There is something both humbling and faintly comic about the spectacle of humans across millennia — in robes and laboratories and dojos alike — circling the same silent centre and returning with slightly different words for their inability to describe it.
The Locked Room.
David Bohm, one of the most original theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, spent much of his later career pointing at something that made his colleagues uncomfortable. Reality at the quantum level, he argued, is not composed of separate, independent objects moving through space. Beneath the surface of the world we perceive — what he called the explicate order — lies an enfolded, undivided wholeness: the implicate order, in which everything is fundamentally interconnected, and from which the apparent separateness of things arises like patterns on the surface of a much deeper sea.
He was not, he was careful to note, doing mysticism. He was following the mathematics where it led. And yet where it led was remarkably close to where certain contemplatives had arrived centuries earlier by an entirely different route.
The Vedantic concept of Brahman — an undifferentiated ground of being from which all apparent forms arise — maps strikingly onto Bohm’s implicate order. The Buddhist image of Indra’s Net, in which each jewel reflects all others infinitely, anticipates the holographic metaphor Bohm found most useful. The Taoist Tao — an underlying process that cannot be grasped analytically but only intuited — feels like a description of something Bohm spent his career trying to formalise.
A Jesuit priest and academic, speaking on a panel discussion, put the theological version with unusual honesty: we cannot know God, he said, and to make matters worse, we only have human words with which to discuss God — and at that level they are entirely insufficient. All theology, he concluded, is therefore speculative. It takes a particular kind of intellectual courage to say that from within an institution that has historically issued anathemas over the precise wording of creeds. It places him squarely in the tradition of apophatic theology — Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing — who argued that the divine can only be approached by systematically stripping away every concept you bring. Not what God is, but the progressive abandonment of what God is not.
It is also, as the Jesuit perhaps knew, very close to the Zen position that all scripture is wastepaper.
The physicist, the theologian, and the Zen master arrive at the same door and find it, if not locked, then without a handle on this side.
The Void Is Not Empty.
D.T. Suzuki, the scholar who did more than anyone to introduce Zen to the Western world, described the void not as mere absence but as the coincidence of ceaseless negation and straightforward affirmation. This is crucial. It rescues the void from passivity and makes it generative — a dynamic tension that is the ground of all manifestation rather than simply its absence.
Miyamoto Musashi, the seventeenth-century swordsman and strategist, wrote in his Book of the Void — the shortest and strangest section of The Book of Five Rings — that the void is of course nothing, and is not included in human knowledge. But he also wrote: by knowing what exists, we can know that which does not exist. Which might be read as: the limit of knowledge is itself a kind of knowledge. The boundary of the map is information about the territory.
Eckhart’s Gottheit — the Godhead beyond God, the darkness beyond all divine attributes — is pointing at the same dynamic nothingness. Something that is not the absence of being but its ground.
If you accept that framing, then negation is not merely passive. It is not simply the lack of something. It is a real force with actual existence. And that changes everything.
Negation Dressed as Affirmation.
Here is where the mystical and the urgently practical converge.
If negation has genuine existence — if it operates as a real dynamic rather than merely the absence of good — then it does not announce itself as negation. It cannot. Its mode of operation is to present as affirmation. This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about it.
The sequence, once you see it, is recognisable at every scale. Desire. Opportunity. Justification. Action. Often followed by remorse and a particular kind of self-loathing that, if not examined, simply restarts the cycle.
I first saw this sequence operating in real human beings, in real time, in circumstances of considerable vulnerability, as a teenager in the back streets around Piccadilly Circus in 1972. I had left home for good after troubles that began in 1968 and took me through Amsterdam in 1970 — a departure made final after an incident in which I pulled a gun on my father. It wasn’t loaded, but he didn’t know that. I did not have the framework to understand what I was watching on those streets. But the direct observation stayed. The framework came later and clicked into place because the experience had been real — which is, interestingly, close to what Musashi meant by knowing through direct observation rather than through theory.
