In Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942) French poet Paul Valéry wrote:
"God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through."
Interestingly this is the year before Sartre's magnum opus Being and Nothingness was published in 1943. Certainly these ideas were doing the rounds.
Now I'm not familiar with "Existentialism" other than Heidegger riled against the inauthentic term and Kierkegaard my favourite modern philosopher would not recognise it.
But I mention "Nothing" here just to illustrate that it shows up across literature and history.
"Nothing" seems impossible to grasp. We grasp at things, so how can we grasp "Nothing." Well that is kind of the point. "Letting Go" depends upon appreciating the "Nothing" at the root of things.
It's not actually that weird. We know when we let go of things and they move out of centre stage in our lives, often quite suddenly like a window blowing open. One minute we are hot with the bother or industry of holding something and then the window blows open and we get the cool refreshing quiet of it having left us. Almost like a demon possession having ended, in fact exactly like a demon possession having left us.
Now we tend to live lives that get an external casing that we try to maintain. We need to be reliable to our spouses and our children and our employers and even to ourselves. We can't go "letting people down" by whimsically "letting go." This looks like "giving up." The great heroic myths of our predecessor culture Greece are all about staying true to a quest or trial or conquest and prevailing against the odds. Heracles or Hercules is one such super-human over coming seeming impossible challenges. He is not Nothing he is very much Something!
Our modern myths (American Hollywood especially) all are all about the hero prevailing whether that is defeating the enemy or winning the girl. We can't just let go half way through. An obvious example would be free climbing without ropes! Once you start you need to complete! Absolutely no "letting go." Not like that anyway. To have got to the position this climber has got to they will have had to let go many times else they would still be hanging on to the start of the climb!
Letting go is the opposite. It is being open to change, and arresting the ego when it makes habitual choices that go against the flow of reality. If you relationship is over then no point fighting pointlessly to keep something that is dead alive. How foolish would Heracles/Hercules have looked taking on a challenge that was really impossible and perishing.
This is very perplexing to the ego. How do I know when it is time to let go? How do I know when it is time to take hold? You can't really get anywhere with this kind of questioning because the Ego is the whole problem. Ego is the opposite of Nothing. It thinks it is something. With this something it infects everything. When we make choices they are based upon the solid foundation of this something. This is how we get out of sync with reality. The Ego can keep pounding on forever driven by its own inner something and ignore the outside world and change indefinitely. Life gets hard, and then we die. Dying is the ultimate change that Ego will rile against its whole life, somehow we think maybe we can defeat death or put it off at least by being healthy and safe. Yet it remains there as a hard wall against the Ego. This is the challenge against which no Hercules can prevail.
Or can they? This is the most famous example of a "Hercules" who over came the impossible and returned from death. But is this a twisting of the story?
Firstly no. Faith is the key to Jesus' teaching, and anything which inspires faith is good. Faith has one powerful feature: it defeats the Ego. The Ego sits there going "this is ridiculous", "I can't explain it", "it does not fit within my world view", "it is crazy", "I reject it". And in so doing the Ego reasserts itself as in control and unchallenged. But faith requires us to go beyond the Ego. So belief in Jesus challenges our Ego. That is the ironic win! The humble weak carpenters son achieves the greatest victory in History, even greater that Hercules!
But very easily the Ego can claim this. The Ego can and does very easily claim all attempted to overcome it. Wait a second it goes. So if I believe in Jesus then I gain immortality and no longer die. Awesome that is a deal. I will live forever and no long worry about death. Love you Jesus.
But its a cheat because it won't work. Following Jesus is to sell everything we own, and give our lives over to God. Suddenly Ego no longer comfortable. I won't do that, so we lose immortality, or stay a bit on the fence having our cake of Ego and trying to eat it as well by pretending to follow Jesus.
We are struggling because we are holding so tight to that fixed something in our lives. So what is this Nothing? Where is it?
In this painting by Lowry we have lots of people going about their lives. In the bottom right for example is a boy possible being told off and a woman pointing at him from her house steps, perhaps his mum. We can imagine what the boy and the woman are thinking and what is being said. Lives are being lived in this picture. It is interesting, there is meaning, there is lots of something to absorb into here.
