What has modern man lost? Why are we in the void? Perhaps life is an effort to reach the source from which we have been expatriated…
Emptiness is the absence and loneliness that a man cannot mute from the moment of his birth.
Human beings are the only beings who have orientations in heart, body and mind from the moment they are born. The main purpose of each orientation is to try to find the only being to which he belongs, his creator. Sometimes he is aware of his search at the level of consciousness, sometimes not. But his search is continuous…
There are many pains that all of us, our ancestors and us, have experienced. The deepest of these pains is the pain of ‘not integrating’ or ‘not merging’. Human beings, especially by virtue of their spiritual existence, are coded to be complete instead of incomplete, to evolve gradually and to exist as a perfect individual. This process of completion is referred to in spiritual disciplines as kemalat or tekâmül. Religions consider it natural for God, the ruler and creator of everything, to be in search as per the format in which God has coded human beings.
Only after the human heart is freed from its veils does it begin to grasp the truth and relate directly to the principle of the universe. Man’s raison d’être and the ultimate goal of all his life’s endeavor is not to “become one” with God (for God is already one), but to grasp the “meaning” of this unity.
Whatever one does, a person who has been scattered from his essence cannot fill the emptiness and pain of that rupture with the turmoil of the outside. The biggest dilemma of modern man, who cannot believe in what he cannot see or touch, arises precisely here. Instead of seeking an inner spirituality from his pain, he falls into the delusion of madly consuming and numbing, as if he wants to forget his pain. Like a lover trying to forget the pain of a lost lover by numbing himself!
When the meaning of one’s life is diminished for one reason or another, one is under the delusion that one can fill the void by external means such as antidepressants, alcohol, overeating, indulgences and wild entertainment. These are merely means to distract us and temporarily suppress our inner need to search for meaning.*
The unquenchable pain in all of us is the pain of “integration”, because we all subconsciously desire to join the oneness from our loneliness into eternity. In the same way, all prayers and religious rituals are man’s attempt to reach from the individual consciousness to that of the supreme creator, to be completed towards eternity. You can observe the same pain in philosophical and literary texts, as in the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Filling this lack, this void, is the deepest need of modern man who has lost his essence and meaning.
According to Pythagoras, who provided the first example of philosophical-religious cult life in the ancient Greek world, a fire burns at the center of the universe and the earth, sun, moon, stars and all objects revolve around it. Everything in the universe dances around this center. All the unhappiness of modern man is that he is removed from this center. That is why his soul is cold. For this reason, as more and more people see knowledge as a power, as a plan of action to control nature, eastern wisdom sees knowledge as an ever-burning hearth where anyone who is cold can warm up. Zarathustra’s fire that never goes out!
Since the divine ground on which the heart, mind and soul rest has been taken away, modern man, every time he takes a step towards the center, slips on the slippery ground beneath his feet and falls back to the ground. However, in order to be able to dance, in order to perform the whirling dervishes, one needs to be warm, moreover, one needs to be on fire. The Indian shaman tells his disciples that “true warriors must choose the place where they will die, for when the moment of death comes they will dance their last dance there”. Modern man, unable to find a place to die, cannot dance with death!
Thrown into the universe… When this abandonment turns into a feeling of ‘abandonment’ as experiences multiply and lived experiences increase; when roles are shared among people on the stage called the world – especially if the bad roles fall to his share the most – he always gives himself a leading role among all the others with the utopia of his childhood. As he grows up, he becomes a supporting actor, a stuntman. If he has fallen from roles that the world applauds to roles that the world is indifferent to, considers insignificant, and pushes him around, the increasing sense of loneliness, despite the multitude around him, begins to accompany him in every step he takes as a huge burden on his shoulders and a bottomless void inside him.
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