Here Comes the Nothing!

Today, we live in an unprecedented sort of world—a reality completely inverted from any known in the historic past. Our world has been gutted of sense and consistency. Propriety, responsibility, even meaning itself have become jokes to exchange in the cynical dialogues that have replaced profound conversation. What should remain private is made obscenely public, while what should be publicly known is obscenely kept secret. We live in a new kind of social space. But less well understood is that we also live in a new kind of psychological space—and even a new kind of spiritual space.

The privacy of all that is public has resulted in the structural irresponsibility of public actors. Because of the collusion of the mass media in camouflaging catastrophes, governments and corporations can and do take risks with our world that infinitely transcend what they can actually take responsibility for. They routinely lie to the public about both their actions and their consequences.

What is valorized today in the public sphere is only the effectiveness of the lie—and the shamelessness (the chutzpah) with which the lie is thrown in the face of the public as a lie. The last bastion of macho capacity is the pride taken in screwing up, and in rewarding oneself for it. On the other hand, what is valorized in the private sphere is the shameless self-exposure of another sort of obscene truth—that of the lack of phallic potency on any level. The more obscene, and the more pride taken in its revelation, the greater is its prestige. Where the public and the private meet is in the display of obscene enjoyment of hatred of the world itself, of disdain for the Other, the masturbatory jouissance of being a loser who has caused everyone to lose. So, for example, it was revealed in a press release recently that the Transocean Corp., the owner of the deep-water drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded and resulted in the worst environmental disaster ever, rewarded its executives with a large bonus, because of their wonderful safety record! The obscenity of such a reward is only exceeded by the fact that they proudly made it public. It is not hard to decipher the message contained in such an action. Nor will they or BP or any other culpable actor in that catastrophe ever have to pay for the true amount of damages they caused to our world.

Or take the actions of a corporation that is contesting the title of greatest environmental disaster makers: the Japanese company that operates the nuclear reactors that are now in process of undergoing world-threatening meltdowns. They took risks with the lives of every human being, not only in Japan, but on our planet. They did not construct the facility with regard for the foreseeable natural events, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, that did in fact occur. It would have been too expensive to adequately prepare for those. The company executives cut corners at every decision point, to maximize profits at the expense of the well-being of our world. Now everyone is paying the price. No doubt, a year from now, those executives, if they are still alive, will be rewarded with bonuses for their safety record as well.

The above are only two of a long and growing list of such destructive decisions being taken by authorities—decisions which demonstrate either wanton negligence, a lack of concern for the continuing existence of our world, or a deliberate effort to destroy our planetary web of life. We could add such decisions as those of nations going to war without democratic consensus; the launching of space exploration rockets filled with plutonium that could explode and harm millions; the corruption of our financial systems; the disseminating of genetically modified species of food plants, that could destroy the world's food supply; the use of fracking, hydraulic fracturing, for natural gas extraction, that is endangering our water supplies; and on and on.

The point of this analysis is not to arouse anger at any particular players in the current socio-political establishments. Rather, what is important is to understand the pattern that connects all these events, and its underlying significance.

The use of public media as a confessional space—and ever more commonly as a pornographic space—in which the ugliness of private life is revealed to all, also has psychic consequences that go beyond the immediate shock, disgust, and secret obscene enjoyment. The game of the media is to create celebrities, and then to destroy them, and in between, to give them the space to thrash around in their dying narcissistic rage and self-justification as they go down the tubes in front of the world, raising ever greater revenues from the corporate sponsors. The real obscenity of this focus on private misery by the public media is to obfuscate the true nature of the dangers of the public catastrophes.

The effect of all this on the collective psyche of humanity is indescribable. It is a traumatic wounding of colossal proportion that keeps consciousness in a stunted state. At the very moment when we need to transcend the normal ego and reach superconsciousness, the perverse morphing of the social matrix itself has intervened to block our path of growth. This leaves one last option for the Atman—that of opening the wormhole in spiritual space between chakra one and chakra seven. This is the only portal that is now possible for most people, and though it is extremely dangerous, it is the stargate that our species has chosen. It has already begun to open, and every day it is opening wider, until one day it shall consume our cosmos. In the yogic paradigm, chakras are not in our body; rather, our body is flowing through the spectrum of consciousness that contains the chakras as powerful vortexes of psychic energy. This energy underlies and permeates what we think of as reality. As we enter the magnetic field of the primordial vortex of chakra one, it acts as a black hole, in which our entire reality will be absorbed.

In order to successfully cross the event horizon of this phenomenal plane from the outskirts of chakra one, a state of consciousness that could be called passive anal nihilism, into and through the blackness of nonbeing, to the yonder shore of absolute nonduality, it is useful to at least understand that the world is a hallucination. Reality as we know it is a construct, an effect of discourse made of images and words. As the wormhole opens, the proliferation of psychotic discourses and their concomitant senseless and impossible perceptions will flood the consciousness with anxiety. The basic fear is not death, but madness, lostness in an empty, insane, and loveless world. Once the shadow of this wormhole overpowers the ego's faith in its own capacity to master and endure, a gradually increasing desperation will start cracking the wall of denial. Generally, one will try to ward off collapse with escalating but absurdly futile means: massages, aromatherapy, and exercise classes will give way to alcohol and anti-anxiety medications. It will be as foretold in the film Neverending Story: as the Nothing approaches, the world begins to crumble. This is what we now face, writ large.

Our age of disasters is reaching its climax. But hidden within the world-ravaging radioactive fires of destruction are little pearls of the Real of love. The tiny seeds of a new world of supreme beauty, goodness, and divine healing are secretly taking root. We must be unafraid of the end of our old dying world, and surrendered to the will of the Absolute, we must dedicate ourselves to become instruments for the birth of God-consciousness that will create our new reality. But to do so involves the purification of our all-too-human consciousness through constant meditation. Only in the perpetual silence of inward surrender to the Supreme Presence will the ego and its anxieties be dissolved. This must now be our highest priority.

May we learn to live in the Absolute Emptiness that has the power to contain even the Nothing, and to transmute the Nothing into the Fullness of God's Light and its power of divine creative love.

Namaste,

Shunyamurti