Marc Gafni – Emptiness and Addictions Part 2

Marc Gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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In our society which sadly defines human beings as consumers and not lovers, denial is the primary strategy for coping with emptiness. We are sold ful-fill-ment at every turn and in every guise. We buy buy buy, hoping that one of the hawked elixirs might finally full-fill us. And yet the emptiness lingers.

This is the great paradox of emptiness. The first relation to emptiness must not be to fill it but simply to be mindful of it. To notice the emptiness. The goal is to move beyond the void to the fullness of eros and Shechina. Yet, paradoxically, you can only access the fullness of being if you are willing to stay in the emptiness long enough to find your way. The path to eros is filled with detours to pseudo-eros, but they are all dead ends. When we are so desperate for fullness, when the emptiness hurts too much, these detours seduce us off the path, often spinning us to painful places we never wanted to go.