Stated in similar terms, when one is confronted with the presence or prospect of nothingness, the sense of self is threatened. We fear the loss of boundaries between our psyche and the swirling volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence and contradiction (VUCA-Plus) that face us in mid-21st century life (Bergquist, 2026).
In his remarkable exposition on nothingness, Don Howard (2025, p.22) references the work of Paul Tillich, a prominent 20th Century theologian:
“Paul Tillich the Protestant theologian and philosopher, wrote about “the threat of nonbeing” as the root of anxiety. For Tillich, non-being haunts us—not as a thing we encounter, but as a condition we fear. But even he stops short of imagining a world in which being never arrived. His non-being is psychological, spiritual. It makes us tremble, but it never overtakes us.”
It is in this statement that we find not just a statement about the source of anxiety in our life, but also the source of confusion about the nature of nothingness. We slip into a consideration of tangible subject/object relations or offer a description of challenging “somethings” (such as VUCA-Plus).
Voids and Avalanches: as we will continually see in this essay, nothingness easily slips through our fingers, for we want to grasp nothingness as something and in doing so lose the fundamental nature of this profound experience of a Void, a blank screen, a deep pit into which everything is pulled (as in the dark stars of our universe). We find the Void to be quite compelling. Like the dark stars, energy and images are pulled into the Void. Much as we find with the cascading of snowpacks down a mountainside, the Void pulls in our thoughts, hopes, and fears. Just as an avalanche will pull in snow, trees, and boulders from outside the immediate path of the cascading snow, the Void compels us to expand our fear of a specific lost relationship toward much broader and profound anxiety about isolation from all people.
When we enter a spiritual space (such as a cathedral or a cliff overlooking the ocean), there is often a surprising and frequently disturbing emergence of deeply embedded concerns regarding life’s meaning or our place as finite beings living in an infinite universe. I experienced just this kind of spiritual “awakening” when visiting the cathedral in Salisbury, England, and when standing in the middle of a raging rainstorm in Carlsbad, California. At the cathedral, I experienced a profound sense of return. I felt like I had been at this cathedral many years earlier—in another lifetime. While dwelling in the rainstorm, I was reminded of King Lear living “madly” through a rainstorm in Shakespeare’s play about a man losing control of his domain. I was King Lear for a moment, facing the loss of control in certain domains of my own life. I was face-to-face with the Void of the cathedral’s lofty edifice as well as the storm’s swirling tempest. I felt timeless and lost.
Numinostic Experiences: while many psychoanalysts might use the term “regression” to psychologize and diminish my experiences in Salisbury and Carlsbad, there is an alternative way in which to frame my confrontation with the Void. Many years ago, Rudolph Otto wrote about this “awe-full” confronting of nothingness—confronting the Void. In what some scholars identify as the first “psychological” analysis of religious experiences, Otto identified what he called the “numinous” experience. In his now-classic book, The Idea of the Holy, Otto creates a new word, “numinous” (from the Latin “numen” and paralleling the derivation of “ominous” from the word “omen”).
