Enabling Being to Emerge From Non-Being

In 1968 I read the following from R.D. Laing’s book Politics of Experience:

“Man most fundamentally, is not engaged in the discovery of what is there, not in production nor even in communication, nor in invention. He is enabling being to emerge from nonbeing. The experience of being the actual medium for a continual process of creation takes one past all depression or persecution or vain glory, past, even chaos or emptiness, into the very mystery of that continual flip of nonbeing into being, and can be the occasion of that great liberation when one makes the transition from being afraid of nothing to the realization there is nothing to fear. Nevertheless, it is very easy to lose one’s way at any stage, and especially when one is nearest. Here can be great joy, but it is as easy to be mangled by the process as to swing with it. It will require an act of imagination from those who do not know from their own experience what hell this borderland between being and nonbeing can become. But that is what imagination is for. One’s posture or stance in relation to the act or process can become decisive from the point of view of madness or sanity.” p42

These words were transformative and were perhaps my first introduction to the zone of “no-thing”, the silence of silences, the ground of groundlessness. Stacy Paralta seems to be speaking to this in the following audio clip.

“True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality; the emergence of the “inner” archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.” p. 144 The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing