The Screaming Void Approached (Part Two)

When actor William Shatner (now 90) recently went into space, he remarked about two things which left him awe-struck. News reports picked up on the first. It was ironic and moving that the man who had played Star Trek’s “Captain Kirk” and famously intoned the catch-phrase “to go where no man has gone before” was, in the end, brought to tears upon beholding the eggshell-thin blue rim of Earth’s atmosphere, and perceiving at one stroke the fragility and unity of his home planet.

His second observation was left hanging by the newscasters — because no one really knows what to make of it. Shatner said that, having made the 66-mile jaunt past the boundary of the blue familiar (the swirling ocean of air that fills us and binds us to each other), he was flummoxed by the complete and invariant blackness of space. There was no “final frontier.” It obliterated every horizon. The utter darkness was as close as skin, and yet more empty than can really be imagined.

This is, of course, how our earthly senses perceive outer space, and, truly, how our human animal cognition of the spacetime dimensions colors our experience of the “vacuum” beyond the limit of the Earth sky. If our bodies, our senses, perceived other wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum (infrared, radio wave, microwave, gamma ray) we would see the universe not as hugely, ominously black and empty, but shining with titanic amounts of energy and activity. If we could perceive the quantum scale, we would discover ourselves suspended in a mystery of paradoxical identities and evanescent realities, the farthest “edges” of every object overlapping and coextensive, the ocean of space boiling with ghosts.

Then again, we are products of the most destructive collision in the history of the Universe, when matter and anti-matter collided and obliterated each other; for reasons unknown, an asymmetry in the collisions preserved one-billionth of the original stuff of the Universe, eventually strung out across the heavens in glittering galaxies. Stranger still, 85% of the bulk of the Universe pulls us toward it with the inexorable attraction of things to each other (or, perhaps more accurately, via the property of things to bend black and “featureless” spacetime around themselves, causing them all to “fall” together). Yet, this 85% refuses to show itself through light or fusion or touch, in no way revealing its presence except for the constant pulling — the acceleration, the yearning.

If we could see much farther into intergalactic space (our hunter’s eyes were not evolved to see such dim prey), maybe we would observe the strange and disconcerting phenomenon that the Universe seems to be flying away from itself — galaxies and their constituent stars and worlds are moving ever farther apart, speeding faster and faster into the…and, again, it is here that our minds break, our prepositional language-logic at a loss. What this expansion means, and what is causing it, are deep mysteries fundamentally tied to the mystery of what this “empty” space is that shocked William Shatner when he came face to face with it for four minutes before dropping back into the bubble of life on earth.

The vacuum of space is the ultimate nail in the coffin of our separation and isolation, isn’t it? Under this lonely sky we made our stories and charted our prophesies, built our civilizations and imagined our philosophies, including the epistemology bedrock of our understanding: how do we know what we know? Our sense of place in the Universe has been profoundly shaped not only by our sense of what is important and worth receiving attention, but also by our sense of what is absent — the emptiness all around.

In Part One, we put forth the idea that reality is a kaleidoscope where there’s no such thing as two paths forward from an either/or choice that leaves everything else in the world the same. Any shift of the kaleidoscope and the entire prismatic image shifts. Yet, what if our perception of emptiness is likewise skewed? What if it’s the case that at no level or scale of the Universe can anything be parsed and discarded as extraneous? How would we live then? What would that do to our profound (personal and cultural) fear of death — fear of non-being, fear of being forgotten?

To begin to answer that question, we must return to the second question raised in Part One, namely: does anyone truly care about me? In the course of addressing that question, I claimed there are two axes of illusion inherent in the asking of it. One, as we discussed, is the nature of the “anyone” considered — they are not fixed in identity, nor permanent or immortal.

The second axis of illusion is the nature of the “me” considered — you are not fixed in identity, you are also properly understood as a transient event existing as the sum of partial-derivative events or “beings” who create you, and simultaneously existing as a component event of something (or many things) larger and more enduring…because everything is connected.

Ken Wilber has used the word “holonomic” to refer to this nested Russian-doll aspect of the identity of anyone and anything. (And, truly, the word “sum” is not correct, as used above, for these are actually synergistic dynamics in which the whole, at any level, is more than the sum of its parts.)

Point is, the “you” you think you know is not as all-encompassing as it seems to “you.” We know that this is the case. People are regularly astonished by the phenomenon of placing their fingertips upon the planchette of a ouija board and witnessing the cursor move around informatively in spite of the fact that all participants will swear that they are not directing the movement. (In controlled studies, researchers have found that at any given moment, at least one of the participants is looking with at least one eye at the next destination for the planchette, although who is the one looking is unpredictable and constantly changing.)

The experience is explained scientifically by ideomotor movement — that is, purposeful movement without awareness of the intent or of the motion. Also familiar is the experience of performing a larger-scale task without immediate memory of having done it. The most well-known example is driving somewhere and arriving at the destination with no recollection of the journey. On the spookier end of the spectrum, some people report about certain locations where they have become stuck in a repetitive loop of behavior without awareness of how or why it was happening.

For instance, one concierge of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego tells a story of how he went to a room of a certain floor in the massive building, slipped a room-service bill under the door, and walked away down the corridor and around a corner to continue his business. In his next moment of self-aware consciousness, he found himself standing before the door where he previously delivered the bill, again with bill in hand. Shaking off the daydream, he slipped the bill under the door, and went on his way. Again, he “comes to” in front of the door to the room. His fellow employees would later tell him that he was missing for 90 minutes — an hour and a half during which he was unable to escape the loop of experience which was physically returning him to the spot in front of that door. Ultimately, it was only by managing to sustain his subjective experience of walking away and turning the corner, until he could at last walk outside the hotel and stand in the sunlight of the front courtyard, that he was able to break the loop.

