Just One Question | Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: How Can We Accept Darkness?

Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from some incredible teachers around the world.

Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris: We hope you enjoy.

So Mallory, I think you know that I can be a little bit dark sometimes.

Mallory: Yes, I’ve definitely noticed.

Chris: Did you notice that?

Mallory: For sure.

Chris: Today we’re going to take a more serious look at this idea with Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, who was on Insights at the Edge in 2023. Zenju is a poet, an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and author of Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times.

Mallory: So you picked this one because that title really called to your dark heart.

Chris: I was like, this is home. What really struck me is that in this clip, Zenju talks about when she had a severe anaphylactic reaction and wasn’t able to breathe, and how she got through it by accepting what she called the darkness — accepting this absence of light and not being afraid. Another thing you might not know is that I’ve actually had episodes where I can’t breathe myself. My throat closes up.

Mallory: Oh gosh.

Chris: Yeah. And the only way I can breathe again is to relax.

Mallory: It’s pretty counterintuitive, right?

Chris: Right. So her story really struck me because she was having this moment, and I’ve had these moments too, where you have to change your mindset to get through this really terrifying thing. And she does that by accepting it — what she calls accepting the darkness, or the absence of light.

Mallory: That’s really interesting, because I feel like so many other teachers are teaching you to look for the light at the end of the tunnel. But Zenju is telling us: just go through the tunnel, even if you can’t see the light.

Chris: Right. Nothing but tunnel.

Mallory: Okay, we’re going. So here is Tami Simon asking Osho Zenju Earthlyn Manuel the question: how can we accept darkness?

Chris: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: At first, when you were talking about darkness as the absence of light, I had a moment of, I don’t know if I know that darkness. That was my first thing — I thought darkness has a sparkle in it, even when it’s… so I went, I don’t understand the absence of light. I want to understand that, but I’m not sure I do. And then, as you shared a story later in the book about an experience you had with anaphylactic shock, where you almost died, and you talked about the allergic reaction and how it was hard for you to breathe, suddenly I had a moment of, oh, I get what the absence of light is. Because, like most people, I’ve had experiences of being very, very ill and wondering if I was going to make it. I think a lot of people have had some experience like that, and there’s no light in that experience. Let’s just say it the way it is — it’s looking at death. You’re looking at death, and looking at it. And in my own experience, I was like, okay, now I understand the absence of light. So I’m curious to take a moment and step back, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this whole notion of the absence of light, and maybe you could also share your discoveries from that experience you had when you went into anaphylactic shock. It was so powerful.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: Yeah. So when you were talking about seeing little sparkly things in darkness, I challenge you — what is that sparkly thing? And when we say we see light, what is that? Is it something of our mind, something of the movies, something of a book, something outside of ourselves? What’s sparkling, what’s shining, and is it shining even when — in the book I talk about light not being something you can see either. You can’t really see light, personally. I believe it’s just as unknown as darkness. And I think that’s what makes it very frustrating to be in the dark, to be in dark experiences — because you don’t know where it is, and you don’t know how to get out of the darkness. So you’re just in there. You’ve been taught to wait for the light, to wait for whatever gifts darkness has. What if we don’t strip the darkness? What if we’re just there? And I’m not talking about wallowing in it until you’ve lost your mind — if you don’t have the mental capacity to do it, I think you should not, or if you do, get help. So I want to say it’s not for everybody to do a dark practice. But even though the darkness is right there — the very thing that’s keeping you from being in it — I feel like when I had that anaphylactic shock, I could tell. I went to my neighbor’s house when I was having it, then I went upstairs to my apartment, and that’s when I began to notice I couldn’t breathe. I was hanging my head out the window trying to breathe, and that wasn’t doing anything. I said, oh my God, I really can’t breathe. So I called 911, and I was able to do that, and of course I couldn’t talk. And then the next thing is I ran to the bathroom, because I noticed I couldn’t see either. My eyes were like golf balls — they were all purple, huge. And I said, oh my god, and I couldn’t walk. I could tell I was getting weak. So I crawled back down the stairs to my friend’s apartment, and the way she looked at me was like, you’re going to die. I could feel it without her saying any of those words. So she brought me in. She had a Benadryl, which is an antihistamine, and she stuffs it down my throat with her finger, because my throat is closed. She stuffs it down in me and proceeds to go to bed, and I do too. So the next morning — before the morning comes — I’m laying there, and I’m going, I can’t not breathe, and I am dying here. I didn’t say it to her. I just knew I was dying, in my own little space where I was laying down. And somehow, I just heard this voice say: use your skin, breathe through your skin. Your skin can breathe. And I just laid there and kind of pretended the skin was my diaphragm, my air, my lungs — everything that would help me breathe. And of course, I did not go to sleep. The morning came, my friend rushed off to work. I’m still in my room, in my bed. And I decide — everything had gone down a little bit — I decide, on my own, to go to the doctor. I drove, can barely see, holding my eyes up to see. When I get there, the doctors look at me like I just got up out of my grave, and they bring me into a room really fast. They said, you had an anaphylactic shock, and I said, yes. And they said, you had a full-blown one that should have killed you. No one lives through a full-blown anaphylactic shock. And I said, well, my friend gave me a Benadryl. He said, no, that’s too small a thing — you would’ve needed a whole lot more than that. They brought in all the doctors to look at me, and they kind of just blessed me and said, whatever you’re here to do in your life, do it.

