Undetectable Distress: The Void Beneath All We Know

Read time 2 minutes. Undetectable distress is the existential void that gives rise to emotional weight. This stand alone article is part of our letting go series.

To truly understand the art of letting go, we need to step back—way back—and ask: why do we even feel the need to let go in the first place? What seeded the despair, the weight, the clinging that follows us through joy and sorrow alike?

We expect meaning. We expect comfort.
But instead, we find a void.
A kind of undetectable distress.

Tao and the impossible threshold

Tao, in its non-manifest state, is beyond knowing.
It’s undifferentiated, secret, mysterious. It cannot be observed—because it exists prior to observation.

Imagine a line. An event horizon.
Beyond it: the unformed Tao.
On this side: the birth of experience—form, knowing, separation.
Everything we call “life” begins after this point. And everything from that point forward becomes one degree removed.

This creates a problem.
We want to know Tao. To feel whole.
But we’re trying to use what was created to understand what created it.
And that effort, however noble, fails.
The result? A disturbance. A quiet ache. The sense that something essential has gone missing—just out of reach.

Undetectable distress provides the weight beneath experience

Let’s borrow from modern physics.
The Higgs boson is nearly undetectable—fleeting, massless, without spin or charge. And yet, without it, particles wouldn’t gain mass. The universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Our inner void works similarly.
We can’t detect it directly—but it gives weight to our lives.
Not the good kind.
A heaviness that lingers beneath all our efforts to feel complete.

What’s worse, this void lies at a place where one would expect to find truth, meaning, comfort and justification for existence.
In short, there is a big question mark where one would expect to find the ultimate answer.

It’s not that this void causes suffering.
It colors everything—including our joy.
It’s the background ache. The ghost in the machine.

Not a solution—Just a recognition

There’s nothing to do yet.
Just see. Feel. Know that the albatross exists.

If one day the seat of awareness shifts from ego to Tao, the void disappears. Not resolved—just irrelevant. The weight lifts. The ache ends.

But that’s not for today.
Today, we’ve found the first rung on the ladder:
A question.
A silent, undetectable distress.
We’ll climb from here.

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Explore more:

If you are interested in learning more, here is a great article on Symmetry Magazine discussing the ramifications of the Higgs boson. It is a fascinating topic in and of itself.

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