“Zero is the passage from the metaphysical to the ‘physical’ realm at the moment of creation. At this point, the infinite and eternal transform into the categories of the spacetime world.”
— Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

Sometimes a theme announces itself through more than one voice.

During a recent, wide-ranging, and deeply engaged Dharma dialogue with Patrick Bryson, we discovered that we had each written a piece—almost simultaneously—around the same image: the black hole. Or, as Patrick called his, the black whole.

Our two pieces emerged independently, yet they orbit the same mystery: what it means to be fully human while recognising that we are the living, breathing threshold where being and non-being meet. Here, form collapses into stillness, and stillness gives rise to form in a dynamic exchange. I often use the image of the dance of emptiness and wholeness; Patrick describes it as an oscillation between articulation and annulment.

In this liminality, we need not rest in the continuous knowing of anything. Instead, we can creatively engage with all aspects of life—daring to come closer to the miraculous within relationship—and then freely relinquish even that, leaving no residue, no karma.

This meeting feels less like coincidence than participation in a shared field of understanding—a resonance across time and space, a coherent emergence—the way life itself sometimes sings through more than one instrument at once.

To read Patrick’s article The Ahuman as “Black Whole”, please click here to visit his Medium page

To read my accompanying poem Black Hole, please click here

— Peter Mitchell

A note on language

Patrick uses the term “Ahuman,” which I hadn’t come across before. He uses it to describe the human beyond self-reference—the threshold where being and non-being meet. I believe it differs from academic uses of the term, which often focus on decentralising the human in ecological or posthuman theory; here it points to an experiential, ontological dimension—the awakened human freed from misunderstandings about the true nature of identity, transparent to the whole, yet also free to temporarily occupy identities as needed, in harmony with the greater nature and needs of existence, and simultaneously aligned with the specifics of natural conditions.

On a Shared Threshold: Between Nothing and Something