INTO THE VOID

November 9th, 2018

Have an idea, start a project, write something down, it doesn’t matter what or how we produce our own personal form of generosity, there comes a time when you have to push that little bird out of the nest and let it fall into the void.

Think for a moment of the word coddle.  It means to treat in an overly indulgent or overprotective way.  But what good does this do?  We might answer this question more circumspectly by asking: what is the cause of such an impulse.  Clearly in manifests from a form of fear.  A fear of what the world will do to the thing that needs to be coddled.  Perhaps with infants and small children, this impulse is justified.  Injury is a real risk, no matter how it manifests. 

But what about the idea or the project that we are afraid to share or launch? 

The same fear certainly applies.  We fear that the world will hate it, or worse, be totally indifferent.  And so coddle takes on a larger expression of itself.  We coddle an idea or project out of a fear that this will happen, because we think that such a reaction from the world is a reflection on our own self. 

Indeed the logic seems sound here: we had an idea that we thought the world might like, but we turn out wrong, and this wrongness somehow translates to our person, and we become slathered in this wrongness. 

This is again, a case of mistaken identity.  We have the bad habit of mistaking the only object of consciousness as our own identity.  Intense emotions are perhaps the easiest way to understand this concept.  When enraged, we somehow become anger incarnate.  We lose ourselves in the process and drama of anger.  So to can be the case with disappointment.  We can lose ourselves in overwhelming concentration on the fact that an idea has failed.  The failure becomes a form of identity, that if too well entertained, may find some permanent hold in our mental house.

All such mistaken identity is an error of perspective.

By zooming out we can view the whole incident as an experiment with reality.  Even no feedback is potentially useful feedback if we only integrate it appropriately.

But the dazzling thing about the void is that it will play a sort of tennis with us.  Perhaps we will lob idea after idea into the void with nothing happening.  The void might seem like an insatiable eating machine that gives nothing back.  But if we keep at it, something will eventually strike, and hit back, and we will discover real feedback.

We would do best to launch everything and anything we can generate off into the void.  Simply put, it’s deceptive that we can see and hear the world because having such gives the illusion that it can be understood (and perhaps it can) and that tomorrow will look much like today.  But situations can change drastically for totally unseen reasons.  It’s this possibility that does us well to launch any and every idea off into the void.  There’s no telling which one might get volleyed back with a payload of gold.

This episode references Episode 93: The Generator.