When I was 27, I had an overwhelming vision that stayed with me for three days. It was so intense that I could not bring myself to do anything other than be in it and let it fade away by itself. In its wake followed the insight into the perspective that the experience of emptiness implies for the ego and for the content it relates to in consciousness. But before that, I had been forced to face the feeling of emptiness that preceded it on several occasions. Which, until this meeting and the terrifying experience I had with it before, had thrown me out of myself and made me bury myself in studies, sports, and work. All to try to avoid facing it again. The duality our consciousness and the emptiness beyond it form together horrifies the ego as it is confronted by its diminishing significance in relation to the content that independently arises outside of it in our consciousness. Emptiness is the first intense experience of this but it is not emptiness, but that which exists and acts on us from beyond the ego. The ego’s first encounters and identification with it is a feeling of total obliteration, an intense feeling of meaninglessness. Of darkness and the absolute unknown. For the ego an experience that it must be like death itself. Even though we afterwards understand that what we experience and work with through our psychic reflection is the ego’s relativization, and a renewed perspective that once emerged from our primordial relationship to the original whole. But the first encounters with the emptiness that the ego have and identifies you with are extremely destructive and intense. So if we encounter them without knowing what it is or if we are not yet ready to face it, there is an obvious risk that we will perish. We will drown in the power of the experience of it because the ego sees it as something that belongs to it. As if it is something that arises through the ego in and of itself. Not as something that relativizes its importance. With time and with the experiences we gain from this encounter repeated, we will endure it better and better. As with other intense psychological experiences we have had and do, both pleasant and repulsive. But the relativization of the ego in ourselves stands out as the most central and the one that also causes us our deepest suffering. Before we come to a reconciliation with the relative importance of the ego in relation to our consciousness. I have also come to realize that it was this experience and its meaning for the ego that led to the death of a person close to me. But also for others who, out of a feeling of hopeless resignation and the sense of meaninglessness that follows from it, are led to expose themselves to circumstances that can ultimately destroy their lives. Without the relativization of the ego, and this experience of the emptiness, in and of itself, we cannot find the privacy and stillness we need for our relationships with the true bottom of ourselves, and the preconscious space whose independence from us we share with everyone else. Even though most people shy away from it and stage their suffering outside of themselves, to make what goes on between them and themselves something they can control as if it belonged to someone else there. As every child within us would do when it does’nt know what is going on within them, or what they are exposed to, when the ego is not developed enough to initially stand its ground when this profound experience hits it. In order for us to be able to do this, we must learn to suffer and endure the intense process of this experience as it is. Something we do through meditative mental reflection. Unfortunately for many, so few actively acknowledge these experiences, and choose to go through them in a way that allows them to confirm that it is something that has great significance for everyone who ends up in them. This means that many will feel betrayed by their surroundings and realize early on that it only refers to words without any underlying experiential content, and to the conditioning this constitutes for them, without the experiences that influence and shape us in relation to them, and that people we feel dependent on or drawn to are letting us down. They are still dependent on it in a politically and religiously declamatory, authoritarian, aggressive and violent way which defends one’s own personal control over this conditioned content because of the fear it entails of being overpowered by the emptiness and contents of the preconscious mind that we find behind it.