Jeanne de Salzmann’s posthumous The Reality of Being has some good comments on nothingness. At page 14, we read: “I can escape only if I feel my absolute nothingness and begin to feel the need for help.” She links this this to our need to be related to something higher. This is, if I can respectfully say so, perhaps the essence of this question, at least as I see it now. Take her word before you even consider mine, but I would say that to the extent we feel a need to escape from our mechanicalness – and this means, or should mean, a conscious wish to develop my own real I – we sense our nothingness.
Then, on p.64 she mentions the virtue of Gurdjieff’s using the prayer “Lord have mercy,” which can help us see our nothingness and discover a finer energy. There is some important material in Bennett’s Witness, which I shall come to in a later post, which bears on this.
At p.100, de Salzmann relates coming to a sense of our own nothingness with playing a role externally, but one with which we do not identify. I think one of the reasons we all find this so difficult is that something in us believes in our automatic manifestations and the emotions which accompany them. “Believes” is only half the story, because something is complacent with them, like a full stomach after over-eating.
At p.108, she connects our understanding of our nothingness to being able to work with others. That needs little comment except to say that to the degree we have that sense, we can sympathise with people’s plights rather than get upset at them.
On a different note, at p.169, she speaks of a solitude which appears as if it were a void, when it represents transformation and freedom, not despair. This nothingness is the quintessence of humility before the greater reality. Humility is something of a mystery to us as we are, but still … when we see glimpses of it in other people it is endlessly endearing.
What she says at p. 218 concerns the need to remain before my nothingness and to voluntarily experience it. I might add that, perhaps in order to wish to experience it, I should prepare: after all, it is not something which we are able to bear for too long. Nor, I think, do we need to: we don’t have to brush our teeth all day. We have to live our lives, but to work with our nothingness for prudently selected periods can have an extraordinary effect upon the day. Even if it is not always having a sensible effect upon is, it can be close to the surface; and when I need it, it is there.
Finally, at p. 264, de Salzmann writes that to see my nothingness is a step towards being liberated.
I have only given indications of what she wrote about: it is worth while studying each in the context of the piece it comes from. But I will add this. It seems to me that when we see that we continually fall back into the old errors and mechanical patterns, the same identifications and considerings, even if we do so less often and do not fall quite so hard, we have the opportunity to see that although we are improving, we still do not have real I. That, I suggest, is the basis for our nothingness: that our multiple I’s, even if they are becoming fewer and more rational and positive, nonetheless stand to real I in the proportion of zero to infinity. That is the relation of one cosmos to another.
This makes sense, but I shall explore it further in the next post on nothingness.
