A Key in the Dark

A Key in the Dark

The Search for What Unlocks the Mystery of It All

It's another late night, with the moonlight filtering through the slatted shutters as I turn the place upside-down. This is the scene of the crime, this place called life. I've been trying to find the one clue that will piece it all together, but it's been eluding me. There's a locked door, and behind it is the answer to the mystery that's been eating at me since I started on this caper. And the door is pretty strong. No amount of muscle is ever gonna break it down. But somewhere in this room, I'm convinced I'll find a key to open that lock.

And why is life like that? It's never given to us in a straight-forward manner. We learn about life when we're just knee-high on our daddy, only to grow up and discover it was all smoke and mirrors. And we can't blame anyone for that. Our parents didn't know. Neither did our teachers or religious leaders. It was all the blind leading the blind. They didn't have the key either.

I'm not sure what makes me think I can find it, but desperation tells me I've got to. So, lighting a match, I look under beds, pull up carpeting. Hell, I'll bust into a safe or two if I have to. It's the mystery that drives every man mad. What is it really all about? Where is that damn key?

The First Key – The Valley Spirit

I switch tactics. I stop prising up floorboards and strike a match of a different sort: the one that lights an old book. After my spiritual awakening I learned that some answers are not found by brute force but by a quieter method, leaning into a certain kind of receptivity. So let’s sit with Tao Te Ching 6 and take that slow, careful look.

Below I unpack each line: what it says literally, what classical readers and modern scholars typically make of it, and how it works as a key in the dark for practical, everyday life.

The valley spirit never dies.

Literal sense:
The Chinese image is of a valley (gǔ, a low, receptive place that gathers water and life). The “spirit” (shén) of that valley is not something that comes and goes. It endures.

Scholarly note:
Valleys in classical Chinese thought are places of gathering, nourishment and concealment. Where a mountain projects and asserts, a valley receives and contains. This line sets up a fundamental Taoist theme: the power of receptive continuity. The phrase “never dies” points to something source-like and enduring, not a personal deity but the sustaining pattern beneath change.

How this is a key:
If the world is often loud and manifest, the valley spirit is the quiet network underneath that keeps things possible. It is the part of reality that does not burn out when you burn out. Practically, breath, silence, presence are ways of accessing this quality. In the caper of life, this is the persistent lock mechanism. Find it and the tumblers line up.

It is the woman, primordial mother.

Literal sense:
Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English render the phrase as feminine: the mysterious, generative “female” who is the mother at the origin of things.

Scholarly note:
The term translated “mysterious female” (xuán pìn / 玄牝) has been read for centuries as a symbolic figure. Taoist cosmology uses gendered metaphors: yin (receptive, dark, moist) and yang (active, bright, dry). The “female” here stands for receptivity, fecundity and the capacity to receive and birth change.

How this is a key:
Calling it “mother” is a deliberate technique to get us comfortable with humility and dependence. It is the opposite of the heroic, macho search for one true answer. The key offered is not conquest but hospitality: cultivate the maternal capacity to receive, nourish and allow emergence. In practice, this looks like allowing thoughts to settle, letting projects incubate, being open rather than compulsively forcing outcomes.

Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth.

Literal sense:
There is a “gate” or passage belonging to this mysterious female. That doorway is described as the root, the fundamental source, of cosmos: heaven and earth.

Scholarly note:
“Gate” (mén) here is a liminal image, a threshold where something passes from hidden to manifest or vice versa. Calling that gateway the root of heaven and earth suggests that the cosmos depends on a receptive opening. Creation is not only the product of thrusting force but also of yielding and enclosure. Many commentators have read this as an ontological statement: the primal source is an openness, or a field. We could liken it to a womb.

How this is a key:
The gate is both image and instrument. Think of it like a keyhole. You do not batter the door; you find the right way to open it. For living, that means cultivating thresholds that allow the unseen to express. Think of rituals, pauses, or moments of attention. The opening is the practical place where the spiritual meets the material: ideas become work, presence becomes relationship, inspiration lands in prose.

It is like a veil barely seen.

Literal sense:
The presence is subtle, not loud or obvious. The veil almost is not there, yet it persists.

Scholarly note:
This line emphasises the Tao’s subtlety. The Tao is continuous and present, yet resists direct conceptual capture. The “veil” metaphor signals that the source is not flamboyant. It does not announce itself with fanfare. Classical Taoist practice trains attention to detect what is almost imperceptible.

How this is a key:
If the key is well hidden, it is not because it is secretive. It is because it is delicate. We tend to miss it because we look with the wrong sense, with violence and impatience. The practical lesson is to refine sensitivity: slow the breath, listen for the faint chord, notice half-thoughts and peripheral feelings. Writers too will recognise this: the best images or sentences often arrive at the edge of awareness, not through brute effort.

Use it; it will never fail.

Literal sense:
Put the thing to work; draw on it. If you do, it will not run out.

Scholarly note:
This is an almost astonishingly pragmatic ending. The Tao is not ornamental; it is utilitarian. “Use it” implies a discipline, not mastering the world by force but by aligning with a sustaining principle so that efforts are replenished rather than exhausted. Many translators render the final note as inexhaustibility: Draw and it does not diminish.

