ENDARKENMENT or BLINDED BY “enLIGHTenment”

 

Day 100 and the Ordinary Beyond

This post began in November 2000.  I didn’t know that then and that's really important if you make it to the end.  That’s when, with the kindness of both Hindu and Buddhist/Taoist scholars, I began a 7-year practice under their guidance.  Subsequently, I would learn from other traditions their “paths” to “enlightenment”.   Finally, inspired by my dear friend and Sufi scholar Moustapha Sarhank, I spent the last 99 days in a discipline with the Al-Asmāʾ al-Ḥusnā – the 99 attributes of the divine.  August 8, 2026 was day 99.  August 9 was, are you ready for it?  Another day!

Enlightenment has a path problem. For all the distinctions among the innumerable traditions claiming some privileged understanding of human transformation, they share a remarkably persistent geometry. There is somewhere we are, somewhere we are not, and some path between the two. The path may require purification, surrender, discipline, suffering, devotion, meditation, medicine, contemplation, renunciation, service, initiation or some exquisitely curated combination of them all, but the proposition survives the variations. Something about the present condition is inadequate to something imagined beyond it, and the aspirant is invited to move.  Only the few ever aspire to it and even fewer “attain” what ever it is.  And then, for the rest of us mere mortals, we get a ticket to the hereafter where we find out if we “made it.”

The invitation is so ubiquitous that we rarely examine what has already been conceded when we accept it. A path requires separation, separation requires at least two conditions sufficiently distinct to establish direction, and direction requires an observer capable of locating a present position relative to an anticipated destination. Before the first prayer has been uttered, the first mantra repeated, the first sacrament received or the first step taken toward enlightenment, the architecture of insufficiency has already been installed because there must be somewhere else to go.  And those instructing us to “take the path” are themselves (with few exceptions), somewhere “ahead” of us but not “there”.  Because at “there”, they’re not there anymore.  They’ve ascended, sublimated, become ONE…, you get the point.

There is nothing inherently sinister in this geometry. Paths are useful and discipline can be beautiful. Repetition reveals things novelty conceals. The deliberate encounter with the same prayer, movement, name, silence or physical demand can exhaust the stories an observer brings to experience until something other than expectation becomes available. A discipline can expose appetite by refusing to satisfy it, reveal impatience by requiring repetition, and disclose projection by refusing to conform to it. There is wisdom in returning to the same place often enough to discover that neither the place nor the observer is ever actually the same. But somewhere along the way discipline and destination became confused. The path stopped being the place where experience happened and became the means by which experience was supposed to deliver us somewhere else.

And so we count forty days, forty years, seven years, ninety-nine Names, fourteen Stations, eight limbs, noble paths, sacred paths, paths of purification, paths of liberation and paths of awakening. Humanity has displayed extraordinary creativity in designing ways to get from here to there while showing remarkably little curiosity about what happens when there is no longer a there. We are fascinated by the threshold and strangely oblivious about the room or space on the other side.

Our stories reveal the same discomfort. The prince finds the princess, the exile returns, the kingdom is restored, the seeker awakens, the Christ ascends, and everyone lives Happily Ever After. Then the curtain falls. “Happily Ever After” may be one of our strangest linguistic admissions because it appears to tell us what happens next while ensuring that what happens next never needs to be observed – but it’s “happy”. Ever After contains every breakfast, disagreement, broken gate, muddy shoe, aging body, misplaced key, ordinary kindness, sleepless night, repaired fence and uneventful afternoon that follows the event we decided was worthy of the story. Yet precisely when the destination has supposedly been reached and life no longer has somewhere narratively important to go, we stop telling it.

Ascension accomplishes much the same thing with greater theological elegance. Having completed the transformational arc, the transformed one conveniently leaves the field of observation. We are spared the far more difficult question of what awakening looks like when there is nothing left to awaken from. We never have to discover what happens if the enlightened one stays, what resurrection looks like while repairing a fence, what the pilgrim does after arriving home, or what happens when the hero discovers that the grass continued growing and dishes piled up in the sink throughout the apocalypse while we were awaiting the omniscient groundskeeper or maid. We certainly don't have to confront the question that fascinates me now: What happens on Day 100?

The question became unavoidable for me only after completing several disciplines whose calendars happened to converge. Ninety-nine days of deliberate gratitude through the 99 Names of God arrived years after the completion of a seven-year Hanuman discipline and a passage through the Stations of the Cross. There is no dissatisfaction with any of them and no impulse to diminish what they disclosed. Quite the opposite. Disciplined observation had done precisely what disciplined observation can do: it had made increasingly visible how much of what appears to be reality is memory, projection, anticipation, desire, aspiration and the incessant manufacture of relationship between what is and what ought to be. But completion exposed something the disciplines themselves could not answer. What next?

