Permission Not to Know: Endarkenment, Childlikeness, and the Ordinary Tapestry

I read Dr. David Martin’s recent post, “ENDARKENMENT or BLINDED BY ‘enLIGHTenment,’” on the same day it appeared, and something in it landed with unusual clarity.

The image of Day 100 — the tractor, the obstructed paths, the chainsaw, the biting flies, and the horses that arrived later without having been invited into the intention — stayed with me. So did the quiet insistence that we do not have to improve upon the simple observation that a path was cleared and horses came. Neither event needed to possess the other. The future did not have to reach backward and recruit the present into its service. What struck me most was the permission embedded in that posture: the freedom to stop treating the inability to see what comes next as a deficiency.

Martin names the persistent geometry of so many spiritual paths — a deficient “here,” a superior “there,” and the long corridor of discipline, purification, or knowledge that is supposed to carry us from one to the other. Even after the numbered practices are complete, the architecture of insufficiency often reasserts itself.

There is always another level, another integration, another destination just far enough away to keep the path alive. Reading that, I found myself thinking about the people who are newer in their spiritual journey, or who simply remain content with a straightforward, non-specialist faith. In the modern Christian landscape (and far beyond it) there is eventually often an unspoken pressure to keep moving toward greater knowledge, greater maturity, greater esoteric or technical mastery. The simple trust of the ordinary believer can start to feel provisional, as if it is only the first stage on a ladder that the truly serious will eventually climb.

But what if God, as Father, had already given His children permission not to know? What if it is genuinely okay not to master the full map, not to keep pace with every advanced teaching, not to convert every ordinary afternoon into evidence of spiritual progress? What if resting in the present — without the future of “enlightenment” or expertise colonizing it — is not only allowed but safe?

This is the image that has been forming for me: faith as a child trusting its parent. The child does not have to strive to know everything the parent knows, at any prescribed pace or even at all. Safety and belonging are not contingent on catching up. They rest on the character and presence of the Father. The present moment is not a waiting room for some more illuminated state; it is already a place where the child can simply be held. In that light, Martin’s endarkenment concept feels like a profound gift of permission.

It is not a new path, not a superior darkness one graduates into after mastering the light, and not another school with its own stages and certifications. It is the release of the demand that the darkness disclose what it contains before we are allowed to be present. It is the freedom to clear the path that is in front of us without needing to know who (if anyone) will ride it later.

I have also been turning over an older story — the Watchers in the Enochic tradition — and reading it through this same lens, though in a deliberately selective and imaginative way. What if the Watchers are no longer condemned for their desire to merge with humanity?

What if, instead, they are finally seen as the good protectors that they have always been?

What if they are now given permission to find for themselves a suitable earthly partner — not as a fall, but as an allowed expansion of their calling? In this re-written lens, the Watchers retain their heavenly role as fierce, skilled protectors and alchemical friends to humanity, while also receiving the gift of the human experience itself.

The partnership becomes an alchemical rebirth of their own: a chosen union in which their protective energy can be directed, with full presence, over both the children born of that union and the adopted human children who come under their care. The story is no longer primarily about transgression and punishment. It becomes a story of guardians who were always meant to stand close, who are finally permitted to stand even closer, and who do so without shame.

I do not see this as a system of fixed appointments or hierarchical assignments. I see something more organic. Some, through their own way of moving, arrive at places of specialized, technical, almost alchemical engagement with the deeper layers of reality. Others remain in, or return to, a simpler trust. Neither trajectory is imposed, ranked, or condemned. The ones who carry the more complex work and the ones who live inside what I have started calling a hermetic seal of simplicity can both exist without mutual judgment or obligatory conversion.

The rest of humanity is given permission to navigate their own journeys at a level of ordinary presence. The specialized work stays with those who find themselves in it; the majority are free from the expectation of becoming experts. There is no control, no recruitment, no condemnation. Just the grand tapestry stitching itself together, one thread at a time, toward continued wholeness and beauty.

This vision has practical implications for how we hold community, especially for those who are new, vulnerable, or simply content with milk rather than solid food. It protects the space where belonging does not depend on performance or specialized knowledge.

It keeps the household of God from turning into an achievement contest between the simple and the esoteric. And it aligns with the deeper safety we long for: a place where the Father’s children can rest without being taken advantage of, without being expected to produce spiritual output on someone else’s timetable, and without the quiet violence of perpetual insufficiency.

Martin’s Day 100 is, for me, a living picture of that permission. The path needed clearing when the path needed clearing. The horses came later, or they might not have. The observer did not require possession of the relationship in order for the intersection to be real. In the same way, the child does not require possession of the parent’s full knowledge in order to be safe. The ordinary believer does not require mastery of every technical layer in order to belong. The present does not owe us a future capable of explaining why it mattered.

Perhaps the only thing any of our numbered disciplines, spiritual paths, or earnest strivings ever needed was another day — a day for which we are entirely accountable, and about which we can be certain of only one thing: we do not know what will happen next.

And that, it turns out, can be a very safe place to stand.