The experience of Life, that is the experience I as a human feel, moment to moment, is like that of being inside a bucket. Being very much inside, in the center of the empty space within it, far away from the tin walls of my bucket. I do not touch the world outside, I do not feel it, and I do not see it. But I feel my tin boundaries with my senses, and with them I feel the world. My tin bucket walls contact the world, and the feeling of this contact is what brings perception to my consciousness.
Moment to moment, when seeing what is really here inside, there is nothing. No substance between my minuscule dot of consciousness and the far-away tin walls of my bucket. Around me, truly what I am, is me and a void. The rest is not me.
It often feels like it is, though. I feel I am my body. I feel I do my actions. That I choose my path, that I build my life, that I am the one swimming in the ocean of matter, substance, values, and risks of this human life. Sometimes it feels SO MUCH like me, in fact, that I feel crowded. Surrounded by pressures and decisions and stress, seemingly crushed and torn apart by fears, by dangers, and by regret. Swamped, it feels, sometimes. Swamped with rush, or with need, or with want, or with discomfort, lost in the ocean of swift, thick world currents.
It is such an illusion, though. At the center, in my truth, I am by myself in the void.
Why does it seem that we get swamped sometimes, then? Why can we sometimes barely breathe? Or hardly see far enough ahead to take the next step, in the apparent darkness?
Learned patterns. Reactive behavior. Acquired needs, and their induced flows into our bucket.
When I was a child, I learned that having more was good. I don't remember how I learned it, but I did. And I also learned that needing less is good. Using less, frugality, is good. And I learned that I could measure "how" good my state was, in these terms, by comparing how much I possessed and how much I needed to what other people had and needed. And this pattern survived to adulthood. When I evaluate what I possess and what I need, an automatic process occurs in the background, and seeks people around me to compare my possessions and needs with them. If I have more or I need less, I feel satisfaction. And if I don't obviously possess more or need less, this automatic process will endeavor to find the "correct angle" or "correct perspective", by which I see myself to possess more, or to need less. For when it determines that, indeed, I possess more or I need less, satisfaction is triggered in me, and I get the feeling that I am doing "something" right. One more yellow brick on the road.
I could list many patterns I learned, and I will do so only for a few. I learned to replicate structure taught to me in school. I learned to avoid blame. I learned to induce tenderness towards me so I would be taken care of. I learned to induce blame in others so I could get what I wanted. I learned to hide my sexuality. I learned to hide some of my emotions, and to highlight some others. I learned to pretend that I liked popular things, and that I disliked unpopular things. I learned to measure, to optimize, and to process most everything in terms of computation.
And in these patterns I have swum in most of my life. They make up the water in my bucket and the currents within it. With each pattern the water became denser and more affluent. The patterns that at first were so easy to follow and to solve, the simple flows, grew in size, in complexity, and intensity. Laid one upon another, one by one, the patterns created more complex currents in my bucket, and I learned to deal with them. Repetitive tasks were optimized, and simple paths were created to deal with known patterns. Pipes and pumps and hoses made of my own mental matter, redirect and solve the patterns, and keep the patterns at bay. I build mental machines that make it a bit simpler, yet the patterns are still there. And when they grow too high, too intense, or too many new circumstances break the structures I have built to help them, again the water swamps me, and I must struggle and fight to stay afloat. And I lament that my helper machines are not working as they should.
But these patterns are not me. I allowed them in, and they swamp me because I believe them. I believe in their importance, in their existence. They were copied from what I feel outside my bucket. But I have merely been deceived. By myself.
There is no water in my bucket. There is no storm to drown me. There are no patterns I need to adopt. These are all just how I have felt the world outside of me, of my bucket. And I play with it by replicating it in me. To play with, to live, and to understand it.
But it is not me. I create these patterns by accepting them, by resonating this space around me with what I wish to explore. These patterns are the same void, made resonant with the power of my mind and my emotions.
But when I allow inside to quiet; when I feel back into my center; when I remember that there is an insurmountable, vast void between my true center and my tin walls, I remember what is me. And I know I am not the bucket. And I know I am not the water, currents, the maelstroms I once thought I needed to master. I do make them and I do feel like they drown me, and that is not to be run away from - it isn't in the nature of my bucket. But knowing this, I can also remember that I need to make no panicked or rushed decisions, in the fear that I may not remain afloat. My true me cannot drown.
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Then there are times that I swim hard, I solve the flows, and the patterns are dealt with. I float, I rise, I conquer the currents, and I find myself the victor. Then once the waves of realization and of satisfaction wash over me, I look around again. What else to do now? There are no more waves, no storms, no currents to conquer, no forces to struggle with. There is nothing left. And now... what?
Emptiness. Void. An unexpected void can be quite disconcerting, especially as one's life experience is characterized by being swamped with problems and hurried with activities and requirements and obligations. When at some time, none of these are there, what remains is simply our unmet expectation of them, and it can feel quite disconcerting. What happened to life? What else must I do?
I am then facing my own void. That truth of self we can so often forget, because of how engaged I've been with my bucket and its water. If the water recedes, if the truth of the void is revealed... what shall my dutiful mind servant do? How can I help? Why can't I help?
In this moment it is common for people to find a distraction. A game, a need, one of the leftover patterns from the past - I can choose one of them and engage my time with it. At least, you know, until the next thing to do pops up. I can rewatch those movies. I can seek social comfort. I can stimulate my body with substances - food and drugs. Anything to keep me engaged, for else... I have become useless. Aimless in the void. How can I possibly remain empty and useless?
It is then I am at the center of the bucket. Surrounded by nothing, my own tin body a vast distance away in any direction. The nothing all around me can feel unsettling, like floating in deeper unknown. But then I realize that I am simply now in a deeper part of the swimming pool, farther away from the edge. And lonely and drab as it may feel, it is also truth. It is in a way a clearer truth, for it is myself without the hullaballoo and rushes of the common day.
Every once in a while, when we encounter the void in the bucket, let us not escape from it. Feel it. Realize it. Accept it. Deduce what it means for the overall life, for the daily life. And fret not, because more currents and more storms will come.
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The danger of the void lies not in the void itself, but in that the average human, trained in the arts of the world and untrained in the art of oneself, is prone to be repelled by the quiet in the void, with only himself to face. This brings him to eagerly choose any available flow pattern or slope around him as a distraction, any one that is easily accessible, that will face him away from the pure himself. And such a rushed choice can lead to missteps.
