I have always written in journals and notebooks, but since 2011 I have been keeping separate journals of spiritual practice. A single journal might span years (dependent on its heft), so it often feels like a milestone when I reach the end of one and start a new journal. Last night I completed a journal that was begun in August 2019. In the photo it’s the thick black journal on top of the stack; the large-format gold journal is the new one, a gift my wife gave me a couple of years ago which I have saved for this.
When reaching the end of a journal it also seems like a natural time to go back and read earlier journals, to re-learn forgotten lessons, to note what aspects of my understanding and outlook have evolved along with my mystic practice, and to act on the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself.’
From a meditation in October 2018 I wrote these lines, which not only reflect my thinking about the void but also some compassion for the painful world-alienation I once knew (esp. in my 20’s) when I felt stranded in the first interpretation:
When we feel lost, the void seems like an ocean of nothingness on which being perilously floats.
When we are whole, the void appears as the wondrous root of being, the veil of the mystery, the pregnant nothing that gives birth to everything.
You can experience either from the same source: the Abyss-Void of spiritual emptiness, or the Bliss-Void of infinite spiritual potential. I don’t always ascribe to generational characterizations, but I would definitely say that my lower-middle-class Gen-X background made the Abyss-Void my received outlook and center of intellectual gravity, back in the day. The good news: dissatisfaction with our own dissatisfaction can eventually become a portal to the sacred.