The question initially sounds innocent, but it isn't. “Next” can smuggle the entire architecture back in through a side door through another practice, another teacher, another medicine, another book, another pilgrimage, another revelation, another integration or another level of consciousness sufficiently distant from this one to restore direction to a life that has momentarily lost its destination. The seeker can survive almost anything except the possibility that there is nothing left to seek. Indeed, enlightenment can become remarkably efficient at reproducing the conditions requiring more enlightenment. The destination moves precisely far enough away to preserve the path. Arrival becomes initiation into another departure. The glimpse requires embodiment, embodiment requires integration, integration reveals deeper material, deeper material requires another practice, and the language changes while the geometry remains untouched. There is always “somewhere else” to go.

This is where the word Endarkenment began to interest me. Not darkness as the adversary of light, because that would merely preserve enlightenment as the reference point and reverse the preference and its associated emotional polarity. Not as Jung’s “shadow” integration. Not ignorance elevated into wisdom, blindness romanticized as insight, or some fashionable inversion in which the sufficiently sophisticated aspirant finally graduates from enlightenment into a superior darkness available only after completing the prerequisite illumination. That would be hilarious and completely predictable.

Endarkenment interests me because darkness removes a privilege upon which the metaphor of enlightenment quietly depends: the observer cannot see what comes next. That may not be a defect. Much of what we call enlightenment assumes that increased visibility is increased wisdom. We illuminate the unconscious, illuminate the path, our purpose, and the patterns governing our behavior. We seek clarity about where we have been, where we are and where we are going. Illumination allows the observer to establish relationships among these points and construct the narrative by which the present acquires significance. Again, this is useful, but usefulness becomes dangerous when mistaken for reality.

The moment the future becomes sufficiently illuminated to be imagined, it acquires a peculiar power over the present. The imagined destination begins reaching backward through time and organizing the behavior supposedly leading toward it. The present is no longer merely experienced; it is recruited. Aspiration is projection with a clock attached. I undertake the discipline because I imagine enlightenment, accumulate because I imagine security, perform because I imagine recognition, sacrifice because I imagine reward, love because I imagine relationship, and endure because I imagine redemption. In each instance, a future that does not yet exist reaches backward and gives instructions to the only moment that does. The present becomes transportation and is never seen as its own completion.

This is subtler than the ordinary critique of desire. Desire can be recognized as wanting something absent. Aspiration disguises the same absence as direction, purpose, development or virtue and can therefore inhabit our noblest activities without attracting suspicion. We may spend an entire life sacrificing the actual to an imagined future while congratulating ourselves for having purpose. Even “being present” can become infected by precisely the same architecture when I practice presence so that I can become more present. The absurdity is nearly perfect. The future has colonized and infected the present in the name of liberating the present from the future.

Perhaps Endarkenment begins when the observer no longer regards an inability to see what comes next as inadequacy. Without visibility, aspiration becomes difficult. The future cannot as easily reach backward and recruit the present into its service. There is no illuminated destination against which this moment can be judged deficient, no anticipated consequence with which to justify an action, and no promised arrival converting experience into transportation. There is only what is here.

And on Day 100, what was here was a tractor.

Some paths on the land had become obstructed.  Frequent thunderstorms – my favorite of weather phenomena – had uprooted some massive oaks that fell across the paths in the forest at AlKIMia Farm.  Limbs had fallen and brush had grown into openings, so the paths needed clearing. Nothing about this constituted a spiritual problem. Oh, and courtesy of my friends at the Kubota dealership, my tractor was back in action after the last time I may have used it outside of the manufacturer’s sanctioned guidelines regarding the weight of lifting objects (but that’s another story).  There was no ceremony in the act, no invocation, no revelation concerning the metaphysical significance of brush, no intuition that something meaningful was about to occur and, most importantly, no anticipated beneficiary. I did not know anyone needed the paths and I did not know anyone was coming. There was a path, it was obstructed, and I cleared it.

Later that evening I learned that horses had ridden those paths.  I did not clear the paths for the horses, and that matters more than the horses. Had I known they were coming, the entire event could have been absorbed effortlessly into the familiar geometry. There would have been a desired future condition of horses passing through and a present action undertaken to produce it. The future would have supplied the purpose, the clearing would have become instrumental, and the path would once again have been a means of getting somewhere.

But the horses were invisible to the action. Their future passage could not seduce the present because the observer clearing the path possessed no image of them.  In fact, while clearing with the chainsaw, the only animals I was conscious of were the biting flies that were intent on exsanguinating my enlightened life-force.  The horses’ arrival could not be the reason for clearing it because, at the moment of action, they did not exist within the field of observation. Nothing reached backward from the future to tell the present what it was for.