There was no light in the sense that we talk about light — something bright, an aha, a major transformation from that experience. But it was staying with it, and not trying to get out, not struggling. I really feel that if I would’ve struggled, I would’ve died. I really felt that. But I did not struggle. I was not afraid. I don’t know why, but I was not afraid. And that is, I think, the inner way of allowing life to be what it is, even though it doesn’t measure up to how you want to be in the moment. Okay, my body betrayed me — why am I leaving? All of a sudden there’s so many other things I could have died from, and here — what has happened? I don’t even know what has happened. I didn’t even know, even though it was an anaphylactic shock, and maybe that was good — I was clueless to all of that. And I think that kind of being with it, dwelling with it, all those hours, was a discovery that there is something — the darkness, the essential darkness, and we want to call it abundant, expansive, all of that — has something to say to us and to give to us. Now, we don’t go get the gifts — I’m looking for a gift, oh, darkness should have given me a gift. Darkness gave me the gift of life. But I think it was beyond that. It was beyond the gift of life. It was just an awakening, in its very subtle way — not a big bang, a very subtle way of showing me how I could just breathe.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel: It was close. There was no flow, no flow through my body. So I feel that I’m still exploring it — we’ll always explore what this darkness, this absence of light, is. So I’m kind of inviting everybody to let go of this whole idea of the light, the sparkle you talk about. Even if you think you see it, let it go. Don’t say, I know what it is, or force people to come out — like if they’re not feeling in a way that you want them to feel — come on, let’s go do this and you’ll feel better, you’ll get happy, come on out, stop crying, stop wallowing. These things we say to each other, or we decide, oh, it should be about over now — whatever you’re dealing with should be over, because when I deal with things it’s over within a month, and you’ve gone on too long, now it’s six months. I think it might be the scariest thing for us — to think of ourselves falling into some dark well, like while we’re taking a walk, suddenly falling into the ground, into a dark pit. So it’s — it’s being there. You can’t really see into it, but you can feel that you’re there. You can maybe even see it, if you are in a dark hole, or something is happening which you can no longer see with your eyes. There are so many dimensions to light and dark when we talk about it — even for myself, when we’re talking about it, it’s almost ridiculous, because it’s so beyond us. It’s so beyond us as human beings. But there it is. And we do have words for what we think we’re feeling, what we think we’re seeing, but yet there’s something beyond that. And that’s what I want to explore — so that when we get to the true essence of it, what’s been imposed in terms of fear about it — fear of darkness, or what’s been imposed about staying away from, avoiding darkness at all costs — what we’ve learned, to me, is to stay away from life, basically. You can’t. You cannot not have darkness.

Chris: This has been Just One Question. You can listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge that this conversation was taken from on your preferred podcast platform or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.