a tolerance for incomprehensibility

the pulsing potential in letting go

Not long ago, I wrote about deep hope. Naturally, right after, the cosmos laughed its belly laugh and my dad abruptly died.

This is death five in my inner circle—all back to back. I see myself standing on a shoreline. There is a first wave, second, third, fourth, fifth. Each wave throws me down in the surf. After wave one, I get up. Dust myself off. Wave two comes. I do the same. Wave three comes. Get up, sister. Wave four. Sister, stand. Wave five.

I am getting slapped silly. I decide to stop getting up. There is no need. I stay down. At first, this effortlessness comes from anger, fatigue, and pain. Then, it comes from curiosity. What is this place? I stay seated in the thick night, on the sand. I am scraped and drenched. There is fog overhead so I cannot see the stars. There are no points of light to guide me. I do not need them because I make no effort to go anywhere. I am not looking to marvel at anything.

Under the [Five] Waves off Kanagawa

Eventually, I return to dry land but it is still dark. Textureless dark. Blue-black dark. Darkness seventy fathoms deep. Many things are changing in me. I can’t describe them but I trust them completely. But I don’t want to be alone in getting to know this place, this place of profound lightlessness. There are too many other alien landscapes I’ve seen, too many anomalous terrains. Where is the murder-murder-death-death-death mystery tour? Where does that unfurl in wisdom teachings?

Rarely seeing my experiences reflected often leaves me with a sense of isolation. I am struggling to find another voice, a voice who has written sanely about this place.¹

I do not want sterile, saccharine, or encouraging words. I do not need to feel better. I do not want explanations or attempts to make sense. I do not need things to change.

What I need is blunt-force, heretical honesty. I need truth meeting truth in the dark.

I am looking for teachers who have walked the badlands. I want them to tell me what they’ve learned in hell. I have reason to believe they will have higher doses of integrity. Pain has a way of tenderizing people, if we let it in.² When it comes to teachers, it is the reaching I look for, not the illumination.

I bring this sense of isolation and frustration to my beloved friend Cassy and my beloved Zen teacher, Peg. Peg suggests I read John Tarrant’s The Light inside the Dark. Cassy points me to Vimilakīrti. In both authors, dear god, I see my experience. I even find the words themselves:

cutting off the mind road

approaching the heart of the night

taking away false blindness and giving true blindness

and the most magnificent: a tolerance for incomprehensibility

I have sensed an immunity to incoherence being conditioned but I could not find the words. I feel exquisite relief in my new relationship with these teachers, in the mirror they have the courage to hold up. I am an avid reader, an obsessive researcher, but I consistently experience a dearth of insight into the tunnels I have crawled. I do not have conventional experiences.

I am the woman being bitten because I opened the box of snakes, seeking to discover how they work. I am the child without sunglasses staring at the eclipse, the free diver who encountered the Kraken. I keep signaling from underwater to those on the surface. The Kraken! It is real! It exists! I call from the Underworld to the people in the light. Pointless loss, blistering cruelty, ice-veined evil, all of it is real! But do not be afraid!, I shout. Fear only feeds it! These are storms from the shadows of our wounded minds, amplified when we reject them! We must welcome the banished, welcome the damned! It is the only way!

The number of people who understand this is miniscule. But it is no one’s fault and no one’s credit, what experiences life shoves in our laps. Who would choose to know pitiless dark? We fear all of it—death, pain, dissolution—because we do not understand its nature. Perhaps I belong to the least understanding, or the most stubborn, since life keeps shoving me in the sand. Watch this. Feel this. Get this. Know this.

Human comprehension is a lawnmower cutting a square in the Amazon rainforest. My head has been shaved, my clothing stripped, my name tag is ripped off. Do I get the memo? Yes, I do. There is no explanation but just this. So I stay on the sand with the dead birds and jellyfish, with the whale rotting fifty yards down. I forfeit my preferences about the this and whisper in chastened awe,

Do your thing, untamed life. Do the thing you do.

This is not a form of throwing up my hands. It is not masochism, nihilism, or passive surrender. I am sitting in companionship with the ultimate incomprehensibility, a shattering of what I think is “supposed to” be. Death has slapped me down, slapped me to pieces, annihilated me to a different kind of sight. This is windless, soundless, hallowed ground. I do not want to miss it.

So I will not stand up, not move along, not work to keep this darkness at bay. It is a skittish, watchful, impermanent visitor. Someday, it will leave. Someday—soon—I will “come to my senses.” Recommit to my human tangles, retie my earth-born knots. Like everyone, everywhere, all the time, I will seek the comfort of my ignorance.

We try hard—very hard—to avoid the knowing that comes from descent into shadow. The truths it holds are too unruly, much too out of control. They take us beyond the bounds of what we believe we can tolerate, what we are willing to bear. To avoid the prospect of radical disassembly, we selectively choose what we accept. I will take this but no, not that. I definitely do not want that.

I have not been given that luxury. Death tore it from my hands. So I disobey my impulses to run out of the shadow. I choose the void, this dreaded thing, as an unfathomable teacher. I bow in awe of its pulsing potential and offer my shredded palms to the sky.

Nacht Wellen #010 by Ralf Tooten

At the dissipation end of waves of death—waves with violence, tenderness, ceremony, and miracles—I have been made less complicated. Death opened its doors and shared a brutal fortune—against my will, against my wishes, against the inmost requests of my heart. I say to Death, I wanted none of this. I wanted all that is the opposite of this.

But from the blue-black place of lightlessness and no-pity I see the nature of this fortune. I have a pristine view of Death’s grand finale. I can see it more clearly in the dark:

Everything is already working. I just have to let go.

1. Yes, I have read Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

2. Neurosis really is a substitute for legitimate suffering. C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 11: Psychology and Religion (West and East).