In 1970 when I was twenty years old and in college, I read a newly published book entitled “The Experience of Nothingness.” The author, philosopher Michael Novak, was visiting our campus, and I wanted to know what he had to say so I could engage him in conversation.
I still remember his visit vividly fifty years later. I sat on the floor before him in a room on the top floor of the Student Union and asked him questions. His ideas resonated with me. At that point in my life I considered myself an existentialist, although I was seriously exploring spiritual traditions. In fact later that year I declared myself a Religion major, going “all in” on my spiritual search.
His book described my experience. It was a powerful awareness of the indescribable depths of existence. The only vocabulary I had to articulate my experience at the time was the language of existentialism. This Depth was neither something nor nothing. Nothingness described it as well as any word. Yet this awareness of No-thing-ness felt very spiritual, hence my attraction to spirituality and religion.
The existentialist author Camus called this “the absurd.” He saw it as evidence of a universe without meaning. Sartre had a book called “Being and Nothingness.” Popularly the experience was called “existential angst.” These days that phrase is a cliché that means little more than a teenage or midlife crisis, but in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust, era it was powerfully fresh and profound. One was called to live an authentic life in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence.
Now I look back on that time in my life and realize that I was in touch with the Holy and did not realize it. I was aware of the essence of the universe and human nature. This was God without all the fluff and religious tradition. This experience of bare essence that was powerfully present and real to me as a twenty-year old is what I would now call Reality, the Divine, the Holy, Godhead or God Beyond God. It is Godness, for want of a better term. God beyond images. It is Nothingness in the sense that God is not a thing among things or a being among beings.
I tend to call it the Ground of Being or Being Itself as Tillich does, but I could equally call it Non-Being. It is the Source the duality of Being and Non-Being come from. I call this reality God, but this is not the traditional theistic Deity of Western religion. It is older than God.
In 1970 when I was twenty years old and in college, I read a newly published book entitled “The Experience of Nothingness.” The author, philosopher Michael Novak, was visiting our campus, and I wanted to know what he had to say so I could engage him in conversation.
I still remember his visit vividly fifty years later. I sat on the floor before him in a room on the top floor of the Student Union and asked him questions. His ideas resonated with me. At that point in my life I considered myself an existentialist, although I was seriously exploring spiritual traditions. In fact later that year I declared myself a Religion major, going “all in” on my spiritual search.
His book described my experience. It was a powerful awareness of the indescribable depths of existence. The only vocabulary I had to articulate my experience at the time was the language of existentialism. This Depth was neither something nor nothing. Nothingness described it as well as any word. Yet this awareness of No-thing-ness felt very spiritual, hence my attraction to spirituality and religion.
The existentialist author Camus called this “the absurd.” He saw it as evidence of a universe without meaning. Sartre had a book called “Being and Nothingness.” Popularly the experience was called “existential angst.” These days that phrase is a cliché that means little more than a teenage or midlife crisis, but in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust, era it was powerfully fresh and profound. One was called to live an authentic life in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence.
Now I look back on that time in my life and realize that I was in touch with the Holy and did not realize it. I was aware of the essence of the universe and human nature. This was God without all the fluff and religious tradition. This experience of bare essence that was powerfully present and real to me as a twenty-year old is what I would now call Reality, the Divine, the Holy, Godhead or God Beyond God. It is Godness, for want of a better term. God beyond images. It is Nothingness in the sense that God is not a thing among things or a being among beings.
I tend to call it the Ground of Being or Being Itself as Tillich does, but I could equally call it Non-Being. It is the Source the duality of Being and Non-Being come from. I call this reality God, but this is not the traditional theistic Deity of Western religion. It is older than God. The theistic God is born of this.
As the fourth chapter of the Tao Te Ching says:
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
I love that! Of course traditional Christians will argue that this is impossible, that nothing is older than God by definition. I would respond that the theistic God is not God, but a creation of the human mind. What I am talking about is before mind. This was my awareness from my teen years, even though I could not put words to it. I can’t really put words to it now, although I try. I don’t know if this awareness is common to all people or not. I suspect it is.
It is the awareness that the physical world is not reality, but is an expression of reality. It is real only as a product of our physical senses. Our awareness of the physical world emerges from this Void, as does the physical world itself. It is the root of consciousness and all that exists. I see this pictured in the Bible in the formlessness and emptiness that the opening words of Genesis say preceded creation.
The Bible opens with the Hebrew creation story. It says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was a formless and void (or formless and empty), and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
The opening words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is considered by scholars to be the title of the book and of the section. The creation account really begins with the second sentence. “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.”
By “earth” the Hebrew writer was not thinking of the third planet from the sun. He meant the cosmos. This is not the birth of our solar system but the universe. This “formless and void and darkness” we can call nothingness or emptiness. It is what Christian theologians are referring to when they speak about “creatio ex nihilo.” Creation out of nothing.
This Genesis passage was retold in the story of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River. Jesus was in a watery abyss and the spirit of God hovered over the waters in the form of a dove, just like the Spirit hovered over the primordial waters of creation. Jesus was being recreated – born again as the Christ. This symbolism is likewise present in the Flood story of Genesis when the dove hovers over the face of the water as they recede, producing a new creation. These are all referring to creative nothingness.
Nothingness is the matrix of what we consciously understand as the world. It is the essence of reality. It is Reality. This nihilo is not meaningless and does not end in nihilism. Nothingness is not nothing. It is called nothingness because when you dive into it, you cease to exist. Only God is. This is what both nothing and something come from. This is nonduality which all dualities come. It is what the Buddhists call Suchness or Thusness or Tathata (/ˈtədəˌtä/).
It is Emptiness but it is a full of potentiality and actuality, which is obvious by the fact that everything comes from it. The Tao Te Ching says:
“Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;
yet it is its center that makes it useful.
You can mold clay into a vessel;
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;
but the ultimate use of the house
will depend on that part where nothing exists.
Therefore, something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not.”
This Spaciousness is what I mean by Nothingness. It was before anything. It is what lies behind and around and within everything that we call this world. It is right here right now, completely obvious. It infringes upon our consciousness at all times. It lies at the periphery of our vision, just out of sight of our eyes and mind, but obviously present. It is only by effort that we are willfully unaware of this Suchness. This is Tao; this is Divine.
This is the essence of existence, and it is our true nature and identity. This is obvious. It was obvious to me as a teenager, yet no one seemed to be talking about it. The preacher and Sunday School teachers certainly did not talk about it in church. Yet this awareness was my constant companion, which is the term in the Gospel of John for the Holy Spirit. Like the Holy Spirit this is beside us and within us. This is how Jesus described the Kingdom of God. It is called nothingness simply because it cannot be identified. It is “not this” and “not that.” Neti, neti.
This is always just beneath the surface of things. It is also right on the surface of things. It is the surface. It is the depths. It is the essence of everything that we see and hear and feel and think. It is reality. Everything is an expression of this. The sensory world is unreal in comparison. But of course you can’t compare this to anything because it is everything.
This is God or the Kingdom of God or Ultimate Reality. This is the Holy. This is the Ground of Being. It is the Mysterium Tremendum. It is the Numinous. Like Pascal said in his famous memorial, this is the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude, certitude; feeling, joy, peace.” It is the Essence of Existence. It is everything and nothing. I first experienced this as Nothingness. Now I see it is also Everythingness. It is the All. It is what we are, what I am. It is I AM.