I recently watched a “video essay” on the films of Ingmar Bergman, in which it was claimed that “no one has ever gone so deeply” into the human unconscious through the medium of film. According to the essayist, Bergman penetrates the world of dreams and the understrata of the human soul like no other. I have not seen any of Bergman’s films besides the Seventh Seal, which I thought excellent, and I have little doubt that Bergman does so penetrate the realms of human psychology. Nevertheless, I was struck, as I am often struck, by the grandeur, even romance (no matter how dark), that these realms are often implied to have by those who treat of them. Certainly, there is grandeur, romance, and profound beauty in the human soul, but there is also delusion of the basest sort, foolishness, banality, and littleness. It so often happens that the most fundamental (by which I merely mean the most common) facts of our inner lives are not material for art, but only the passing dust of an empty landscape, or worse. So much of our mind’s activity is a grasping at nothingness, a futility of movement with no purpose or discernible cause.
At least it is so for myself, and of course I cannot speak of the inner life of others. I must assume that my mind, as a human mind, is in some ways identical with other human minds. Now, perhaps the purpose of the artist is to distill the quotidian traffic of our lives, and of our inner lives, into a crystal, an artefact of time and space that reflects the drama and beauties of these superficially uninteresting moments. Perhaps the artist is able to peel back the average and ordinary and see good and evil at war, the human spirit, the transcendent, the beautiful. Certainly, this is part of the artist’s task. Nevertheless, I suspect that some realities (if they can be called such) really are hollow, are no more than the skin of the nothingness that wears them. Such, I believe, are many of the daily thoughts that bubble up from the unconscious and flit across our minds. Some of these thoughts may, if closely observed, reveal an eventual pattern, but many of them are cracks in our being where patterns and order and light are absent, and randomness and sheer quantity pour forth. Like sulfur geysers on the ocean floor, nothingness leaks into our souls and up into our inner workings.
An artist may utilize the fact of these inner workings to progress an artistic whole, but by being integrated into that whole, the nature (or perhaps better the absence of nature) of this psychic flotsam is violated. Were an artist to truly imitate such activity, the result would be chaos, pure absence in the guise of reality. This could not by any sane definition be considered art.
These cracks and the artefacts they produce are the source of madness, the dynamic entry point of unreality. Some of us, in our more sensitive moments, may be unfortunate enough to peer into one of these cracks and encounter the nothingness that lurks there. Such a vision grants a glimpse at annihilation, it reveals why evil is a non-substance, a rampant nothingness, and in particular why nothingness is evil.
Of course, such a claim is contradictory; a person cannot know or experience nothingness. Speaking on the level of a superficial logic, this is correct. Nevertheless, such an experience is possible, and so we must fit our logic to take account of this fact. It may not be an “experience” properly speaking, but it is not an absence of experience, either, for one feels it, remembers it. In standing on that precipice and looking out, one recognizes nothingness, one knows the void. I do not know how, but I know that this may happen. Consider, for instance, the following account of a dream given by Pavel Florensky:
I did not see any images. The experience was a purely interior one. Utter darkness, almost materially dense, surrounded me. Powers of some kind dragged me to the edge and I felt this to be the edge of God’s being, that beyond it is absolute Nothing. I wanted to scream but could not. I knew that in one more moment I would be expelled into that outer darkness. The darkness began to flow into my whole being. Half my consciousness of self was lost, and I knew that this was absolute, metaphysical annihilation.1
Perhaps the most terrifying element of such a moment is precisely the recognition that occurs. One feels a certain kinship with the nothingness and feels a kind of inertia, as if one were being pulled back into it.
This should be no surprise for the Christian, for whom all that is comes from nothingness. When we look into the void, then, we see our first ancestor, the darkness upon which we are as but lambent flickering. One may well wonder in such moments if one is real at all, and the answer that is ultimately returned may be “no.” Indeed, all things of this order—of the created order, that is—are, at base, nothing at all. We may have sudden and direct encounters with this nothingness, as I have described above, or we may get subtle intimations of it in the apparent vacuity of the world around us. I have known people who have been periodically haunted by the sense that behind the thin crust of the world accessible to their immediate experience, there is a vast Nothing, a void that peaks out at them with terrifying visage. Standing on a bridge made of wooden boards, such people will stare into the slats and feel that they do not lead anywhere, that the darkness contains this Nothing, and that they are upon a small island isolated in a sea of night. There is, so I am told, a psychological condition in which this sensation becomes overwhelming, and even the apparent fact of one’s own existence and experience seems hollow and unreliable; unreality pulsing through a hologram. I suspect that many of us have experienced this to some extent in moods of melancholy or contemplation.
