Today we are between Good Friday (death on the Cross) and Easter Sunday (resurrection from death on the Cross). This is the intermediate zone, the meat in the Easter sandwich, the Dark Night of the Soul (moon). This is no man’s land between the pairs-of-opposites death and life, Up and Down, In and Out. Here in this space between death and life, we don’t know which is which, we don’t know what is good, what is bad, what is up and what is down. This is the intermediate zone of ambiguity.

This is the psychosis of Easter when we have lost our reference to death or life, past or future. Nothing is fixed here. I. have no compass. Everything is dark. I don’t know where I am….but here I rest. Here we don’t resist or struggle. Here I’m OK with ambiguity. Here I’m OK not knowing anything, not knowing what to choose. Here I cannot choose. And when I cannot choose this or that, I don’t have the power of choice. When I don’t have the power of choice, I don’t know who I am. I cannot choose myself.

So we hurry over Saturday, we hurry over this abyss of not knowing to get to Sunday and the flowers of Easter and the celebration of being free from the tomb, the Dark Night of the Soul.

But it is here in the tomb that the seeds of the Resurrection, the seed of New Birth is planted. Death is the seed, and when planted in the tomb of Not Knowing, it gives birth to a new idea, a new understanding, a new way of being in the world, a new life, a new business, course or relationship.

The space between death on the cross and liberation from the cross is the most important space of all, for this is the bridge from death to life, from the repetition of the past (karma) to a New Testament, a new way of being.

We celebrate Easter ritually as a calendar day, but we don’t know how to celebrate Easter, practice Easter in our everyday mind. When the Cross comes, when suffering, upsetting events, negativity comes, we want to get rid of it, fix it, deny it, remove it and blame it on something or someone. We don’t know how to sit with it. We don’t know how to nor react to it. We have not been taught how to be Teflon to negativity instead of Velcro.

Our whole consumer culture is built on creating new products and services to get us over the space between death and life, between the negative and the pleasant, and between discomfort to comfort. We don’t know how to sit with What Is, with Just This. We don’t know how to be OK with Not Knowing.

My understanding of acceptance here is not being passive to an external problem, but discovering the empty space within where we can discover or create a solution to the external problem. What are the conditions necessary for a creative response to a problem that has never existed before? Where do you go if nothing in the past will work with this problem? You must enter the Dark Night of the Mind where you can rest with Not Knowing…because that is the truth: you don’t know what to do. How can we enter that Not Knowing space and be OK, and be sensitive, and be watchful, alert when there is no answer? How can we stay engaged when there is nothing to engage?