I was researching the obsolete constellation of Cerberus. Why, you might ask? Simply because the three headed dog was my previous synchronicity. The search was somewhat futile as very little is written about this constellation. No significant stars, no known reason for it's origin nor it's demise. Yet the word Void appeared like a star in it's own right in the deep sky of my mind. This was the first of the synchronicities.
I recalled my first experience with "The Void". I was a young mother on my second round of meditation studies, my first having been as a teen in the 60's. I was sitting cross-legged on a blanket on the old hardwood floor of my living room, the babies down for a nap. I had been practicing meditation for a few months. Just emptying my mind and going deep within. On this late spring morning I closed my eyes and looked at the dark inside of my lids. My consciousness dropped as if I had been in an elevator. But the ride didn't go down incrementally...one floor down...next floor down...ding, ding, ding with every level down. The sensation was one of falling at an incredible speed and down a blackness that seemed to pull me towards nothing but oblivion.
The experience couldn't have lasted more that a few seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. I was terrified. I was horrified. I had only one context for the experience - Hell!
A few years before I had attended a couple of charismatic Christian churches. After studying with them for a while I decided their laws and restrictions didn't make sense and went back to meditation based on no particular philosophy or tradition. Just me picking up where I had left off - checking out the frontier of consciousness and the mind.
When I experienced that darkness...that falling, falling sensation...that insurmountable fear, my default setting was "This is bad! This is wrong! This is the devil's work." And I stopped meditating. I trashed any books that were unsanctioned by the churches and attempted to live as a good fundamentalist Christian wife. That was it's own kind of Void...but that's another story.
It's been over thirty years since I had that experience, and I have not felt it again. And neither have I attempted to meditate in that way. I learned something of how really intense and dangerous the mysterious, the esoteric, the unknown can be for the dilettante and uninitiated. But my curiosity has not deserted me. I've learned to creep up on the Void from different angles. I get close to the edge, but always far enough to not get sucked in by the vortex.
All this to say that this time the Void didn't come during meditation. It came instead as a familiar pattern of pain and rejection from my narcissistic father... a terrifying sensation in it's own right. But this is not about father bashing. Instead, I've finally come to the realization that the Void I experience
will never be filled by him. And this realization came across from this line by Emily Carding from her Tarot of the Sidhe:
"I give wholly to the Void, to be holy in The World."
The sentence struck me like lightning. I understood it immediately as this - if I want to stop the fear and terror of falling I need to give myself over to the acceptance of it, whatever 'it' is. Not as a helpless victim, but as a powerful creator of my own experience.
With this understanding I looked at what benefit I have gained from the experience of falling for the naive idea that this time the narcissist will be different. This time he will hug me and hold me and tell me how much he loves me. This time he will apologize for all the ways he hurt me. I know logically none of this is going to happen, but the little girl's heart is always full of hopeful innocence. And as far as my relationship with my father is concerned I have stayed a child.
Until now...
This weekend I accepted the terms of endearment. I gave myself wholly to the Void. I fell fearlessly into dark feathered arms and landed in a world were the perspective is upside down...the sky is below and the trees grow above me...and suddenly it all makes sense. I hang myself up on the relationship because I am growing my Soul. I am cultivating balance and temperance. I am learning to pick myself up, spread my wings, and fly.
All these years I have been falling. Time after time I'd fall into the trap and cry. I'd find comfort in the people who love me in a way that lifts me up again. And now I get up on my own. This was the second synchronicity.
The third was this:
"Priestess of the Void"
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