But let us ask a bewildering and crazy question, a Twilight Zone question. Behind the woman is the edge of the painting! She can almost reach it if she turns around and leans. What does this woman think of the edge of painting and what lies beyond?
Woah!
Craziness!
This is the same question we face when we try to think of Nothingness. Now we can't deny there is a border around that painting, and if its possible to wonder what the woman is saying to the boy, its possible to wonder what she thinks of the white space around the picture.
This reveals something about context. All the "normal" stories we would create looking at that picture assume that the figures represent people. But they are not really people they are just colourful marks on a page and marks on a page cannot think. Yet despite the fact they are just "dolls" we are able to fill them with life and meaning. This ability to tell stories, to create what are called narratives, is the very essence of the "something". To make real progress we need to be able to separate the "narratives" from what they are about. That is very hard and takes long meditation practice. Separate the name/nama from the form/rupa.
Within the context of the picture we can make up a whole world of stories. Perhaps she is his mum. But step outside the picture and that is clearly just colours on a page. Its the same object but used in a different world, contexts, or as later Wittgenstein would say "language games." The same ball, but in one set of rules it's tennis and you hit the ball, but in another context it is a game of "one knee, two knee" and you catch the ball. Likewise in one set of rules she is talking, and in another she is colours on a page.
The whole "something" of what something is can be totally changed by the context, or the rules of the world it is in.
So when I ask her what does she think of the white border around her I am smashing up narratives. I steal the rules from one context where she can talk, and then apply to the other context where she is just colours on a page. These world's exclude one another and cannot mix. They have their own borders. Gilbert Ryle called this kind of thing "category mistakes" and argued that the difference been "body" and "mind" worked the same way.
This blog has got a bit more complicated than I wanted but the pattern still remains. Each context has its boundary that stops it mixing with other boundaries. The colours on the page cannot talk to the boy. The woman cannot speak about the white colours of the border.
Yet they exist. The picture is definitely bounded by the white border of this blog page, and she is definitely pointing at the boy and saying something. These are both things we can discuss and come to an objective conclusion on.
And this means that while the contexts do provide immanent limitations, the woman can never step out of the picture like the girl in the film The Ring, they do somehow fit together into the same world. We have quite happily skipped between being in the picture and being outside the picture and back in again.
Now how is this possible?
This is the Nothing. The ability to be listening to the woman one second, and a split second later wondering what she thinks of the border outside the picture.
The mind is agile, and can be here and there, and in this context, and outside this context instantly.
This is possible because it has no context of its own!
The problem happens when we start to take hold.
Perhaps we decide the boy is being unfairly scolded and we take to disliking the harsh woman. Perhaps that represents experiences of our own and it raises all kinds of emotions. Suddenly we cannot be so free and easy in stepping into the picture and out again. The woman has become something fixed!
The ultimate fixed thing though is not the woman in this picture but it is our self. And this is where ego and mind differ.
Yet we are literally just a painting. We have no more flesh and blood than the woman on the steps of that house!
Woah!
We are a narrative crafted around, not colours on a page, but instead memories, feelings, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, possessions, friends, hopes, fears all the things that surround us.
So this blog has once again got long. But the whole problem of life and death lies in holding onto the narrative and not seeing it exactly like the character painted above so that we can drop in and pull out again from multiple contexts. And to do that requires letting go of each context and not getting stuck in the something, being open to asking a crazy context-busting question like "what is the white around the picture like" that mixes contexts and breaks us out of a particular fixed world and context.
So the first thing we think here is: oh no that is nonsense I need protect myself because unlike the woman I am a real person who if I don't look after myself will die. That is a fixed reality. And that fear of death and the struggle to exist fuel belief in the solid something self, the Ego.
But this is where separating narrative from what they are about is SO important.
The woman who is pointing in the picture is really just colours on a page, but colours on a page cannot point!
The Ego that is scared of death is really just a body, but a body cannot be scared of death!
It is the exact same difference.
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