The Magic of the Void
By Kenneth Johnson

It's a place that is not a place, a state of consciousness much sought after, and yet entirely nonexistent. After all, "void" means nothing, right? It's part of a New Age nomenclature which may well stretch on into infinity.

So what is the void, anyway?

That depends on who you talk to.

The 1960s Void

I suspect that most members of the New age community first learned about the void back in the 1960s - that is, if they're old enough for that - whence it came bursting into the collective consciousness thanks to Tim Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner's interesting, though sometimes fanciful, translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This notorious "Harvard three" made the void sound like a perpetual psychedelic fantasy of colors and lights.

But according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead itself, the void is actually something quite different from this psychedelic fantasy. In fact, it isn't a something at all. It's a nothing.

In classic Buddhism, the word for void is sunyata, which means simply "emptiness." But there's a catch to this particular emptiness. It actually signifies the emptiness that occurs after you have poured something out of a container. So the void is where you go after you empty out all your garbage, all your thoughts, all your conditioning, everything human or imperfect, and so on.

The True Nature of the Void

If everything is a creation of the mind, then what is left over? What is there that had not been created by the busy, active, restless entity that is your mind?

And the answer is, you guessed it, the void. The void is the primal state of emptiness which occurs when everything else is cleared out. It is not quite the same thing as Nirvana. This emptying is, in fact, the goal of most Eastern meditation.

There's also a void in the Western tradition. And no, I don't mean just a gap in our knowledge. I mean a conceptual void, similar to the ideas of the Eastern philosophies.

It is mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis in the Bible: "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep." Is this the same void? You bet. The actual Hebrew term is tohu bohu, and it is a peculiar void indeed. Way back in Babylon, the primal chaos, or void from which all things sprang, was perceived as a dragon, and the dragon's name was Tiamat. The Hebrew Bible contains a great deal of common Near Eastern myth disguised as theology. Tohu bohu, therefore, is none other then the cosmic dragon Tiamat - meaning chaos and the void are seen in the Western tradition as a kind of serpent or dragon, a formless chaotic energy from which all things began.

And the dragon is a lady. Tiamat is a female dragon, and one suspects that tohu bohu was the same. In Babylon, a godly patriarch named Marduk kills the dragon, and in the Bible Yahweh does the same thing - except that the dragon has taken on a different name and is referred to as Leviathan.

So focused rational consciousness exerts its control over mystic, mysterious, serpentine, and feminine depths of energy which is the void.

Some of you would like to say at this point: This is not necessarily a good thing!

But do take note of the fact that this Western void seems decidedly feminine in character. After all, the dragon was a lady. Can we say the same thing of the Buddhist void?

W.Y. Evans-Wentz, the original translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, says that: "Bliss is the father, and the void which perceives it is the mother. Radiance is the father, and the void which perceives it is the mother. Intellect is the father. Void is the mother."

East or West, all the same.

The void is where you go when you lay down the heavy burden of the intellect and return into the eternal empty space of the cosmic mother.

Happy trails to you.