And still the horses came.  This is where the temptation to manufacture meaning becomes almost irresistible. We could call it synchronicity, Providence, divine orchestration, manifestation, evidence that the universe rewards alignment, or a sign that ninety-nine days of gratitude had produced some heightened relationship between intention and reality. Every one of those explanations would immediately take possession of the horses. Each would illuminate the event by inserting it into a narrative large enough to explain why it happened. The unknown would become known, the ordinary would become sacred, coincidence would become confirmation, Day 100 would become the reward for Days 1 through 99, and the path would once again lead somewhere.

What happens if we resist? Not because synchronicity is impossible, Providence must be rejected, or events cannot possess relationships unavailable to the observer, because those conclusions would merely replace one certainty with another. What happens if the observer simply does not require possession of the relationship? A path was cleared and horses came. Neither event needs possession of the other, and yet they met.

There is something extraordinary in refusing to improve upon that observation. They met. The clearing did not contain the horses and the horses did not cause the clearing. Neither event, considered independently, contained the explanation of their eventual intersection. Yet at some boundary condition in time and space, two conditions that did not require knowledge of one another became consequential to one another.  And, importantly, when I looked at the cleared trail, I had profound gratitude for my fit body, my tractor, the chainsaw, and the fact that the flies, having drunk enough blood, had buzzed off… to make way for the hornets I would mow into an hour later. The rider in the evening had pure gratitude for the trail.  Neither gratitude informed the other.  Both were genuine.

Perhaps this is where the observer has habitually mistaken explanation for wisdom. Wisdom may not be the capacity to identify the hidden mechanism connecting the events. It may include the capacity to witness their intersection without immediately collapsing it into a story.

The observer's inability to see what comes next is not necessarily a deficiency in the observation. If that is true, action need not know its consequence to participate in consequence, usefulness need not be anticipated to be real, generosity need not know its recipient, a seed does not require knowledge of the person who will someday sit beneath the tree, and the present does not owe us a future capable of explaining why the present mattered. This begins to expose another possibility concealed by our obsession with paths. Perhaps what we have called purpose is sometimes merely our retrospective explanation for intersections we could never have anticipated. The future occurs, we look backward, we draw a line between events and then, having drawn the line, imagine the line was there all along. Perhaps sometimes it was. Perhaps sometimes it wasn't. Endarkenment does not need to decide.

That may be its peculiar freedom. Enlightenment wants to see the path while Endarkenment can walk where the path disappears into darkness, not bravely, because bravery would require an imagined danger; not faithfully, because faith would require confidence concerning something unseen; not hopefully, because hope would populate the darkness with a preferred future; but simply without requiring the darkness to disclose what it contains. There is a profound difference between trusting that everything will work out and relinquishing the demand that everything work out. The first still contains a bargain with the future. The second leaves the future alone.

Perhaps that is what Day 100 reveals about all our numbered disciplines. Their completion is not another number. There is no secret hundredth Name, no fifteenth Station hidden beyond Golgotha, no eighth year that finally validates the seven preceding it. The arithmetic ends because the observer no longer needs another unit of distance between here and arrival.

For ninety-nine days there was a path. On Day 100, there was simply a path, and I cleared it. The horses came later. The temptation is to say that the horses proved the path needed clearing, but they did not. The path needed clearing when the path needed clearing. The horses merely encountered the consequence of an action that had no knowledge of them.

This may be the monotonous ordinary beyond Happily Ever After. Not a life emptied of consequence, meaning, wonder or astonishing intersection, but a life in which those things are no longer required to reach backward and justify the moment that preceded them. Ever After is not another destination. It is what remains when the storyteller stops insisting that every event advance the plot. It is the breakfast after salvation, the grass and dishes after enlightenment, the fence after resurrection, the relationship after the wedding, and the ordinary afternoon in which nothing happens that can be converted into evidence of spiritual progress.

And perhaps the deepest challenge is allowing even Endarkenment to disappear there. There should be no School of Endarkenment, no Endarkenment practice, no seven stages of Endarkenment and no certification for those who have successfully relinquished their attachment to enlightenment. The moment we construct a path toward Endarkenment, we have already missed the joke. There is nowhere to arrive. There is something here, and we can attend to it without knowing what comes next. There may be consequences beyond the horizon of the observer, intersections no present intelligence could anticipate, and horses coming tonight. Or there may not.

The wisdom is not knowing which, and the deeper wisdom may be discovering that knowing was never required. A branch lies across the path and it can be moved, not for the horses, not for enlightenment, not because the universe is watching, but because the path is here and the observer is here and, in this unrepeatable intersection before either becomes something else, clearing is what presents itself.

Then the future can remain in darkness. If horses come, they come. If nothing comes, nothing comes. For once, perhaps, there is no need to pierce the veil.  Perhaps the veil was only troubling us because we had become convinced there was something behind it we needed to see.

Perhaps the only thing the 99 days ever needed was another day. A day for which I was entirely accountable, and about which I could be absolutely certain of only one thing: I did not know what would happen next.

 

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