Two Kinds of Void
Thirty-five years ago, my wife, Joan, authored a paper for an art history course in which she contrasted the Buddhist sense of nothingness, the Void that is the All, with the Western existential dread of annihilation, the nihilistic void. These two kinds of void strongly influenced the art produced by Asian artists, epitomized in the serene gardens of Kyoto, and that of Western artists affirming themselves with visceral force in the paintings of the abstract expressionists.
I later used Joan’s concept of two kinds of void in developing a positive psychology of intuition and spirit in contrast to existing dynamic psychologies based on conflict, repression and pathology. The paradigm I propose in The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm provides a substrate for understanding the two kinds of void. The physical core of experience established at the first tier of consciousness is continuous, undifferentiated and unvoiced. It is the source of the plurabilities (see Of Two Minds #10) that we articulate as we differentiate the entities and events we create at the verbal-symbolic tier. The continuous physical core is the basis for our experience of the infinite void, the Void that is the All, and it is the ground from which we recognize a potentially unlimited array of plurabilities.
As we identify features within the undifferentiated core and recognize entities and events at the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness, we define a world in accordance with our own assumptions. The world that we create remains vulnerable to questioning, criticism and disproof. This world, without its grounding in the physical core, is little more than a fragile façade that staves off an ever-threatening possibility of annihilation. This is the threat experienced by the existentialists, a loss of meaning and control in the face of the nihilistic void.
The nihilistic void is experienced as a threat when the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness that we create is abstracted away from its grounding in the physical core. If we question conscious expressions that are only remotely tied to their core grounding, we can become lost, uncertain, frightened and perhaps even experience nausea. The verbal-symbolic version of the world we create in accordance with our own assumptions gives only the illusion of control.
The realities we encounter at the first tier of consciousness are continuous, unvoiced and undifferentiated. The grounding we establish at the first tier is the generative source for all of the possible worlds we could construct from the realities we encounter, plurabilities we find useful and differentiate into entities and events. A seemingly unlimited number of potential worlds can be developed from this undifferentiated source. Our dependence on the reality of the specific version we create leaves us vulnerable.
Any version of the world we articulate at the verbal-symbolic tier stands as a house of cards. The world we know is constructed more or less soundly on our undifferentiated core of experience, but if the world we create becomes our only reality, we remain at risk. Each challenge to the entities and events we have assembled threatens the world we have constructed with annihilation. We maintain our grounding at the physical core by acknowledging that the world we know is transient, one of many possible ways of representing reality.
The world of entities and events we create at the verbal-symbolic tier is not an illusion, but it represents only one version of an underlying reality. It rests upon the continuous physical core at the first-tier, void of form, for its ultimate grounding. These two kinds of void, empty and full, inform our sense of being in the world and impact the choices we make in our lives. The artistic sensibilities and creations Joan described in her art history paper powerfully illustrate these differences.
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