Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

And today, I want to talk to you about something that most people feel very nervous about.

When I first encountered it myself, I was very nervous about it. And I call it the void.

And let me talk to you about it. If you are in, I have an interest in things spiritual,

and why else would you be here in the gathering room? It is an overtly spiritual space, right?

You may have had some sort of practice like

centering prayer or meditation or any one of a number of different types of contemplative practice.

And all of these, as they say in Asia, are a thousand paths up the mountain to the same peak.

And if you spend a lot of time contemplating, what will happen to you, I think, what they say

happens to everyone and what certainly happened to me is there comes a moment when you are

face to face with nothingness.

And I remember the first time this happened to me.

I was meditating and like everything seemed to disappear from meaning.

And suddenly everything was empty and vacant.

And it was terrifying.

It was like T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland, the Hollow Men, the endless gray expanse of a terrible, terrible nothingness.

It was horrible and it depressed me and it scared me.

And I think that's how most people initially see or think of things when you say the word

the void.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said, if you stare

long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. And he knew what he was talking

about because he went completely crazy after he was really smart. He was like a full professor at 24, but at 44 he decided that he had

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