“The basis of spiritual renewal is not the guilt feelings that frequently arise in sensitized individuals in rich industrial societies. Instead, it is a crazy mysticism of becoming empty that reduces the real misery of the poor and diminishes one’s own slavery. Becoming empty or ‘letting go’ of the ego, possession, and violence is the precondition of the creativity of transforming action.”
―Dorothee Söelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance
I once heard spirituality described as a kind of onion with a deep inner kernel of Truth, capital T, that manifests through increasingly tangible outer layers like ritual, dogma, aesthetic expression, and worship.
But, I always wondered: if these outer layers are the visible refractions of the deeper Truth, capital T, where is a person left when those outward manifestations fail to provide a clearer understanding of the truth, the one you feel deep at the core of your being?
I turn 36 this year, barely a breath in the cosmic scheme of things. Most of my adult life up to this point has been spent trying to peel back these spiritual layers to better understand who I am, why I’m here, and what meaning I’m to derive from the experience.
To be frank, this emptying out has been downright uncomfortable at times, and I don’t know if I have any more clarity than when I started. I also wonder if there really is a “there” there.
Perhaps it was naïve ever to assume there was.
I think this is what others have called the “dark night of the soul,” and mine has felt never-ending and spiritually fatiguing.
But, what has surprised me most is that this process of emptying out hasn’t left me empty. Far from it, in fact. My search for a deeper kernel of truth has led me—quite necessarily, I think—to a more profound truth: that it’s all meaningful, every single bit of it.
While some reach this point and conclude, “See! There’s nothing there,” I looked into the emptiness and concluded the opposite, “It’s all there. Every single bit of it.”
To me, spirituality has become a deepening of all those things that make the human experience unique and beautiful, and therein I see the divine, the god, the connective breath, us.
It’s insufferably cliché, but sometimes another person can say it better and more simply than I ever could, so I’ll conclude with these lyrics written by Taylor Goldsmith and his band Dawes:
All these psychics and these doctors—they’re all right, and they’re all wrong.
It’s like trying to make out every word when they should simply hum along.
It’s not some message written in the dark or some truth that no one sees;
It’s a little bit of everything.
In this and a thousand other small yet important ways, the process of emptying out has really been a process of emptying in. And that, for right now at least, is enough.
—A.J. Plummer
image is the Flammarion engraving (1888) in which a traveler puts his head under the edge of the firmament