Brilliant Darkness

“A certain unknowingness increasingly appears as the precondition of any knowledge worth knowing.”
(Catherine Keller, The Energy We Are: A Meditation in Seven Pulsations)

“To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion.
That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.”
(Dogen Zenji, Genjo Koan)

“I'm standing in a field
A field of questions
As far as the eye can see
Is this what it means to be free?
Or is this what it means to belong to the free?”
(Bill Callahan, Free’s)

One of the guiding principles of psychodynamic psychotherapy is that we do not fully know ourselves. We behave in ways that conflict with our self-view, we experience “intrusive” thoughts that cause us to question the landscape of our minds, and we have aspects of ourselves that we keep out of conscious awareness because they make us feel vulnerable or incompatible with our surroundings. This may come as an unwelcome shock – after all, our self-knowledge appears to be the foundation of our experience. Lacking this, the bottom falls out and we are seemingly set adrift amongst the murky deeps of uncertainty and indeterminacy. Without dismissing the discomfort that pools around disorientation, I wonder if there is another way to receive this news of unknowing? Perhaps as a hand reaching across the watery deeps of being…Or an invitation into (im)possibility echoing out of the aspects of yourself that rest as pure potential beneath the surface of your knowing.

“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea what one is.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo)

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

If you’re here reading this, you’re likely interested in transforming your suffering in some way. Your life has become unmanageable. You’ve drifted from the path you knew. The waypoints that once offered the solace of orientation are missing or have somehow led to a dead end.

And I wonder:
Can you transmute the suffering of your wandering without minimizing it, without sanitizing it of its transformative potential?
Can you find the possibility within the chaos of your unknowing and welcome the metamorphoses echoing out of your own future?
Do you dare give birth to a dancing star?

Perhaps the answer to the great question of life is simply whatever part of the question weathers the asking. And maybe the (dis)solution is found by resting in that zone of indeterminacy, that chaos, where infinite possibilities lay in wait like the effulgent fire brimming within the pine cone, just waiting for the right conditions (time, air, heat…) to smolder in every direction, bringing life-giving seeds to this feast of falling-and-rising.

And I wonder:
What are the conditions for your own regenerative smoldering?
Which fires have you put out prematurely without waiting to see what life may come from them?
What seeds of being lay in wait?  

I’m thinking now of Rainer Maria Rilke’s words to his protégé Franz Xaver Kappus, immortalized in Letters to a Young Poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet) 

Rilke seems to be encouraging the younger poet to avoid irritably reaching after easy answers and, thus, foreclosing on the immanent possibilities waiting within the questions themselves. He’s advocating for sinking deeper into the unknown and learning to navigate life by the light of your own uncertainty. Perhaps to follow the unconscious urgings of the self and to:  

“cast a beam of intense darkness so that something which has hitherto been obscured by the glare of the illumination can glitter all the more in the darkness”
(Sigmund Freud)

And maybe psychodynamic psychotherapy aims to do just that: to cultivate a space where darkness and light course through one another, each taking its turn in this breathtakingly ambivalent pulse of inception, growth, decay, and individuation. To help reveal the limitlessness of your horizons, even as they’re clothed in darkness…

“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedgeshaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless….Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless.”

(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)