Something More Than This

I started to read Deepak Chopra's Way of the Wizard last night, and the first lesson reminded my of October Project's song "Something More Than This" from their album Falling Farther In, which happens to be the one song I find most spiritually meaningful. Chopra writes, "look beyond your limited self to see your unlimited self. ... Before the seeing comes the feeling that there is more to life than what you are living." The refrain of "Something More Than This" goes, "Whatever you fear/Whatever you hide/Whatever you carry deep inside/There’s something more than this/Whatever you love/Whatever you give/Whatever you think you need to live/There’s something more than this."

I thought about this within the context of being a Five, my personality type on the Enneagram. The core experience of Fives is the awareness of emptiness. For myself, this shows up in my tendency to fill up empty space, due to a discomfort I feel with emptiness. I'm more comfortable amidst clutter than I am when everything is cleaned up and tidy. If I clean up a space, I usually feel that something should go in it. Not that I want clutter everywhere. I do care about keeping areas I want to move in free of clutter. But if empty space isn't serving a purpose for me, I usually think of some way to fill it up.

Within this context, Chopra's words got me thinking that there is something more to the awareness of emptiness than just emptiness, that what is actually behind it is the idea or awareness that there is something more than this. This thought helped me make better sense of the Five's awareness of emptiness and other characteristics of the Five. Fives are known for being collectors. I have a huge music collection, covering many genres. In recent years, the availability of inexpensive and free MP3 files from the likes of emusic, Audio Lunchbox, and Amie Street has allowed my collection to grow much larger, and I already had hundreds of CDs before I shifted my focus to collecting MP3s. Collecting could be explained by the awareness of emptiness. It helps make me aware of the holes in my collection, leading me to fill them. But in reflecting on it, it also seems to be about an awareness that there is something more than this. I listen to many different genres of music, but I have continued to feel that there is more to music than what I have been able to listen to so far. I have recently quit emusic, due to recent price increases, and quitting makes me wonder how I will continue to explore new music in the future.

When I think of Chess, I also think that there is something more than this, and this has led me to create several Chess variants. It is not from a dissatisfaction with Chess or with the sense that Chess has been all played out and needs to be replaced; It is simply the sense that one single game cannot be all there is to the possibilities of play inherent in the concepts behind it. It seems to me that my creation of Chess variants has been spurred on by a sense that there is something more than this. More generally, I think this sense that there is something more than this may be behind a lot of creativity.

What Chopra got me thinking was that the sense of emptiness typical of Fives may be rooted not in a deficiency but in the awareness that there is something more than this, that we may be greater than we are, that there is more to the world than we know or dream of. This would help explain why this October Project song reaches me more deeply than other songs do. It would also explain the Five's fascination with understanding the world. Fives, more than any other type, are interested in increasing their knowledge. This could be accounted for by a sense of emptiness, which in terms of knowledge is ignorance, but again there seems to be something more than this. I have a great interest in knowing how the world works. I have studied hard science, social science, philosophy, religion, and investigations into the paranormal, unknown, and mysterious. I frequently listen to Coast to Coast AM with a streamlink account. My own interests lean more toward what is still unknown than they do toward what can be known for sure. For example, I'm more inclined to read books on Atlantis than I am to read books about the details of oceanography. While a greater interest in more knowledge may be accounted for by a sense of emptiness as ignorance, this inclination toward more mysterious subjects is better accounted for by the sense that there is something more than this and the desire to know what that something more may be.

But it is not just the idea that there are still frontiers of knowledge. The October Project song conveys the idea that there is always something more than this, that no matter how much we know about the world or about ourselves or whatever, there is always something more than this. It is this idea which gives the song its spiritual significance, and I think an awareness of this may be behind the Five's awareness of emptiness.