Five Ways to Become One with The Void

“He who sees too much ends up finding no place anywhere.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Or, he becomes sovereign in the void, finding his place everywhere. This is the radical human task: to become significant within insignificance.

To become sovereign in the void is not a destination but a perpetual becoming. The one who “sees too much” does not wander homeless; he dissolves the very concept of home and claims the cosmos as his skin. He is Home-full. The void is not the absence of a place. It is the raw, unscripted potential before any god, ideology, politics, or identity has a chance to rush in and fill it with nonsense.

Here is the path to the void. Each step is self-inflicted, because what you forge in your own fire will not melt under scrutiny.

1.) Starve the old self until it dies:

“When the ego dies, the soul awakens.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

The first illusion to kill is the belief that you need a place.

Sit in deliberate solitude for extended periods (days, not hours) with no distractions, no books, no plans. Let the mind yearn for meaning, identity, belonging. Let it scream for attention, pretention, and admiration. Do not rescue it.

Watch as the panic exhausts itself. Elevate yourself above yourself and bear witness as your old self squirms its way into its cocoon. When the void gazes into you, gaze back even harder. Nietzsche called this “staring into the abyss.” I call it reconnaissance.

When the ego finally shrugs and shrivels into a malleable thing, annihilate it. Prop it up on the cross of your own crucifixion. Kill it, then rebirth it. Give it wings. Give it providence and wholeness. Give it self-actualization and individuation. Give it its first taste of sovereignty.

The self that required a stage has exited. The one that has elevated itself above the stage has entered. Home is no longer a place. Home is now and forever everywhere.

2.) Affirm the eternal recurrence as daily liturgy:

“Amor fati is a sentiment of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go; to love a life that tries in almost every moment to make you hate it and to still stare back at it and say, ‘yes, I love it.’ What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten?” ~Pursuit of Wonder

Ask yourself, every morning: “Could I live this exact day, with all its boredom, pain, and absurdity, infinitely many times—and still say yes?” Not stoic resignation. But a lustful yes. Amor fati—love of fate—taken to the extreme. When the answer is yes, you have aligned with the void’s rhythm.

Call it Groundhog Day on crack!

The transcendent being does not escape circumstance; he devours it whole and asks for seconds. This is not mere optimism. It is the will to power weaponized against nihilism itself. Every setback becomes raw material for your next creation. You stop seeking a “better” place because every place, even Punxsutawney, P.A., becomes the only place worth repeating forever.

In the boozy haze of amor fati, the existential darkness is transformed into lightheartedness. In the grip of loving playfulness with fate, absurdity loses its grip and you free yourself to laugh and to be laughable. You experience a state of cosmic sublimity where absolute vulnerability trumps naïve invulnerability. You free yourself to live on purpose with purpose. You free yourself to love agape-style, no-holds-barred, completely amorous with your own destiny.

In this sublime state, all the pains, all the pleasures, all the ups and downs, all the fear and love of life become mere ingredients for your own immortality project, your magnum opus, your ultimate work of art: becoming sovereign in the void.

3.) Practice creative destruction with your own identity:

 “‘Fate’ was only a mask, as everything is a mask that is not death.” ~Emil Cioran

Build yourself, burn yourself, then build yourself again—deliberately. Adopt a persona fully (the hermit, the artist, the warrior, the fool), live it unapologetically and for no other reason than for shear experimentation. Then annihilate it in a private ritual. Write the manifesto of who you were, who you are, and who you will always be, and then tear it up and write the opposite.

The sovereign in the void has no fixed mask because he is the mask-maker. He is the mask bender, the mask wearer, and the mask destroyer all at once. This is how you become “elevated”: not by climbing a ladder that others built, but by realizing the ladder, the climber, and the sky are all your own invention.

Live archetypally. Dance in and out of persona. Dip in and out of being whatever you want to be. Wear wolf masks, thunderbird masks, whale masks. Cultivate the hero, the shadow, the trickster.

