Jumping to Darkness

Giovanni Kerkhof · 2026-09-29 · from chapter 1, The Nature of Awareness

So what actually goes wrong, in the unadmitted state? Here I have to describe something that took me years to see clearly. Thinking happens in the head, and thinking is about things. "Je kunt bewust zijn van het, van de gedachte. Maar dat waar de gedachte over gaat, dat bestaat niet" — you can be conscious of the thought, but the thing the thought is about does not exist. Not there, not then, not in the room with you. And when you believe those contents, something terrible happens to your awareness: "Als je bewust je bewust zijn laat opgaan in die illusies van de denken en daar aan gelooft, dan gaat de aandacht allemaal naar dat twijfelachtige, vage geestesweeld" — if you let your consciousness dissolve into the illusions of thinking and believe in them, all your attention flows into that doubtful, vague mental world. The result is a strange inversion: "Men is niet bewust van wat er is en is bewust van wat er niet is." One is not conscious of what is there, and is conscious of what is not there. That, in fact, is where all consciousness is lost.

I have an image for why. Awareness behaves like light, and light needs something real to land on. "Als waar awareness schijnt op het luchtledige, op illusies, dan reflecteert het niet" — when awareness shines on the void, on illusions, it does not reflect. Nothing comes back. And the mind, receiving no reflection, does not sit quietly with the darkness; it is used to draw conclusions, to fabricate something where nothing returned. I once compressed the whole pathology into a single pair — onbewust van je denken een jumping to conclusion, onbewust van je aandacht een jumping to darkness. Unconscious of your thinking, you jump to conclusions; unconscious of your attention, you jump into darkness. Two failures, one root.

When that consciousness gets trapped rather than lost, the ending is different but just as instructive. "If it's over-conscious, when there's so much consciousness locked up in that something, it explodes" — the same as a body over-focused on feelings or thoughts or actions. Fixation is not depth; it is pressure.

But here is the good news, and it is genuinely good: the whole machinery of projection cannot survive being watched. "En dan is projectie niet meer interessant, want projectie wordt gezien. Het wordt gezien dat het geprojecteerd wordt" — projection is no longer interesting, because the projecting itself is seen. The moment I actually observe the mechanism, "valt het meteen uit elkaar. En dan blijft er niks over" — it falls apart at once, and nothing remains. The spell loses its charge; the emotions drain out of the stimulus because it no longer does anything to you. This is why I say becoming conscious has real consequences: "Veel hallucinaties gaan verloren" — many hallucinations are lost. You should want that, though it costs you a certain enchantment.