Recently, I wrote about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how, in later life, he added an ultimate need beyond “self-actualization” which he called “self-transcendence”. It was a recognition by Maslow that there is more to life than being all you can be.
In my view, it is not about being at all.
I mentioned how I had independently come to a similar conclusion (though such things are never really concluded). I call my philosophy the way of emptiness, and the idea behind it is simple: get over yourself. It is about the emptying out of self until nothing remains but a point of pure consciousness.
Just let go
An important piece of this emptying out is the recognition of our own insignificance. More importantly, it is the recognition that our insignificance is our greatest superpower.
Most of us live our lives in mirrored rooms. Everywhere we look, we see only ourselves. Everything we think and feel revolves around our tiny little insignificant lives. In our minds, these lives take on enormous meaning, and that distorts everything we do.
But let’s smash the mirrors and look out through the vast reaches of space to see what’s really out there. Let go of this obsession with self.
The universe is enormous. We cannot even truly conceive of the distance to the next town, let alone the distance to the next planet, star system, galaxy.
Life is everywhere
By some estimates, the universe contains at least 100,000,000,000 planets with life on them. Space just seems empty because the distances are so vast. Even if that number is two orders of magnitude too large, that’s still a billion planets with life on them.
If the life on one of those billions of planets is extinguished, would the universe even notice?
And we are not just lost in space, but in time as well. The universe is billions of years old and has billions of years yet to go. And yet we homo sapiens have been around for much less than a million years.
Remember that a billion is a thousand millions (unless you’re British).
In the scope of time, our existence as a species is less than the blink of an eye. The lifespan of a single human? Effectively zero.
And how do I fit into all this? I am not even a species, let alone a planet. I am a particular instance of a single species with a lifespan too short even to measure in universal terms.
Viewed from the universal point of view, the difference between me and an amoeba is nothing at all.
I am utterly insignificant. And so are you. Sorry, but it’s true.
We are insignificant members of an insignificant species on an insignificant planet in an insignificant star system in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy.
We are all, together and individually, effectively zero. Zilch. Zip. Get over it.
The unbearable lightness of unbeing
For some reason, this bothers most people immensely. The infant in the womb is, as far as its experience goes, the entire universe. The birth of consciousness, of awareness of “other”, occurs when that infant is removed from the womb and forced to recognize that it is not, in truth, the universe. Not even close.
Our infantile selves desperately seek a return to that “infinite” state. So we spend our lives continually exaggerating our own importance. As long as we remain infantile—and most of us remain infantile our entire lives—we refuse to consider or accept our own insignificance.
But this constant self-aggrandizement is self-defeating. Our insignificance is inescapable. And so we spend our lives in quiet desperation, our actions shouting, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”
Look around. You’ll see this behavior everywhere. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Ironically, another characteristic of the infantile mind is a furious need to avoid accountability for our actions. These two drives—to make ourselves the center of the universe and yet not to be held accountable for anything we do—are continually at war within us.
Beware the Sword of Damocles
We fear the Sword of Damocles, hanging by a thin thread over our heads.
We humans desperately seek meaning in life. Viktor Frankl made this search for meaning central to his “logotherapy”. But as Uncle Ben regularly reminds Peter: with great power comes great responsibility.
We want the former; we loathe the latter.
The universe is meaningless. We invent meaning and then attempt to project it outward into the universe, to pretend that it comes from somewhere, anywhere but ourselves. Why? Perhaps because if it comes from outside of us, then we are off the hook. The devil made us do it. God commands us.
But is that really the case?
In the scope of infinity, we are all insignificant, meaningless. That much is certain. But we are not meaningless to each other.
Let’s shrink the scope down to something human-sized. We are the creators of meaning in the universe. It is not something imposed from without. It is something we create inside ourselves.
What matter if the universe is meaningless so long as our own lives are filled with meaning? Think locally, act globally.
The mechanism by which we create this meaning is love, which is the action of placing the needs of another above one’s own. It is, literally, the emptying out of the self. It is living for something bigger than ourselves.
The way of emptiness, then, is the way of love. But love is so utterly misunderstood that we’ll need to discuss it in much more depth.
Love is Kierkegaard’s First Immediacy from his masterwork, Fear and Trembling. Love is the secret the fox gives to the Little Prince. Love is the core of all the great religions and philosophies. As John says more than once, God is love. Which means love is God.
Insignificance is our salvation
In truth, our insignificance is utterly freeing. It means simply that we just can’t fuck up too badly. Destroy all life on Earth? Meh. There are 99,999,999,999 more experiments out there. Not all will succeed.
Waste your life? In a few generations (or fewer), no one will remember or care.
To many people, this is reason to give up, to surrender and do nothing. Or to feel sorry for themselves in a sad and infinite loop.
But to me, it is a calling. The universe may not care if we fail, but I do. The universe may have no intrinsic meaning, but I find meaning everywhere I look. History may not care if I waste my life, but what a loss to me and to the people whose lives I might have made better and more meaningful.
To go out with a whimper may not matter to others, but to me it is utterly humiliating. If aliens ever did show up, I’d die of embarrassment.
The way of emptiness says stop trying to fill yourself with significance. Instead, empty yourself out. Recognize that you are utterly insignificant, and that it does not matter.
Then use the powers that you do have, insignificant though they may be, to fill others with significance. Create the meaning you want to see in the world.
True significance outside ourselves is possible. We just have to put it there.