A cup needs the empty space inside it as much as it needs the clay. Fill that space with more clay and you can't put coffee in it. Take away the clay and you can't hold the coffee either.
The Tao Te Ching makes the first half of that argument in chapter 11. In Witter Bynner's version: "Thus we are helped by what is not / To use what is." I think the reverse matters just as much: the space needs the clay to give it a shape.
That's how I think about the named and the nameless in the Tao Te Ching. The opening chapter puts the two together:
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.Tao Te Ching, chapter 1, Feng and English
The ten thousand things are everything we can distinguish and name, from a rock to the coffee in a cup. This is our side. D. C. Lau calls the same crowd "the myriad creatures." Myriad comes from the Greek word for ten thousand. The nameless is the other side.
I don't know how creation works. I'm taking the distinction between named and nameless from the book, without adopting its account of the beginning. I think the two sides are equal. Neither came first, neither produced the other, and neither is more real or more valuable. Each requires the other to exist, as the clay and the empty space require each other to make a cup.
Chapter 2 comes close to this: "Being and Not-being grow out of one another," in Arthur Waley's translation. But chapter 40 says, "Being itself is the product of Not-being." That's where I disagree with the book. The cup helps me explain why, though an analogy can't establish how existence works.
Those terms are difficult to use without adding things I don't mean. Calling the other side a place would imply a location. Saying "it" would imply a thing, and "they" would imply beings. Those words describe things on our side, which is why I keep saying "the other side." The book opens with the same warning about naming. "The name that can be named is not the eternal name," says Feng and English's version of chapter 1.
I think the attraction between the two sides is mutual. We wonder about the nameless, and I think an equal attraction runs the other way. I can't describe the corresponding attraction without giving the nameless some quality I know from this side. I think the pull itself is necessary for either side to exist.
At the end of chapter 1, James Legge translates the relation between the named and the nameless as "Together we call them the Mystery." I read that as the two sides facing each other. The mutual attraction is my addition; I'm not claiming the book says it.
In that picture, things on our side are closer to or farther from a middle. There's no physical distance between the two sides. Space and location already belong to the world of named things. By distance, I mean how much separates something from everything else. On our side, I think that distance is self.
A rock has very little self. It doesn't want anything or distinguish itself from the mountain it fell off. An animal has hunger and fear, and some awareness of itself apart from its surroundings. A person can spend an entire day thinking about how they compare with somebody else. In this picture, the rock is closer to the middle, the animal farther out, and the person farther still.
The rock hasn't reached the middle. It has a mass and a location; we can tell it apart from another rock. It belongs on our side, just with less separating it. Calling a rock "spiritually fit" sounds strange because we usually associate spirituality with understanding something. I mean having less self, which doesn't require understanding.
The Tao Te Ching uses the image of an uncarved block of wood. Before carving, it's a block. Afterward, the pieces are bowls or handles, each with a use and a name. "Once the block is carved, there will be names," says Waley's chapter 32. A person's identity can become more particular in the same way. A job or an old grievance gives us another way to distinguish ourselves.
Zhuangzi doesn't reserve the Tao for people with spiritual accomplishments. Asked where the Tao is, he answers with an ant, then weeds, then a broken tile, then dung. I don't take this to mean that a rock is better than a person. Nearness isn't a ranking of worth.
Moving farther out would mean becoming more occupied with yourself. Someone can want money or power so badly that other people barely register. Someone who wants another line of cocaine can get just as absorbed in that wanting. In either case, there's little room for anything beyond getting what you want.
I think an equivalent movement exists on the other side, toward the middle or away from the middle. I don't know what makes that distance. Self is how I'm describing our side; I can't carry the same explanation across.
If self is what separates us, then a weaker sense of self would mean being closer. Hallucinogens and meditation can both change that sense. The default mode network, a group of brain regions associated with mind-wandering and thinking about yourself, is part of the research on those changes. A psilocybin study by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues found reduced activity and communication in some of its central regions. A meditation study by Judson Brewer and colleagues found lower activity in major parts of the same network in experienced meditators compared with people who hadn't trained in meditation.
These studies don't measure distance from the nameless, and the network isn't a switch that turns the whole self off. I'm connecting the experience of feeling less separate with the idea of moving closer.
Even when the feeling of being a separate person weakens, someone is still having an experience. Their senses keep working, and they still have a body and a brain. In my theory, they remain on this side, however different the experience feels.
I picture the limit in the same way I picture the speed of light. At the Large Hadron Collider's design energy, a proton travels about six miles per hour slower than light. Adding energy shrinks that gap, but reaching light speed would require infinite energy. Something with mass can keep approaching without ever arriving.
I'm borrowing the shape of that limit, without treating physics as evidence for the theory. Anything still identifiable as a something remains on our side. A person couldn't reach the middle while remaining a person. Even the rock still has the properties that make it a rock.
Death would complete the loss of self in this theory, but a "you" wouldn't make the crossing. Your identity belongs to this side along with your brain. Someone who nearly dies and returns with a story would, in this theory, have approached the middle and come back. Having a story to tell would mean they had remained on this side.
In a 2018 study by Christopher Timmermann and colleagues, thirteen healthy volunteers received DMT and answered a questionnaire used to assess near-death experiences. All thirteen reached the questionnaire's usual threshold, although none had been near death. That shows an overlap in what people report. It doesn't tell us what happens after death.
People also report meeting beings during a trip. A being is already a particular something. Seeing a face or hearing a voice means the experience still contains things that can be distinguished and named. However unfamiliar those experiences are, I wouldn't call them the nameless.
I don't know how to test the pull running both ways. Any measurement I could make would already use the things and distinctions of this side.