The term 'Void' occupies a wide and contested terrain within the depth-psychology corpus, drawing simultaneously on pre-Socratic atomism, Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy, Tantric somatic practice, Aurobindian metaphysics, and Jungian alchemical psychology. In the Epicurean tradition, as documented by Long and Sedley, void names the second permanent constituent of reality alongside body — intangible, non-resistant, and logically necessary for motion. Buddhist usage, as transmitted through Campbell and Evans-Wentz, radicalizes this ontological neutrality: the Mahayana formula 'form is void and void is form' dissolves the binary altogether, situating the Void beyond the very opposition of Nirvana and Samsara. Tantric sources — Singh's Vijnana Bhairava in particular — transform the Void into a contemplative practice-object: the meditator imagines the body as 'absolutely void,' directionless, unsupported, a technique for dissolving ego-structure and entering non-dual awareness. Aurobindo interrogates the Buddhist Void critically, warning that an Energy functioning in a void becomes itself unintelligible, pointing toward a Non-Being or Nihil. Hillman, speaking from the alchemical tradition, reclaims the void as a positive interior force within the vessel — productive emptiness rather than absence. Across these positions, a fundamental tension organizes the discourse: is the Void a metaphysical substratum, a soteriological goal, a contemplative instrument, or a psychological danger to be circumvented?
In the library
14 passages
In Buddhism, the void is less a vacuum than a positive force. The inside shapes around itself the outer visible form. The 'stillness' of the Chinese jar begins inside; the exquisite shape we see is the stillness emanating from the void.
Hillman argues, against Western culture's abhorrence of emptiness, that the void within the vessel is a generative, positive force whose interior stillness produces outer form — a foundational alchemical-psychological revaluation of emptiness.
The Void cannot even be strictly called Nirvana, for this is a term relative to the world, and the Void is beyond all relations.
Evans-Wentz transmits the Tibetan Buddhist position that the Void transcends even the relative category of Nirvana, placing it beyond all conceptual and relational determinations.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis
From this void and the void is the form. The void is nothing but form and form nothing but the void. Outside the void there is no form, and outside the form no void.
Campbell cites the Mahayana formula identifying void and form as mutually constitutive, contrasting it with the Vedic-Hindu affirmation of a generative brahman-presence that is explicitly 'not a void.'
Campbell, Joseph, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis
an Energy working originally in the void — for the material field in which we see it at work is itself a creation — looks itself very much like a mental construction, an unreality: or it might be a temporary inexplicable outbreak of motion... the Void of the Infinite alone would be enduring and real.
Aurobindo critiques the logical trajectory of materialist and Buddhist frameworks in which Energy operating in a void collapses into nihilism, leaving only the Void of the Infinite as ostensibly real.
just imagine that your body is only a vacuum, it is nothing... vyomākāra means, absolutely void; digbhir anāvṛtam, [that] there are no sides even. Your body is absolutely void, without the sensation of sides.
Singh explicates Tantric Dharana 67, in which meditation on the body as 'absolutely void' and directionless is prescribed as a direct path to non-dual God-consciousness in Shambhavopaya.
Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979thesis
On the upper side, in subjective consciousness, there is nothing; in objective consciousness, there is nothing; and, in the center of the cognitive state, in the heart, there is nothing. And this you should imagine simultaneously, all-round in your body. Then the state of thought-lessness is revealed.
The Vijnana Bhairava prescribes simultaneous visualization of voidness in subjective, objective, and cognitive dimensions of experience as the means to nirvikalpa — the thought-free state of pure awareness.
Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting
Divine Wisdom, the Guide to the Science and Art of Living, is in its true nature the unpredicable Voidness.
Evans-Wentz identifies Divine Wisdom with the 'unpredicable Voidness,' aligning Buddhist shunyata with a Gnostic light-in-darkness motif from the Gospel of John.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
if it is intangible, and hence unable to prevent anything from moving through it at any point, it will undoubtedly be the emptiness which we call void... the same substance when empty of all body is called 'Void', when occupied by a body is named 'place'.
Long and Sedley reconstruct the Epicurean ontology in which void is defined by intangibility and non-resistance, functioning as the second permanent constituent of reality alongside body, with its designation varying according to occupancy.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
A fixed attribute is that which can at no point be separated and removed without fatal destruction resulting — as weight is to stones, heat to fire, liquidity to water, tangibility to all bodies, and intangibility to void.
Lucretius, cited by Sedley, identifies intangibility as void's fixed and inalienable attribute, distinguishing it categorically from body and establishing it as one of only two per se substances in the Epicurean universe.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
Inseparable from the things of which they are attributes are, for example, resistance from body and non-resistance from void. For body is inconceivable without resistance, and so is void without non-resistance.
The Epicurean text asserts that resistance and non-resistance are the mutually defining permanent attributes of body and void respectively, establishing their metaphysical complementarity.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
There is an identical explanation both for the world's stable position in infinite void and similarly for the earth's being settled in the world with equipollence at its centre.
Zeno's Stoic doctrine, as reported by Long and Sedley, invokes infinite void as the cosmological context within which the world maintains stable position through equipollent centripetal force.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
that part which was void of passion did not share in the suffering... the passionless divinity of the Word, united in subsistence to the flesh, remain void of passion when the body undergoes passion.
John of Damascus employs 'void of passion' (apathos) as a Christological term, distinguishing the impassible divine nature from the passible human nature in the economy of the Incarnation.
John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
unoccupied space is not permanent, but can turn into occupied space at any time. By choosing instead space in the broadest sense... he ensures the permanence of his second element.
Sedley explains Epicurus's strategic decision to ground his ontology in 'space' broadly conceived rather than void strictly defined, resolving the paradox of void's impermanence while retaining its conceptual role.
A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987aside
And how can our food get down, if there is no void to receive it?
Plato's Timaeus raises the physical necessity of void as a receptive space for bodily processes, citing it as a condition for the possibility of swallowing and biological growth.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside