huh?
My blog is in a re-birth phase (Sep 2010). In the interim, if you find your way here and are curious about where the phrase “the pregnant void” comes from — it was just a phrase that popped into my head. It seemed such a . . . well . . . fertile phrase that I knew it probably had volumes written about it online. I googled it and found very little so sort of adopted it. I love the idea. The below excerpt is one of the only things I’ve really been able to find on the phrase, but describes precisely the visual that the phrase conjures for me.
Chow for now . . .
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The Pregnant Void
by Derek Lin
This nothingness has many names. Ancient Hindus called it Sunya, the pregnant void. In his philosophical discussions, Bruce Lee called it voidness, or the living void. Modern physicists call an aspect of it the quantum foam.
This void is not an empty vacuum, nor is it the nonexistence of oblivion. There seems to be nothing within its emptiness, but in reality it is seething with infinite possibilities, all waiting to express themselves by taking form in the material world.
This is an important aspect of the Tao – without substance, without form, without shape, and yet containing all conceivable substances, all conceivable forms and all conceivable shapes. The phrase “In God all things are possible” is a glimpse into the divine genius of this supreme power.
Thus in chapter 4 of Tao Te Ching we see that:
The Tao is empty
Utilize it, it is not filled up
So deep! It seems to be the source of myriad things
Having completed the thought experiment, we can now look at this passage in a different light. It may have seemed puzzling before how the Tao can be empty and still be the source of everything. Now it begins to make more sense.
Everything comes out of nothing. Just as the source of all the trees in our example is the immaterial potential of the seed, the source of everything in existence must be the ultimate emptiness in the very beginning of time.
(The above was written by Derek Lin and excerpted from The Seed, which is from his Column Tao Living)
