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In this book Eric Rhode researches into the area of human experience described by John Milton in Paradise Lost as the ‘rising world of waters dark and deep won from the void and formless infinite’. He is predominantly influenced by W. R. Bion's later works in which Bion struggles to formulate a description of ineffable experience which he names simply ‘O’. He contrasts two global points of view, the medical and the religious vertices, described by Bion. The medical vertex focuses on explanation and is intolerant of gaps in understanding which it seeks to fill with one concept after another to create an illusion of a continuity in knowledge, as if this could be possible. The medical vertex is grounded in linear and sequential logical thinking to the exclusion of all other aspects of experience.
The religious vertex embraces uncertainty and unknowability as fundamental and not as obstacles to overcome. Chaos takes on a significance from which meaning may emerge but ultimately it is unfathomable and can only be partially and incompletely known. The becoming of ‘O’ describes the emergence of meaning from this state of not knowing and Eric Rhode seeks to illuminate this as a main theme in his book. He takes Bion's scene of a tennis court as a metaphor for the stripping away of existing concepts in order to gain access into this area of experience: the ‘waters dark and deep’. Bion suggests that a beam of darkness is brought to bear on the tennis court scene so that the couple playing tennis disappear and the focus narrows to the net until only a hole in the net is visible. Any conceptual understanding of the scene is lost in the process and the emotional focus is removed from the primal scene of the couple. The pre-Oedipal anxieties of not knowing and consequent disintegration arise in the gap or hole leading to feelings of terror and a dread of annihilation.