The mind's not invited to the party.
Dark Knight is a difficult term. It's a little complex. It's used that way at like a really hard time, but actually when it was originally coined by Juan de la Cruz, John of the Cross, in the 16th century in Spain, he didn't really mean that. He meant going into a place where you just don't know anything.
A real emptying out of all our ordinary understanding.
That dark, in that dark night, you know, from his point of view, the divine could reach him.
When he'd let go of all his understanding of the world.
Yeah, concepts and ideas and thoughts and all that stuff. So just to quickly jump in, I remember walking down the street, the high street near me, and feeling empty of Simon at that point, not sure if Simon was going to come back, and then recognizing everyone coming towards me was empty. And, you know, obviously, I'm them, they're me. And not only that, the rubbish — I remember the rubbish on the floor and the graffiti on some shops I would normally turn away from was just stunningly beautiful. And my mind would rise and try and understand this, and I very quickly realized that that was not a good idea. You know, it was like, no, no, no, no. Like, just any kind of trying to conceptualize or understand or put it in a box of any kind was just a bad idea. And I just had to keep letting go of thought. And as long as I did that, it was beautiful and it was loving and it was heart opening and everything like that, and the energy was flowing and it was great. But anytime it went up into the head, you know, how can you get your head around being one with everything and infinity and all that stuff? It's crazy. So just what I'd say, the two things I'd say, is that that dropping of conceptualization that it sounds like you just described is not only nice but like important, because as soon as you try and get your head in it, that's when things, I imagine, could go quite wrong.
Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. The mind's not invited to the party.
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a beautiful thing to learn that you actually don't need it. I mean, it was a long hard lesson for me to learn, actually, that I didn't need my thinking mind the way I thought I did. And it's often a surprise to people to find that. I remember my Zen teacher once saying to me after I'd had another kensho while I was in Zen training, you know. And I said, 'But I've got to think to do all the stuff I need to do.' She said, 'Well, just watch. Just watch. Do you see that the things that need to get done just get done?' And she was absolutely right. I wasn't needed half as much as I thought I was.
I mean that — sorry — that is the thing, isn't it? I interviewed Chris Niebauer, who's written the brilliant book, which I think is such a good one, these books that can appeal to anyone whether they're interested in this or not, you know, about the thinking mind, the left brain, etc. There's the split-brain experiment, of course, and he's got this lovely line: you know, the thinking mind is a terrible GPS to reality, and, you know, and it does chatter away. And just as you say, I mean, that hasn't stopped for me, but just knowing that it's chattering away, and there does seem to have been this shift away from it, where there's this, let's say, awareness waking up to itself, just knows, well, it's all fine. Like, you know, chatter away all you like, the kid on the back seat going, 'Are we there yet?' But like, it's all fine. And there is this separation that seems to have happened on some, you know, structural level in that way.
