing mean­ing­ful about chang­ing it.
I think so many peo­ple are stuck in this rut that I hope you will write more on this subject.

Well, you betcha!
Let’s look of one side of this–a part that was not mentioned, then get to the issues raised.

Busy­ness is encour­aged by… wait for it… busI­ness. I sus­pect that cor­po­rate execs world­wide fair­ly peed them­selves when the whole mul­ti-task­ing thing arose.

“Oh boy! Dou­ble the out­put from the same work­force! Let’s do seminars!”

I spent a long 10 months back in 1978 work­ing for an insur­ance com­pa­ny, in the “Human Sys­tems” depart­ment. This was “1984″-speak for “effi­cien­cy experts.” 

They called us “ana­lysts,” and our job was to go in and watch peo­ple fill out, say, “Form 101.” We wrote down every action, mea­sured how far the per­son reached for a pen, for paper, etc., then added it all togeth­er, and fig­ured out, from a huge book, how much time, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, fill­ing out “Form 101” ought to take.

We looked for ways to shorten the fill-in time, which in many cases amounted to stuff like moving the stack of papers closer.

The peo­ple being observed were nev­er mid­dle man­age­ment and up  —  nobody checked up on them! They were cler­i­cal work­ers, and they hat­ed it when we showed up.

I got let go because I spent a lot of my free time in my depart­ments, get­ting great results by find­ing ways to elim­i­nate tasks the work­ers hat­ed. My boss said, “We’re inter­est­ed in what’s best for the com­pa­ny, not for the work­ers. Your pri­or­i­ties are backward.”

I was glad to leave, as the work seemed de-humanizing.

I left ahead of the great “mul­ti-tak­ing” push. I’m sure it was adopt­ed whole-heart­ed­ly by that com­pa­ny. I’m sure they hired ambidex­trous clerks, and tried to get them to fill out two forms at once.

OK, any­way… the take-away here is that mul­ti-task­ing is a lie. Try it. You can’t do two things at the same time and give both your full atten­tion. What you can do is get good at flip­ping rapid­ly between two tasks, giv­ing the illu­sion you are doing two things at once. Both things suf­fer from the shifting.

OK, so that’s my anti-multi-tasking screed. Back to the points raised in the comment. 😉

“I think some­times peo­ple get jazzed by mul­ti task­ing or get warm fuzzies from accom­plish­ing lots of “stuff”.”

See above.

Yes, indeed, our cul­ture is built with “stuff” in mind, or has been since Ford’s assem­bly line clunked into action. Sure, the automa­tion of every­thing result­ed in much low­er costs, but ulti­mate­ly, mak­ing “more, bet­ter, faster” into a reli­gion has shift­ed human priorities.

We learned to measure our worth on how fast we move and how big our pile is.

And what gets lost in the process? Self-worth, rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty, reflec­tion time. Exchanged for “Wow! You sure are a hard work­er! Let me add to your pile so every­one knows!”

This shift is real, and it’s from inter­nal to exter­nal val­i­da­tion. Titles and degrees become more impor­tant than depth and focus.

“Do you think people’s “Busy­ness” is yet anoth­er attempt to fill that end­less “hole” with­out doing the hard work of being alone with the empti­ness and/or hav­ing con­flicts and dis­cus­sions that need to hap­pen to resolve the hard things?”

For sure.

Peo­ple in gen­er­al have nev­er been much inter­est­ed in the work required to do in-depth per­son­al work. Busy-work (career, hob­bies, etc.) has always been the most con­ve­nient escape.

Con­fronting the “void” (the end­less “hole”) is (both from a Bud­dhist and Exis­ten­tial­ist POV) the thing most resist­ed, because it is the most feared.

Let me split this into two. First, let’s look at “the hole.”

The hole is what appears when we stop busy­ing our­selves. Med­i­ta­tion “proves” this.

You sit, you bring your atten­tion inward, and almost imme­di­ate­ly, the mind starts chat­ter­ing, throw­ing up images, sto­ries, aches and pains, all designed to do what we do best–distract our­selves from see­ing “the great emptiness.”