You are anything but singular. You are multifariously plural. Your unconscious is a deep ocean of archetypes just waiting to be explored. Dive in deep. Learn to swim. Learn to surf. Learn to manifest hurricanes.

As Carl Jung said, “We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.”

Add capacities and experiences. The more you understand archetypes, the more you will be able to differentiate them. Which is important because the more you differentiate from archetypes, the less unconscious influence they will have over you and the more conscious awareness you will have over them.

In the void, maskless and mask-full, there’s a freedom so fierce it eats itself. Opposites don’t merely coexist; they fuck and birth galaxies. Your Shadow swallows light and shits out stars. Your inner beast cants your sage’s sutras. Your inner sage howls in animal jouissance. Anima and animus spiral into a mercurial androgyne that dances on the knife’s edge of creation.

When nothing is sacred—or rather, when everything is sacred—your freedom to reinvent yourself becomes a powerful personification of Ouroboros, a mystical embodiment of the Phoenix. You find your place everywhere because you carry the blueprint in your bones.

4.) Cultivate the void as a lover, not as an enemy:

“It’s better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion.” ~Kierkegaard

Train the body and the mind to rest in emptiness the way a sword rests in its sheath: prepared, immediate, lethal. Daily meditation is too soft a word; call it cosmic confrontation, call it existential self-interrogation.

Sit motionless until your thoughts dissolve into pure awareness of the void. Subsume the abyss. Meditate on death, eternity, and interconnectedness. Be fully present: mind, body and soul. Get intimately involved. Feel it. Then listen. Listen deeply, hungrily, like what it has to say will save your life. Use it as your own little insane asylum, if need be. For, we all need a place where we’re free to be crazy occasionally.

Then when you come out of your meditation dance, make love, create, and fight—pour that pure awareness back into life like molten steel into a mold.

The transcendent one does not float above the world like a ghost. No! He is alive. He moves through it effortlessly, hungrily, lightheartedly, because he has already died to it. Zen masters and Nietzsche both knew this secret: the void and the dance are the same movement. Wu wei (effortless action) meets the will to power. You act without clutching. You belong without clinging. You create without attachment. You entertain a thought without accepting it.

5. Weaponize perspective until it becomes godlike:

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.” ~Nassim Nicholas Taleb

He who “sees too much” sees the horror and the comedy. The cosmic joke is second nature. Laid out like a playmat, or a yoga mat… Stretch deeply with your soul into controlled folly. Give a wink to the eternal gag.

Train with radical perspectivism. Cultivate imagination. Meet Alice at the rabbit hole of your inner freedom. Meet Neo in the Desert of the Real. Shine the light out of Plato’s Cave. Yuck it up with Phill and Phill in Punxsutawney.

Shatter the final illusion—that reality is a place you must fit into. A richer understanding of reality comes from applying multiple perspectives rather than seeking a single “truth.” Look at reality like an artist. Don’t tolerate it, cathartically subsume it, then make art out of it.

When you can inhabit mutually exclusive truths without going crazy, you have achieved sovereignty. The universe stops being a prison and becomes a playground. You find your place everywhere because “place” was always just a story, and you are now the storyteller.

As Joseph Campbell said, “’Reality’ is just a word and you shouldn't use it without quotation marks around it anyway.”

But here’s the kick in the shins: there is no arrival. The moment you declare “I am one with the void,” the void laughs and says, “Prove it.” Sovereignty is not a noun; it is a verb. You do not become transcendent, you perpetually ascend, you transcend in every breath, every choice, every refusal to flinch. You don’t bow; you Flow.

This path is lonely by design. Most will call it madness or nihilism because they still need their little corners to hide in. But you refuse to hide. You don’t need a comfort zone to cling to. Being uncomfortable is your comfort zone. You will walk through their cities, their temples, their revolutions as a sovereign god—everywhere at home precisely because you need no home.

The void does not swallow you; you swallow the void. Then you spit out worlds. That is how one finds his place everywhere. Not by seeking it. But by surrendering to it.

Image source:

Beyond Essence by Ojerum

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Five Ways to Become One with the Void) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.org. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.