Last night I reflected on being surprised that Camus came to mind as I tried to engage in the questions asked and that the confusion I felt was similar to what I feel when engaged in conversation with family members on the topic of God.

My family would be troubled with the association of the word ‘absurd’ and the word God. Than it occurred to me that in conversation we were using the word God differently. My family relates to a personal God while I relate to a non-personal G_d. With that in mind I would rewrite what I posted about Camus:

Albert Camus famously rejected the “leap” the turn to a personal God or transcendent meaning as a response to the absurd. For Camus, the absurd arises from the tension between our deep longing for meaning and the universe’s indifferent silence. To leap toward a personal God, one who explains, redeems, or consoles, is to escape this tension. Camus called this philosophical suicide: a refusal to face the absurd honestly.

This notion of a personal God was the one I was the taught which I internalized as God as a Father who would make everything better, all I had to do was trust, follow the rules.. and above all avoid a feeling that such a God could only be a puppet master at best, a monster at worse. In the end I was not able to hold that tension or the mental gymnastics to justify such a relationship. Here I enter my ‘dark night’ of the soul.

Rejecting the personal God as Camus suggests, I feel clears a space for a different kind of relationship. Not a being who ‘watches’ over us but Being itself. Not a voice that answers, but a presence that holds. This is the realm of the non-personal G_d, the canvas beneath the painting, the silence beneath the story, the ground of being that doesn’t resolve the absurd but embraces it.

In this light, Camus’s refusal becomes a kind of spiritual integrity. He doesn’t leap, but he also doesn’t turn away. He stays with the tension. And in doing so, he points, perhaps unknowingly, toward a sacredness that doesn’t require belief, only presence.

Here the words of a ‘we must lose God to find G_d’ come to mind.

In this non-dual space, theologies of law and language begin to fade. What rises in their place is compassion, not as a commandment, but as a natural expression of being. In that compassion, “law” is not imposed but embodied. It is not followed out of fear or duty but lived from a place of deep remembering.

The absurd remains. This kind of G_d doesn’t answer the cry for meaning with a tidy explanation. Instead, it holds the questions not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived. The world is still what it is: beautiful, brutal, unresolved. But in refusing to escape it, we may find ourselves more deeply in it. And in that, something softens. Not because the world has changed, but because we have.

Paradoxically, the refusal to leap has helped me see that the path of the leap is also valid. What I once saw as escape, I now recognize as another form of devotion. All wisdom traditions whether they speak of a personal God, an impersonal ground, or no God at all are trying to name the unnameable, to touch the mystery, and that is so very human.

Each path, in its own way, invites us to hold the tension.
Each path, in its own way, returns to the canvas – the shore beyond.
Every path, in its own way, pathless.

Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā
Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond, into the gone completely beyond the other shore, awaken.
Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond, into the gone completely beyond the other shore, return.

Just a note: the serenity prayer is always good advice. One can hold the tension and take that advice but the the tension remains as it was and is.

correction – I might add a refusal to articulate it away, fix it with words.

HI Anita
To your point “Your philosophical and poetic reflections could act as a shield, elegant and thoughtful, that sits between you and raw vulnerability.”

As most such things it has been both and neither. Today I no longer view it at a shied if only because it hasn’t worked as one 🙂 If anything the reflections have increased my sense of isolation. My family would reject most of what I have written and not understood.
So the pondering has changed little of what is “painted” but has restored a relationship to the canvas… ( I sleep a little better and handle panic attracts a little better) The tension between remains and I can only try to hold the tension without seeing it as something broken. It is and I am That.

“I’m having this image of a blank canvas full of dark colors, representing the ache and I’m nowhere to be found on it. The ache feels heavy, unbearable… until someone, with a few brushstrokes, paints me onto that canvas. What a relief: there I am. I didn’t know I was there.”

I have lived in that space waiting for someone to paint the brushstrokes… if only I could see myself… We live our lives reflecting and reflected the illusion of separation between the observer and the observed… But… What if the brush has always been in your hand? What if the ache isn’t a void, but a whisper reminding you that you are already on the canvas, even if the colors feel too dark to see?

I use too many words… I return to the riddle..

We are “bigger then big and smaller then small and we have it ALL” where in each breath, we can simultaneously feel expansive and grounded, infinite and finite, everything and nothing… avoiding the tension we tend to notice only the what is causing us grief or the one we wish to escape to. The observer the observed lost in the painting and forgetting the canvas and or running from both.

How often we get caught up in the details of life (the painting) and forget the underlying reality or awareness (the canvas) that holds it all. We are, I am That. The painting and the canvas. not as separate but one.

That is not comfort in the sense that we tend to seek comfort. Comfort as a release from pain, fear and uncertainty. It is the tension of ache Life asks us to hold. Maybe their is a kind of comfort in that… We may feel alone in our wonder and our pain, but were not when we remember.

Hi Anita. Great questions

Yes, I know that nothingness inside. That hollow, alone space. There are times when the mystery feels too vast, and I long for something more tangible. The heart aches, even as it knows. The soul whispers “yes,” but the body feels tired, small, and unseen.

Do I feel I belong to something greater? I think this is where language begins to fail. The word greater implies measurement, and the experience I’m pointing to is beyond labels. It’s not something I can hold and define. As I mentioned earlier, the heart still aches even when the mind “knows.” So I hold this as a kind of living tension, not something to fix, but something to stay open to. (The wisdom traditions suggesting that holding the tension opens to what Gurdjieff might call the third force. The ‘force’ which encountering the tension of duality dissolves it into something else.)

