For the last few years I’ve spent most of my time helping other writers, but lately I’ve been also working on a writing project of my own.
I’ve always been enthralled with the void. Darkness. What’s not seen. Once you start to pay attention to it, it’s everywhere. Silence. The wind. It starts within.
Everyone experiences the void at one point or another. Some visit it frequently. The wisest among us learn to see it as an old friend; as potential—a portal into the unknown. Culturally, we are taught to fill any emptiness in our lives. Fill it with a pill, a person, an accomplishment. We escape any sense of lack with meditation, microdosing, therapy, or shopping. Many of us are on a mindless race to Nowhere which, ironically, is precisely where the healing lies: in the void. A place of endless possibility, hiding in plain sight.
The void is in the negative space of a photograph, the absence of sound between two notes of music; a pause in conversation, darkness when you close your eyes. It’s in the dark energy of the cosmos, the black holes that form as giant stars collapse. It’s transformative power and simple application begins to make sense when you consider how the void, the invisible is woven into every domain of life.
I’ve spent the last year researching and studying different manifestations of the void for a book I am writing. I started to look deeper into how the void appears in our bodies and minds, in the cosmos and beyond. I talked to cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, oceanographers, astronauts, linguistic experts and brain research fellows at MIT. I wanted to understand how the void shows up in matter, the cosmos, biology, science, architecture, neuroscience, languages, religion, and philosophy. As I learned about all of the different dimensions and cultural expressions of the unseen, something remarkable happened: I stopped chasing and yearning.
It amazed me to learn that even our biology involves an element of the unseen. Take human vision for example. There’s evidence that our visual perception relies on gists, our eyes make predictions, filling in the holes as it were about what we actually see with our own two eyes. The same is true of our ears and the way we hear. Some neuroscientists I interviewed believe that what we interpret as consciousness is more likely the prediction, rather than the real-time feed. I learn about dark holes and cosmic vacuums, another part of our universe that seems filled with emptiness and yet the opposite is true.
If this appeals to you, I am looking for beta readers for early draft chapters of the book and will share more as this unfolds.
I would love to hear your thoughts.