The Void
The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil. To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
One of the things I’ve been grappling with is how different individuals cope with “the void”. “The Void” can mean different things to different people. When I say “The Void,” you’d probably think of a large gaping hole in the abyss. It is in actual fact, The Void. Phenomenologically speaking, “The Void” can be linked to subjects like depression or just plain emptiness in one’s life. The question is, how do we as a collective, come round to understanding “The Void”?
Void in the 21st Century
The elites want us to do work that sucks our soul. Convention would say that I'm being overly dramatic, that working is part of life; we just have to get on with it — it's our human duty. But years ago, even peasants didn’t have to work that hard. The paradox of development and progress is that we pay the price for everything that we've gained. Every advantage or convenience is a curse waiting to consume us.
“The void” can partly be blamed on modernisation and globalisation. But who exactly are the puppet masters of modernisation and globalisation? All of these can be traced back to two of the richest families in history, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds . With members of the two bloodlines having a part to play in the World Economic Forum, it is not hard to see who the main players are in our global chessboard. Despite their wealth and power, we have come to see the true colours of the global elites — they want us to own nothing but apparently still be happy.
Despite the interconnectedness that modernisation and globalisation has blessed us with, many are suffering from a void that has been masked by terms like “mental health” or “chemical imbalance in the brain”. In Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Burnout Society, he mentions that depression happens in a society that says “nothing is impossible.”
The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.”
In a society that overvalues work but neglects rest, there is an epidemic of depression that lends to the void of society. The way we deal with depression as a society is a testament to how we solve other humanity-related problems. Many of us treat depression as a form of “sickness,” that if someone is depressed, they need to be cured immediately. Pills are given to cure this “sickness,” with little regard for their side effects. The most common misinformation is the ridiculous belief that depression is due to the lack of serotonin or a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is obviously false and couldn’t be further from the truth.
Embracing the Void: The Benefits of Depression
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The idea that space is something sacred isn’t just known to philosophers or spiritualists. In interior design, there is this theory called the sacred space theory which is a space designated for individuals to connect with themselves.
While interior designers have the concept of scared space, Jungian analysts have the concept of sitting with darkness, which is unlike anything modern healthcare would ever advocate for. In The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves, James Hollis mentioned,
Our analysts didn't tell us how to get rid of our depressions, but more likely to go back to our flats, and sit with that darkness till we went crazy, went home, or the meaning of the depression revealed itself to us.
When lockdown happened, all of us had to be comfortable with that space. That was truly a blessing in as disguise, as Simone Weil mentioned, it is “only through that void can God come to fill that space.”
Besides connecting with ourselves, Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian analyst, claims that depression is the perfect chance for us to connect and commune with the divine principle.
It is much better to let such black thoughts come up and to dialogue with them. Then very often they become the bread bringers and connect us with God. A depression is really meant to reconnect one with the divine principle.
Depression also offers us the chance to reinvent ourselves, to shed the dead layers of who we are not, to become more of who we are. And by choosing the modern route of numbing our subconscious signals with pills, we destroy the chances of getting to know ourselves deeply.
Jung said that at the bottom of every depression, and there is always a bottom there, one will find a task, the addressing of which will take one's life in a new direction.
— James Hollis, Ph.D., The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves, p. 19.
Embracing the Void: The Art of Doing Nothing
Laozi, a pioneer of the Taoist concept of action via inaction emphasises on allowing events in our lives to unfold and flow naturally. Instead of forcing events and outcomes, what better way to sit back, relax, and let life run its course.
Like Laozi, Naval Ravikant states that:
Some of the most creative and productive people I have ever met work in multi-week bursts and then have weeks where they just idle with little done. It’s the nature of the human animal.
Of course, Naval is not suggesting that you spent the rest of your life in idleness but here, he is proving a point where work and rest are part of the same coin. You cannot have one without the other.
In her book The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz emphasises that even while we are doing absolutely nothing, the mind is still running in the background; our thoughts are forming its own thoughts, operating through the unconscious. A necessary action for generating ideas and just getting our creative faculties up to par with the greats of society.
Before the birth of the hero or heroine, there is often such a long period of sterility; and then the child is born supernaturally. Put into psychological language, we know that before a time of outstanding activity in the unconscious, there is a tendency toward a long period of complete passivity. It is, for instance, a normal condition in the creative personality that before some new piece of work in art or a scientific idea breaks through, people usually pass through a period of listlessness and depression and waiting; life is stale. If one analyzes them, one sees that the energy is meanwhile accumulating in the unconscious.
So these periods of sterility mean that something specific is in preparation in the unconscious.
Creating Out of the Void
In our rational and materialistic society, many discount the work of the unconscious. Thanks to the internet, many are starting to realise the gift of the unconscious via the re-emergence of depth psychology, and yet there are many who still approach subjective matters with a rational approach. According to von Franz,
Rational consciousness needs to be dimmed by a depression in order that the new light may be found, with new creative possibilities.
Out of the old comes the new.