The sense that all beyond one’s own awareness is nonbeing may appear to be solipsistic, but I believe it is an encounter with a genuine truth, indeed with two genuine truths. The person who feels the edges of his consciousness and feels Nothingness lurking there—as contradictory as such a statement might appear—has not become delusional, but has rather dispensed with one of the most common and yet questionable assumptions of human life: the existence of a world beyond one’s own mind. All of us go about our lives blithely assuming that the world behind our backs is still there. As I write these pages, I assume that the fire burning in the other room is still there and that it is there precisely as a burning fire, not some numinous shadow. But do I really know this? If I am not present to experience the heat, the light, the crack, how can any of these things exist? Heat is a felt quality; light is seen. If heat is not felt, it is not heat. Heat is only itself in relation to consciousness; it only is in relation to consciousness. There is no fire unless it be known as such. If any entity remains beyond consciousness, it is certainly not a fire, and it is obviously unthinkable and thus totally inconceivable. In short, it is nothing at all. If one spend enough time with such considerations, until they became not mere intellectualizations but begin to alter one’s perception of the world, one arrives at the terrible moment in which the assumptions of the extra-mental preservation of reality may be doubted, and what was thought to be solid walls evaporate as mist.
In such a moment, there is no ground, there is no “out there” that we can point to as the foundation of existence: existence is made of conscious experience, and the whole of reality as we know it consists precisely in our own conscious experience. Beyond this there is shadow, the entirely unknown, the ungraspable. Should we push ourselves to contemplate the edges of our consciousness, we come face to face with a precipice. Yet the temptation to solipsism is (or ought to be) only a brief one, as there are several points of evidence that drive it away. We stroll about the world and find that it is still there. Voices call out to us unexpectedly. Music drifts by from an open window. The wind blows us off course. Reality is moving and breathing in ways that I cannot predict; it asserts itself upon me, and I cannot resist it. It cannot, therefore, be my mind that creates the world. My mind is at most a small fragment of the greater mind in which the whole of the experiential world is contained. I dwell in this greater mind, from which the blooming, buzzing confusion is distilled, cut and placed in miniature cross-sections within my experience, my consciousness containing a fragment of the whole. We are forced, then, to posit some other, greater mind: Vishnu dreaming the cosmos into being or the red king of Through the Looking Glass.
“He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
We dwell within this dream, and yet it is not our dream, but another’s, and we must waken from our own small, limited worlds to the real world, the one from which ours is derived.
I said that I believed there there were two truths encountered in this experience of nothingness. The first is the realization of the impossibility of the existence of anything beyond consciousness; the second is the inherent emptiness of all finite things. The thinness that one often feels in sensitive moments, the sense that reality is a veil above a pit, is a recognition of the ultimate contingency of the world. One peers out upon creation and sees that it is hollow, that none of it simply is but can only ever be in relation to something else, as a piece of a vast web of causes upon which it is dependent. This vast web, moreover, the communion of which supports each particular thing, is itself insufficient, for its being, the fact of its reality, has no relation to what it is. There is no reason why the cosmos should exist. All things are contingent, insufficient to account for themselves. This is the famous distinction between essence and existence. For all finite things, there is no connection between what they are and that they are. All beings have a nature, and yet their natures have no necessity, no self-positing ground that demands their existence. The great question, then, is not, Why does one particular state of being change into another? over which the cosmologists are constantly bickering and with which they confuse with the question of a creator, but, Why is there anything at all? We look out upon the world and find it empty, the Nothingness peering through it at every corner. All things are passing in and out, and if one is granted the capacity to see, one will recognize that all that is is a kind shadow passing over the face of a mirror. Yet somehow, by some miracle that hides yet speaks itself in every moment, the whole breathing creature of reality is there, glimmering before us. How can it be that all this rose from the nothingness that lies beneath it, when its own being is so transitory, so ultimately empty and insufficient? All floating essences flowering forth from the humus, resting upon nothing, floating upon the back of the proverbial tortoise with no end to the chain of causes. The dream cannot account for itself; there must be a dreamer.
If reality is the dream of a vast mind, this mind must then be noncontingent, the first and self-sufficient existence from which all reality flows. In short, it is the ground of all being, the sole existing reality for which the fact of existence is an intrinsic part of what it is. When Tweedledum declares that Alice would disappear like an extinguished candle should the dreamer wake, he is speaking of the metaphysical contingency of creation upon God in some of the most lucid terms imaginable. The only difference is that the true King is not in any one place in creation nor bound by any other of the conditions or spheres of that creation. The dreamer transcends the dream and yet is intimately present to each and every moment of it. The dreamer may even allow the dream to have autonomy, to have a part in shaping the events, processes, and conditions of it.
Thus it is that from the contemplation of Nothingness, we arrive at Being. From the staring abyss we are forced to contemplate the ground of all things. If it is possible to have such a startling encounter with Nothingness, with the emptiness of all contingent things, it is equally possible to have an encounter with the Mind that is always lifting us up from this nothingness, sharing itself with us and giving itself to us in every moment. It is to this Mind, this infinite love dreaming all things into being, that we must turn for the cure to our terrors, for it is in Him that we move and live and have our being.
The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, p. 151.
Your writing is a fine art.