What I was watching was the mechanism of self-betrayal. Men constructing, in real time, reasons why what they were about to do was consistent with, or even required by, their values, their identity, their sense of who they were. The justification was not a cynical performance. It was sincere. Which is precisely what makes the mechanism so effective, and so dangerous.
Theology called this temptation. Psychology calls it rationalisation. Politics calls it ideology. But these are descriptions of the same underlying machinery operating at different scales. The individual justifying an act he will later be ashamed of. The nation constructing the moral case for a war it has already decided to fight. The institution explaining why this particular moment is the wrong time for change.
In each case, negation — the force working against the conditions of life and flourishing — presents as affirmation. As rights. As necessity. As realism. As the only responsible choice.
The Climate Locked Room.
This brings us to the most consequential application of the mechanism currently operating on the planet.
We know, with shrinking room for doubt, that climate change poses an existential risk to human civilisation. We know that meaningful action would, in the long run, result in a general increase in living standards, energy security, and ecological stability. We know the technologies exist. And yet the gap between what we know and what we do remains vast and, in crucial respects, widening.
The usual explanation names capitalism and corrupt politics, and this is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. Capitalism cannot function in a collapsing civilisation. The hyper-wealthy have children and grandchildren. Pure stupidity and pure evil are unsatisfying as complete explanations for intelligent, functional people.
What seems more likely is that the mechanism of negation is operating at the level of identity. The entire sense of self, purpose, and meaning of those most resistant to change is constructed around the system that is doing the damage. To genuinely act in affirmation of life — to act in a way that the situation actually requires — would demand a dissolution of ego and identity that the psychological structure resists with enormous force. And so negation moves in, dressed as affirmation.
“We are the ones who understand how economies actually function. Disruption will harm the poor most. The science is more uncertain than it appears. Our grandchildren will have better technologies to solve this than we do.”
The sophistication of the rationalisation is proportional to the intelligence available to it. Which is what makes it so difficult to counter through argument alone. You are not arguing with a conclusion. You are arguing with a psychological structure that has already decided, and is now generating conclusions in its own defence.
Are We Talking About the Same Thing?
The convergence of threads here is striking enough to take seriously.
The void as the coincidence of negation and affirmation. Consciousness as something the brain participates in rather than generates — a possibility that some interpretations of quantum mind theory, certain mystical traditions, and some anomalous empirical research all seem to point toward. The implicate order as the undivided ground from which both mind and matter unfold. God as the unknowable beyond all names. Satan as the personification of a real structural dynamic rather than a medieval fairy tale. Negation as genuine force.
These may not be identical descriptions. But they may be different maps of the same unmappable territory — arrived at from physics, from theology, from swordsmanship, from contemplative practice, from direct observation in difficult circumstances.
What seems to connect them is this: there is a force — call it what you will — that works against the conditions of existence and flourishing, that presents as its opposite, and that operates most powerfully through the most intelligent and articulate parts of us.
The honest representatives of almost every serious tradition — scientific, contemplative, philosophical — eventually acknowledge that limit. It tends to be the less serious representatives who claim to have the complete map.
The Appropriate Motion.
Humans are as fascinating as they can be hilarious when you take a step back and observe as an alien scientist might. Circling the same silence for centuries. Writing it down, losing the writing, finding it again, writing it down differently.
Perhaps the circling is not a failure to arrive. Perhaps it is the appropriate motion around something that cannot, by its nature, be stood upon directly.
But the circling has consequences. And at this particular moment in history, with the tools to negate life now operating at civilisational scale, understanding the mechanism — recognising negation when it presents as affirmation, in ourselves first, then in the world — may be less a philosophical luxury and more a survival requirement.
Musashi wrote that by knowing what exists, we can know what does not. The void is not included in human knowledge. And yet here we are, still circling. Still looking. Which may itself be the most human thing of all.
This post grew out of a conversation touching on David Bohm, D.T. Suzuki, Meister Eckhart, Miyamoto Musashi, Zen, quantum physics, climate paralysis, and fifty-four years of accumulated observation. Some conversations earn their length.