And no, this doesn’t make me less needy of human connection. If anything, it might deepen the ache. To be candid, I sometimes wonder if writing about these things is a way to avoid that ache, but it doesn’t. It just brings me closer to it.

How to explain… Alan Watts once said, “What you do to the Earth, you do to yourself.” I used to read that as a kind of environmental ethic, where I still saw myself as separate from nature. But when I let go of that separation, the meaning changed. If I am the Earth, if I am everything, then what I do to the Earth, to others, to the world, I do to myself.

When I see bombs being dropped, I am That. When I see a child starving, I am That. When I see someone holding that child, I am That too…
It’s not a comfortable realization. But it feels true. And maybe that’s what belonging really is, not comfort, but connection. Not escape from the ache, but presence within it.

I understand when someone might say what’s the point then if in the end that ache and that experience of nothingness inside remains. I don’t have a answer for that. I still get angry and frustrated only not so much now. No that’s not it, the anger and frustration is part of the ache returned to the ‘canvas’.

Maybe the ache not a flaw in the system, but is the system. The anger, the longing, the emptiness brushstrokes on the canvas of being.
And the canvas itself still, silent, unchanging holds it all….

There’s no easy answer and maybe that’s the task: not to answer the question or resolve the ache, but to relate to it differently. as Rilke said “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves” holding the tension something shifts, though not always in the ache itself, but in how we hold it.

All these words and I’ve said very little and nothing new.

Hi Anita
I really appreciate what you shared and the psychological and emotional lens through which you viewed the phrase “When I see I am you, how can I harm you?” You’re right, it can be incredibly difficult to see innocence in others when we struggle to see it in ourselves. I feel that is a aspect of our shadow work, where we wrestle with seeing both the best and worst aspects of ourselves and instead project them onto others. In projection, the last thing we want to, or maybe capable of doing, is to see others as ourselves.

What I was pointing was something a little more like the spirit behind the word Namaste “The divine in me recognizes the divine in you.” Or even deeper, There is no me and you, only This. As the Upanishads say: “Tat Tvam Asi” “Thou art That.”

It’s not just about seeing my goodness or badness in you, but about seeing that we are not separate at all. That at the deepest level, we are made of the same light, the same breath, the same being. Each of us a arising and returning to the canvas. From that place, harming you would be harming myself. Its a moment of non-dual realization, where the illusion of separateness dissolves (as would any measurement, like innocence), and compassion arises naturally, not from similarity or shared traits, but from oneness.

I think both perspectives are true and necessary part of our unfolding. The psychological healing of reclaiming our innocence a step toward being able to glimpse that deeper unity.

One of the intentions behind the blank canvas post was to point to this shared truth across wisdom traditions. That this realization of oneness is not exclusive to any one path, but a shore we all seem to be sailing toward. A unifying current beneath the surface of our many stories.

Hi Everyone

Finding that I have nothing new to say I thought I would expand on the Blank Canvas with the aid of AI see if various wisdom traditions might relate to the idea.

In Jungian terms The “blank white canvas” functions as a symbol of the Self, the totality of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious. The word Self a archetype of wholeness, the unchanging ground from which all psychic content arises and to which it returns. The canvas, though seemingly empty, contains all potential, just as the Self contains all aspects of the personality, realized and unrealized.
“The canvas contains within it every painting that has been and will be created.” This realization mirrors the Platonic idea of forms and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious—a realm of archetypal images and potentials that exist beyond individual experience.

The idea that “nothing is lost, nothing gained, nothing to fear” a realization of being present (Eternal Now), often symbolized in Jungian psychology by the mandala, a symbol of wholeness and the eternal cycle of becoming. The canvas, like the mandala, is both empty and full, static and dynamic.

Exploring the notion of AUM as the sound of ‘one hand clapping’ and every word that has and will be spoken.
AUM is considered the primordial vibration—the sound from which all creation emerges. It is not just a sound but a symbol of totality where:
• A represents the waking state (conscious mind)
• U represents the dream state (subconscious)
• M represents deep sleep (unconscious)
• The silence after the sound represents pure awareness, the Self beyond form

AUM the sound-canvas from which all spoken words (forms) arise and to which they return. The Sound of One Hand Clapping, the Zen paradox meant to transcend dualistic thinking by inviting the mind to confront the limits of logic and language. In the context of AUM, One hand clapping is the unmanifest, the potential before form. Two hands clapping is the manifest, the world of duality, sound, and form. So, AUM is both the sound of all sounds and the silence of no-sound: the canvas and the paint, the hand and the clapping, the word and the silence between words.

Exploring the notion of Language as Paint on the Canvas and how Language constructs our reality. From a psychological and philosophical standpoint, language is not just a tool for describing reality, it shapes it. In Jungian terms, language is a symbolic system that gives form to archetypal energies. It is how the unconscious becomes conscious.
• Words are symbols, and symbols are bridges between the known and the unknown.
• Language filters experience, giving it structure, meaning, and narrative.
• What we can name, we can relate to; what we cannot name, remains in the shadow.

The ego uses language to define identity, time, and separation. But the Self, the deeper totality, speaks in images, dreams, silence, and paradox. This is why mystical experiences often feel ineffable as they transcend the limits of language.

In the metaphor of thatCanvas and the Paint, the canvas is pure awareness, the Self, the eternal now. The paint is language, thought, culture, memory, everything that gives shape to experience. Each word, like each brushstroke, reveals and conceals. It brings something into form while hiding the infinite potential behind it.

AUM the sound of one hand clapping the vibration before duality. Language the second hand, the clap, the echo of creation.

The canvas is always blank, yet always full. Every word is a painting, and every silence a return to the source. Let us then take care in the words that we speak and remember the return to silence.