The Paradox of Emptiness

Here’s a weird paradox that I’ve noticed in life: the smaller you make your world, the larger the emptiness becomes…conversely, the more of the Universe that you let into your world, the smaller the Universe itself becomes.  This is the paradox of emptiness.

How can this be?  I believe that everything in this Universe is connected.  When we deny the connections, we deny a fundamental piece of our very existence.  This causes a schism in our psyche, a disconnect between what our Higher Self knows and what our ego-bound self thinks.  Intuitively, we understand that, at minimum, people are connected.  We are gregarious animals, if you will, and we find joy in the presence of others.  This should be our first clue of the important role that connection plays in our lives!  We desire connection to different extents, of course, depending on our life experiences, but if you are honest with yourself, you will appreciate that a balance between solitude and interaction with others brings a certain peace to life.  Thus, connection is an important part of the human experience, and resisting it is bound to cause disharmony.  When we shutdown and limit the connections, we amplify this disharmony and feed the negative emotional and psychological drivers that cause us to want to isolate ourselves.  It becomes a self-fueling cycle, and the end result can be nothing other than sadness.  Eventually, it can become tragic.

This is how making our world smaller makes the emptiness loom larger.

When we embrace the connections and feed them, they will grow.  Strong and healthy connections lead to balance, to harmony.  Embracing the need for connection and nurturing the ones we already have is a method of affirming the innate human need to be a party of the collective.  There is value in retreat, in meditation and internal reflection, but I do not believe that the average human being is meant to sustain a solo journey over the long haul.  Connections are safe harbors during life’s storms, and life is no less temperamental than the weather on an open sea during times of climactic change.  Our journeys are different, of course; each human being has a path to follow.  The Universe nudges us towards one another, into each other’s paths.  We weave into and out of each other’s lives.  If we could visualize them, the sum of our paths would look very much like a giant, cosmic net.  In the net, all paths lead to all others.  The weave is tighter than we think.  We understand that only when we allow ourselves to perceive the net.  We perceive the net only when we allow ourselves to flow into and out of the connections.

Universe.  Connection.  Flow.  This is how letting in more of the Universe makes the Universe itself smaller.

A paradox can be weird, but it does not have to be beyond our ability to comprehend and leverage it.