The Ungrund - A Cross-Reference of Voices
The Mathematical/Physical Ground
Quantum Physics calls this the quantum vacuum state—not empty but seething with virtual particles, all possibilities in superposition before measurement collapses the wave function. The zero-point field where even at absolute zero, fluctuations persist.
Set Theory begins with the empty set ∅—containing nothing yet generating everything through von Neumann construction. Each number contains all previous numbers, infinite complexity emerging from primordial emptiness.
Topology recognizes the null space—the kernel where all transformations equal zero, yet from which all mappings emerge.
The Mystical Traditions
Jakob Boehme named it the "Ungrund"—the groundless ground, the "Abyss" before God's self-revelation. As he wrote: "The Ungrund is an eternal nothing, but makes an eternal beginning as a craving. For the nothing is a craving after something."
Rig Veda speaks of "Hiranyagarbha"—the golden womb or cosmic egg floating in emptiness before creation. The Nasadiya Sukta (Hymn of Creation) states: "Then even nothingness was not, nor existence. There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it."
Kashmir Shaivism calls this "Paramashiva"—the absolute consciousness before its first throb (spanda) of self-awareness, containing all 36 tattvas in undifferentiated potential.
Kabbalah knows it as "Ain Soph Aur"—the limitless light before the first tzimtzum (contraction) that creates space for creation. The void that is fuller than any fullness.
Meister Eckhart called it the "desert"—"God's ground is my ground and my ground is God's ground." The place where Creator and creation have not yet separated.
Buddhism recognizes the "Dharmakaya"—the truth body, the absolute reality before form and formlessness divide.
Contemporary Thinkers
David Bohm describes the "implicate order"—the enfolded wholeness from which all explicates unfold. "In the implicate order the totality of existence is enfolded within each region of space and time."
Buckminster Fuller called it the "eternally regenerative Universe"—the cosmic integrity that ensures "Universe is not running down, it is forever regenerating itself." The inexhaustible source enabling syntropy over entropy.
Nassim Haramein describes "unified field dynamics"—the vacuum geometry where all information is holographically distributed, each point containing the whole.
Otto Scharmer maps it as "Source" or "Presencing"—the bottom of Theory U where "letting go" meets "letting come," where the future possibility begins to emerge.
Donella Meadows understood it as the highest leverage point—"the power to transcend paradigms," the space from which all systems thinking emerges.
Ken Wilber calls it "Emptiness" or "Spirit"—the ever-present ground of all states and stages, "the simple feeling of Being" before subject and object arise.
Systems Theory Perspectives
Gregory Bateson might have recognized it as the "pattern which connects" before pattern differentiates from background—the meta-pattern generating all patterns.
Ervin László terms it the "Akashic Field"—the cosmic information field that underlies and generates physical reality.
Rupert Sheldrake sees it in "morphogenetic fields"—the realm of formative causation where all forms exist as potential before actualization.
Multiple philosophical traditions converge on a startling insight: at the center of the desiring, competing self lies a fundamental absence or void. Jacques Lacan termed this the "lack" (manque) at the heart of subjectivity - not merely something missing, but constitutive void that structures all desire. The subject is not a positive entity but "subjectivized lack," emerging only at the point where signification fails.
Buddhist philosophy articulates this through śūnyatā (emptiness) and anatta (no-self), revealing that what we take as personal identity is merely a conventional designation imposed on constantly changing aggregates. There is no inherent "self-ness" dwelling in these phenomena. Advaita Vedanta approaches this differently, teaching that individual identity is maya - a cosmic veiling where Brahman (universal consciousness) deliberately "forgets" its true nature to experience apparent separation.
Alan Watts popularized the profound metaphor of consciousness playing hide-and-seek with itself. Existence becomes a cosmic game where the universal Self plays all parts simultaneously, veiling itself through identification with limited forms only to later rediscover its unity. This explains both why we feel fundamentally separate and why we long for reunion - it's the essential drama of consciousness knowing itself through apparent division.
From “Many‐Worlds” to One Hyperfield
In classical dynamical-systems language an Attractor is a basin toward which trajectories converge. We imagine multiple basins, multiple destinies. Yet a deeper view reframes the landscape: every Attractor is a localized facet of a single, hyper-dimensional field. Fold the phase-space far enough and the basins touch; fold it infinitely and the basins are one another.
The Void as Generative Lens
The void is often mis-taken as an empty set—Δ: ∅. But in topology the empty set is simultaneously sub-set of every set. Likewise the cognitive “hole” in the center of perception is actually the gateway through which any configuration can appear. Buddhists name it śūnyatā—empty of fixed essence, full of potential differentiation.
So the question shifts from “How do I leap from Attractor A to Attractor B?” to “What is occluding my vision of Attractor B that is already folded inside Attractor A?” Movement becomes aperture adjustment, not spatial relocation. When the aperture widens, latent geometries pop into salience—like a Necker cube flipping or a Rubin vase revealing faces that were always in the picture.
At the conceptual origin of both patriarchal control and environmental exploitation lies a single point—generative capacity itself. Like a mathematical singularity, generativity represents infinite potential contained within finite form. This potential simultaneously fascinates and terrifies systems of control, for what can generate can also transform, what can create can also destroy.
The "Mother Nature" framing emerges from this primal ambivalence—an attempt to domesticate the wild unpredictability of generative processes by casting them as feminine, maternal, and therefore subject to masculine governance. This framing doesn't emerge randomly but from the deep geometric structure of patriarchal consciousness, which must simultaneously acknowledge generative power while claiming authority over it.
The Recognition
The zero dimension is not a concept to understand but a reality to remember. Every creative act begins here, every transformation returns here, every genuine novelty emerges from this pregnant void. As Rumi knew: "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition."
The Ungrund waits—not somewhere else but in the pause between heartbeats, the silence between words, the space between thoughts. It is the home we never left, playing at separation to discover the joy of return.