The Void

The Void is one of the most-reported and most-paradoxical of all deep hyperspace phenomena — a state or presence 'of nothingness, without time, matter or significance,' as the DMT-Nexus Hyperspace Lexicon describes it. A state of non-existence, and yet — this is what makes it philosophically vertiginous — a state that is experienced. The question that arises whenever a traveller reports it is precisely: if there is nothing, what is doing the perceiving?

In many first-hand accounts the Void arrives with fear. The disappearance of familiar reference points — body, name, room, time, other beings, even the sense of being anywhere at all — can register initially as loss or annihilation. Experiencers describe feeling irretrievably alone, or lost in a space that isn't a space, with no way back and no landmarks to orient by. This is the aspect the lexicon warns of when it notes that the Void 'may elicit fear and a sense of being lost or alone.'

But the lexicon also carries a second, longer, and more matter-of-fact voice — a first-person passage from an experiencer (credited to DmnStr8) reporting the same territory revisited. 'If you ever experience this again,' the passage says, 'sit in it and really pay attention. There can be great peace that can come from such an experience. The stillness and vastness of nothingness can be something of great beauty.' The passage continues into one of the more original psychonaut observations in the lexicon: that the Void is not static. 'This nothingness becomes something at some point. It forgets itself and finds preference. It creates experience. You create experience for the nothingness from the nothingness. In some ways I feel that we are of great value to the nothingness. It was bored and empty. Now it has something to do, something to experience, emotions, family, memories, life…'

Comparative traditions reach for the same territory under a host of names. The śūnyatā ('emptiness') of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the ayin of Kabbalah, the fana of Sufism, Heidegger's Nichts, the nada of St. John of the Cross, and the pre-creation tohu wa-bohu of Genesis all describe encounters with a ground state that is neither exactly something nor exactly nothing. The lexicon flags a specific relationship to Ego Death — the two are entangled in reports, and travellers who reach one typically report having reached the other.

Source:
DMT-Nexus Hyperspace Lexicon — Void, The