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The Nothing
Entering the void on psychedelics and other non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Close your eyes. Imagine absolute blackness, darkness so complete that there is not even a glimmer of light, a hint of a symbol, or the ghost of a face in your mind. Imagine a silence so profound that you can’t hear your own breath, or even the quiet whisper of your thoughts — a complete absence of sound. In the void, there is nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to touch or taste or smell. You’re disconnected from your physical form, the material world, and the process of thinking itself. You float — if that can even describe what the not fully extant you is doing — in a silent abyss, a brutally vast and lonesome vacuum. The void is neither here nor there, and it is suffocating in its stagnant denseness.
My psychedelic journeys have led me to the void several times, and I find it unsettling. I talked to my plant medicine mentor about it, asking her why I end up here in non-ordinary states of consciousness. “You’ve experienced the nothing. Embrace it, because out of nothing comes everything,” she told me.
Once, while holding an ecstatic trance body posture, I waited for visual phenomenon as had occurred many times before, but nothing came to my inner eye. Frustrated, I said to myself, “Why don’t I see anything?” I heard this reply, “Most of what you humans ‘see’ are generated by the…