But if you “just sit” with the sound and light show, soon you start to notice gaps between sto­ries. As you choose not to be led astray by your sto­ries and imag­in­ings, the gap widens, and you peek through to… noth­ing. Empti­ness. That which lies behind or beyond “form.”

If you keep look­ing, you see, as the Heart Sutra says, that “Form is empti­ness, and empti­ness is form.” Empti­ness, or “the void,” is the screen upon which “real life” is cast. It’s the oth­er side of the coin of “real­i­ty.”

To get to this place, though, requires the courage to just “sit there,” and be with the terror that arises at confronting “non-being.”

Niet­zsche put it, “Bat­tle not with mon­sters, lest ye become a mon­ster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.“
The key word here is “bat­tle.”

Med­i­ta­tion, prop­er­ly prac­ticed, is not a bat­tle at all, but a “sit­ting with.” The void, the abyss, empti­ness, is who we are; and we are also “full­ness.” Our egos, designed to keep us stuck in illu­sion, wants us to fear the void. To do so, we fill it with mon­sters of our own making–what will peo­ple think, I am a bad per­son, peo­ple are out to get me–stories, fan­tasies designed to get us to stop look­ing and to go back to “being busy.”

The joke is, the void, the empti­ness is… emp­ty! We pop­u­late it with phan­toms so that we “don’t go there.” We cre­ate it, we for­get we cre­at­ed it, and then we scare our­selves with our for­got­ten creation.

The emptiness, vast and limitless, is as much our real home as is “the worlds” we concoct and call “form.” Or fullness.

Back to the quote: “…and/or hav­ing con­flicts and dis­cus­sions that need to hap­pen to resolve the hard things?”

Begin here. Are the writer’s “hard things” the same for me, for you? Of course not. You are the source for what you declare to be “hard.”

Rela­tion­ships end because the peo­ple have dif­fer­ent sto­ries about what is going on. Not one right, one wrong, but dif­fer­ent. So, real­ly, one is say­ing to the oth­er, “My scary, self-cre­at­ed sto­ry is true, yours is false, and because you won’t do things my way, it’s all your fault.”

The writer accu­rate­ly presents the “cure”–having con­flicts and discussions.

Exact­ly!

For the pur­pos­es of this arti­cle, make it, “Be scared by the mon­sters of my own imag­i­na­tion, but keep going by let­ting go of the fear. Then, share it and work it through anyway.”

Most people choose to simply avoid.

They have a fight that accom­plish­es noth­ing, then run and hide, then come back and apol­o­gise –with­out ever once dis­cussing, let alone resolv­ing, the issue. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The issue, the fear, the ter­ror, nev­er gets dis­cussed or worked through.

Why? Because the 2 peo­ple are too busy telling them­selves sto­ries, scar­ing them­selves, and think­ing end­ing a rela­tion­ship is a bet­ter alter­na­tive than fac­ing and shar­ing their self-cre­at­ed demons and monsters.

Sil­ly in the extreme.

Often, busy­ness is the tool that leads to rela­tion­ship destruction.

“..or at least a ter­rif­ic dis­trac­tion from real­ly think­ing about one’s life and doing any­thing mean­ing­ful about chang­ing it.”

Yup. Too busy tak­ing the kids to tap dance. Too busy at work. Too busy to sit down, every day, to express fears, angers, emo­tions. Too busy to sit still and talk issues through to res­o­lu­tion. Too busy for ther­a­py. Too busy to med­i­tate, to breathe, to process.

And then you get to find out what “too busy” bought you, as your self-cre­at­ed mon­sters bite you in the ass.

The inter­nal mon­sters you fear are actu­al­ly your friends. They tell you what to look at, and invite you to sit down and look. And then to do the “easy work” of shar­ing and work­ing through. (It’s either easy or hard, depend­ing on how you choose to see it.)

The void, the empti­ness, is right here, right now, and always is. You can run, but you can’t hide.

So, sit down and have a look, a breath, and anoth­er look. If you choose, you will dis­cov­er that the void look­ing back at you has a famil­iar face.

Yours.