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A curious thing occurs whenever I go back to Bion's writings to check a concept he ostensibly articulated. The concept has disappeared. The words Bion uses create conjunctions that, in the spaces between, give rise to a process of conceptualization in the reader's mind. Like a Zen koan, the words gesture towards realization of a given concept, but do not spell it out. Bion said ‘I try to give you a chance to fill the gap left by me’ (cited on p. 11).
Grotstein's A Beam of Intense Darkness presents a diary of Grotstein's ‘filling in the gaps’ left by Bion. Grotstein's aim is to ‘create a synopsis, synthesis and extension’ of Bion's ideas in a ‘reader-friendly’ manner. He explicates such Bionic ideas as the ‘language of achievement’, reverie, truth, ‘L,’ ‘H’ and ‘K’ linkages, ‘container/contained’, Bion's ideas on dreaming, ‘thoughts without a thinker’, ‘the Grid’, ‘reversible perspective’, ‘shifting vertices’, ‘binocular vision’ and ultimate reality, designated as O.
Grotstein speaks of how engaging with Bion's ideasis to ‘dream them’ and takes Bion's advice to use his ideas as launching pads to ponder where the ideas point towards. The ultimate destination, around which ideas are like pilgrims circumambulating, is O. O refers to absolute truth, a numinous domain of reality beyond all concepts, and which passes beyond all understanding. O, like a thing-in-itself, cannot be known, it can only become. It refers to the core truth of a situation, of an object, of each other. Our life task is as authentically as possible to become our own mystery by allowing O to become us. It is to become ‘incarnated by [our] ineffable, infinite reservoir of cosmic being’ (p. 52). Jung writes (1954): ‘It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself’ (p. 291). Individuation is a rendezvous with our numinous mystery. Where for Jung the emphasis is on Self, for Bion it is an apophatic search for truth, for the ‘awesomeness and wonder, rather than the dread, of the ineffable Otherness