Nothingness & Faith
The path of self-awareness
Nothingness is knowing that everything that you think you know could be wrong. It is knowing that the people you love could be keeping secrets that would turn your relationships with them upside down. It is knowing that something tragic and unexpected could happen at any moment — a sudden death, an attack, a layoff, a health crisis, an accident, an institutional collapse, an invasion — that would set your world on fire.
You are nothing when you know that all possible methods of justification could fail you. Your rules of proof could overturn today’s facts with tomorrow’s information. The next day, new undeniable realities could prove that your historically reliable rules of proof themselves are untrustworthy when it matters most. At any moment, your life as you have lived it could be revealed to be a lie.
You are nothing when you know that there is no way to be certain about which way to understand your life and your world out of the options. There is no sure way to know that your current perspective is most right, true, or useful. Nothing can safely tell you which risks are worth taking in life because you can’t and don’t know the future. Time enjoys retroactively transforming our well-justified confidences into unfathomable hubrises right when we least expect it.
You are nothing when you know that nothing can really save you from nothingness. Nothing can truly rescue you from the profound ambiguity and absurdity that characterizes existence. Nothing is certain and everything that appears to be guaranteed is a lie you overconfidently assume or cling to out of fear.
To forget your nothingness is to forget what it means to be human and pretend to know the future. Such pretense will inevitably hurt you and the ones you love, if not worse. If you forget your nothingness for too long, you will stray into dogmatism, the ignorant belief that an old perspective rendered outdated by new circumstances can still guide you through existence. The dogmatic burn civilizations with their militant certainty or die trying.
However, constant remembrance of your nothingness will trap you in anxiety and set you on a course toward psychic death. It leaves you fatalistically stuck, lost of the will to make something, however tentative and imperfect, out of existence. The fatalistic shrivel into dust or kill themselves before despair can destroy their bodies from within.
The only way to make something out of life without losing yourself to dogmatism or fatalism is faith. Faith means both remembering and forgetting nothingness by cycling between remembrance and forgetfulness. It is a dynamic balance between self-mastery, self-enslavement, and self-estrangement. Faith is a disciplined dance with change.
The faithful know when to dig in, when to change plans, and when to ask for help because all known strategies aren’t working. They rotate roles to reorient, achieve, and enlighten. They play the masters who design what should be, the slaves who push through pain to transform potentiality into actuality, and the imaginative strangers who suggest creative solutions for impossible problems in life.
Those who go the way of faith walk the path of self-awareness toward psychic stability, imparting meaningful change to the world along the way.
Faith is “irrational” because rationality is a lie of certainty. Even nothingness rationally conceived is a lie for true nothingness is not a claim but the fallibility of all claims.
Embrace nothingness.
Then, faith.
“I waited for something and something died
So I waited for nothing and nothing arrived
It's our dearest ally, it's our closest friend
It's our darkest blackout, it's our final end
My dear sweet nothing, let's start anew
From here all in, it’s just me and you”
- Villagers, “Nothing Arrvied”