'Negative Capability'

The poet John Keats writes: "At once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..." (Letter to his brother, 12/21/1817)

In a Letter to Reynolds, 5/3/1818, Keats speaks of stepping into the "Thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think." This could mean nothing else but Samadhi, the deepest meditation.

Keats uses nearly Buddhist language to describe the creative state of anatta: no-self. In a letter to Richard Woodhouse, 10/27/1818, he writes: "As to the Poetic Character itself... it is not itself - it has no self - it is everything and nothing... A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no Identity - he is continually in and filling some other Body... I have no nature. When I am in a room with People, then not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of everyone in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated."

Not just Keats, but all true artists love Negative Space. Leonardo da Vinci wrote, "Among the great things which are to be found among us, the Being of Nothingness is the greatest.” Miles Davis used Negative Space in his music, creating by subtraction. Miles once said, "Don't play what's there, play what isn't there." (LINK). Negative Space is the essence of Chinese and Japanese art, which had a profound influence on Matisse, Van Gogh and other European painters.

It's the silence between the notes, the infinite Presence implied by the finite form. This is the space of creation that was there "in the beginning" before God said, "Let there be light." The first verse of the Bible describes the womb of negative space from which the cosmos is born as tohu wa bohu: "formless and void."

As artists love Negative Space, so mystics love Pure Awareness. Meditation is the discovery that Pure Awareness is awakened space. The emptiness between stars, the hollow in your throat, chest and belly, the vastness between electrons, between one quark and another in the core of an atom, or in the black hole at the center of a galaxy, is all one space, and it is living. It is the wakened space of consciousness itself.

Falling into the hollowness of a single atom in your body, and you hear the music of the spheres. For that infinitesimal space contains the universe.