(Interesting side-note: The Hotel del Coronado has been described by custodians and by ghosts in alleged EVP ghostbox sessions as a purgatory— a sort of supernatural minnow trap, if you like — where once inside, consciousness becomes confused, and cannot find its way out.)

You are a mystery, your “wheelhouse” of awareness is, in fact, not aware of vast amounts of your experience that are inaccessible to the workaday logistical consciousness that has been experientially and formally trained to hold a set of expectations about reality.

Not only that, teenagers, but — like all people — you are evolving within your own lifespan. You are, as you are well-aware, within a window of rapid and more extreme transformation of your being, second only to the bootstrapping period of “clawing toward singular existential consciousness” that occurs in the first two years of life from infancy through to toddling. Contrary to what you may have been told, this transformation that began in your final years of childhood and continues through puberty is not standardized and predictable, nor is it ordinary.

It is, whether society is fit to acknowledge it or not, an unavoidable rite of passage…and the question becomes: to what end or destination is it headed?

The last years of childhood and the early teenage years are, for many people, a time of mystery and adventure. Undoubtedly, it’s why Stephen King has centered several of his stories on groups of kids in this age range. I know a person who is sure that, for a brief period of about 40 seconds, she witnessed her sister hovering in midair in their bedroom. For months, they had practiced trying to fly by leaping off their beds. I know a person who’s best friend, a kind and gentle soulmate, died when they were both fourteen. Her world changed, she reconnected to an awareness of voices in the wind, strange synchronicities, magical portents. She saw signs of her friend’s presence everywhere, and it threw open again the doors to a life of mystery in the midst of a troubled and rebellious time for her.

It is when we fall in love with the Anima or Animus for the first time. It is the time-frame when schizophrenia often onsets. It is a period of adventuring further from home, on your own, trusted to walk to the park to meet friends or walk home from the library in the twilight. It is a time when alcohol and other mind-altering plants and chemicals are first encountered. It is an era when the costumes and the masks change, the music shifts from childhood to something darker, driving, longing. It is a moment when the bottom falls out on your sense of self, and is replaced by something new and much more wild, more secret. Like the expanding Universe where every galaxy moves farther and evermore rapidly away from all the others, so too in this time you become a galaxy of uniqueness, sailing away at unapproachable speed into regions of space and mystery that cannot be crossed by any other body, only by light and love and remembered pain.

And yet.

And yet, there is that inter-connectedness of all things, which creates a common destination, a unifying current to the whole movement of your being and all the beings around you, all the beings who have gone before you. Society doesn’t talk about it, and society has largely lost the means to talk about it. Just as there is so much more aboard your ship (and in the sea) than your wheelhouse can account for, so it is that society’s helm of politics and shared speech and doctrine and law and common sense cannot account for the direction in which the ship of our shared lives is sailing. Beyond the horizon of loneliness is the world’s greatest mystery: the simultaneous, occult meaning of everything.

You want to be cared for. You want to be cradled and held back from despair. You want to be protected from pain. Unfortunately (at least for many of you), this journey will go right through those experiences…and beyond. That is the promise. We will examine many wonderful and scary things in the course of this investigation, but ultimately, we are headed beyond fear to something much more astonishing that will transform your life.

Yet, a word of warning.

There is a maxim that many people live by: God only gives you what you can handle. The idea here is that life is a series of lessons prepared for maximizing your grace; and further, that these lessons are custom-designed to challenge but not exceed your resources and capacities. Your experiences will change you and grow you, but not destroy you.

On the flip-side is the philosophy of existentialism, developed in the 20th century (and, not coincidentally, following on the heels of much scientific discovery about the Universe and the “vacuum” of space). Existentialism says that reality is so terrible — and, specifically, so terribly random and unjust — that to confront the truth of the situation causes a severe mental breakdown; and therefore, most people live a more palatable lie. Existentialists say that healing comes through the living act of being “truth” — that is, being your entire authentic self.

That is a worthy aim. It is the hope within this writing, that you find the way to be your authentic self. Yet neither of these (very human) perspectives is correct or accurate. Everywhere humanity looks, what once appeared to be random chaos or insignificant is revealing itself to be complexly intricate, fractal, to the point of being deterministic but not predictable.

What that means is that many (all?) features of the Universe are causally linked — determining each other — but those linkages are nested in such complex patterns of triggering that what happens next is inherently unpredictable. And, that’s not for lack of measuring precisely enough. Better radar isn’t going to let meteorologists know with 100% accuracy how the weather’s changing. It is an emergent mystery; but it’s also not random. There is an order and a meaning to everything that has to be lived to be appreciated.

Yet, it is not the case that life gives you just what you can chew and no more. Tell that to the father and child who stood upon a rock gazing out at the Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives, only to be swept away by a sneaker wave that swelled up on them in that moment. Both were drowned. Tell that to the man who carefully opened his canary’s cage to let the bird out for exercise, only to have the canary hurtle toward his head, strike him in the temple with its beak and kill him instantly. (These are both true stories.)

Life is strange, unfair, full of features we customarily edit out in order to preserve our peace and sanity. It is rot and muck and millions of years of calm punctuated with sudden hours of cataclysmic violence.

The only reason you survive is because you are also vast, with mysterious resources emerging within you. If we can look past the obvious about you, if we can see something other than the matte black loneliness of your singularity…what will we find?