- Not essence yet – absence of identification, the transition point that allows essence (Essence, 48)
- Qualities
- The ground of mind
- (As opposed to the content of mind
- Five Skandas (‘Heaps’) in Buddhism)
- Undifferentiated
- Linked to expanded self-image
- Expansive, open, clear, luminous blackness, awareness (see “Levels,” below)
- Tied to body- and self-image
- Dissolves boundaries and exposes distortions
- Experienced as threat to ego
- Ego needs rigid boundaries to exist
- Importance of holding both images – “conscious self-image and newly arising unconscious self-image—simultaneously in one’s attention for space to appear” (Void, 49)
- Lack of symbiotic gratification – relation to Merging essence, which is associated with mother, golden womb
- Creativity – unity of emptiness and form (Void, 65)
- Physical manifestations
- Open / absent top of head; shaking in spine
- Genital hole
- Column of space – head to groin
- (Body armor [Reich])
- Levels (Void, Ch. 20):
- Clear space – arises with dissolution of the external self-image
- Black space – arises with dissolution of the internal self-image
- Clear dense space – arises with dissolution of the external body-image
- Black dense space – arises with dissolution of the internal body-image
- Annihilation space – dealing not with boundaries but with “actual feeling of existence”
- The Void – no sense of individual experience
- (Deficient emptiness): Space experienced with ignorance
- Relevant books