How this is a key:
This is where accessibility shows its face. The valley spirit is not abstruse metaphysics accessible only to adepts. It is a resource you can use. The practice is simple (and therefore easy to overlook): yield, attend, pause, breathe, notice. Do these things and the practical goods are renewed. Your creativity, resilience, and compassion will be replenished, for instance. For your own awakening, this is the switch from desperation to practice. Desperation rams doors; practice opens gates.

Quick practical suggestions (how to “use it” — a tiny toolkit)

• Pause before acting. When you feel the compulsion to solve, take three quiet breaths and notice what softens.

• Practice receptive writing. Start a page with silence for two minutes, then let words come without forcing a plot.

• Cultivate a “threshold ritual.” A cup of tea, a short breath count before work; these are tiny gates that invite emergence.

• Listen rather than answer. In conversation, try to sit through the silence and see what arises.

Tying it back to our case

Taken together, the five lines are a compact manual for a certain kind of access. Not a doctrine, but an invitation to a way of being that yields results. The valley spirit is the key in the dark, small, patient, feminine in the metaphoric sense. And the instruction is simple: use it. That promise of inexhaustibility is the accessibility we are circling in this newsletter, profound truths that are also useful, low-tech keys that open big doors.

So, grasping the key at last, I went to the door and turned it, fully expecting the door to open. Instead, it only went a quarter-turn. There it stuck, no matter how I tried to jiggle or manipulate it. Not wanting to break it off, I withdrew it. Then it hit me. This was a special type of lock. It would take more than one key. Each one would unlock it a quarter-turn more. And I had a hunch where that next key would be found.

The Second Key – Symptoms of Liberation

The next key often shows up in the hands of anyone stepping out of the old church doors for the last time. It doesn’t belong to one person alone. It’s a set of shifts, almost like fingerprints, that mark the path of deconstruction.

One of the first is a sudden taste for ambiguity. After years of craving clear answers and tidy doctrines, many discover they can breathe more freely when questions remain open. Ambiguity becomes less of a threat and more of a companion. Instead of fearing the fog, they begin to walk in it, even finding beauty in what cannot be nailed down.

Alongside this comes a suspicion of certainty. Those who once clung to absolute truth now begin to distrust it. Certainty starts to look less like confidence and more like control. Anyone claiming to have the map from start to finish raises an eyebrow, because many who have been burned by dogma know that life rarely follows such neat directions.

Then there is the work of building scaffolding for yourself. This is one of the most unsettling yet liberating steps. Without the prefabricated frame of doctrine, you begin to construct your own supports, your own worldview, piece by piece. It can be unnerving, because there is no authority telling you whether the structure is “correct.” Yet the liberation lies in knowing that what you build is yours, and it will hold because you’ve tested it yourself.

Another common shift is the acquiring of habits once labelled “sinful.” For me, this meant picking up words I was once forbidden to say. After my spiritual awakening, I began to curse like a sailor, something the old me would have abhorred. For others, it might be tattoos or piercings, visible reminders that their bodies are theirs alone to mark and adorn. These acts, once condemned, now feel like small keys turning quietly in the lock.

And finally, deconstruction often opens the door to relationships that once felt off-limits. Former boundaries of “us versus them” fade. Instead of suspicion or judgment, there grows a sense of openness and curiosity. People who were once seen as outsiders or even enemies become friends, teachers, or simply fellow travellers.

The clue becomes clearer with each step. These shifts are not random quirks. They are signs that another key has been found, and the lock has turned a little more.

Lesson: Breaking from Christianity provides a key to living more authentically, even if it unsettles you at first.

By the way, I’ve recently begun publishing SubStack articles deconstructing the Genesis stories. It’s completely free to follow me there, and I’d love it if you gave it a read.

Grasping this key firmly, I plugged it into the lock, and turned. And the lock gave again, just a little bit. I knew I would have to keep searching, and this time, I would pick up the search in the area of literature that, after deconstruction, has interested me more than any other.

The Third Key: Neo-Noir Literature

I began searching through the usual noir casefiles, but the key wasn't there. Then, I hit on another idea. What about neo-noir? What can we learn when noir authors add another literary element into noir? How does it change the genre?

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

This is often cited as one of the landmark neo-noir novels. Ellroy reconstructs the infamous 1947 unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles and layers it with corruption, despair, moral rot. This is the first of his LA Quartet, four novels dripping with irony, violence, and a dark architectural power that redefined noir for the modern era.

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

Another in the same quartet, this novel continues the mythic descent into Hollywood’s sewers. Corruption, police brutality, glamour turned grotesque: the prose is razor-sharp, spare, and relentless.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

This collection turns the detective novel inside out. It deconstructs noir conventions through post-modern techniques, exploring identity, authorship, and the detective as a narrative device as much as a person.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem assembles noir structure around a private eye with Tourette’s syndrome. It is playful, linguistically inventive, but with a beat of existential isolation that echoes classic noir.

The City & the City by China Miéville

Imagine two cities occupying the same physical space but existing on different perceptual planes. A noir detective story unfolds in this uncanny speculative world. Genre blending at its most surreal.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

A neo-noir Western of sorts, it is about a violent man who stumbles upon drug money, a relentless killer who trails him, and an aging sheriff witnessing prophecy in madness. Sparse prose, brute inevitability. It’s a neo-noir twilight of the American dream.

Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer

This one is a fever dream dressed as a novel. Baer twists noir into something surreal and unsettling, with prose that feels like it has been soaking in blood and cigarette smoke. The narrator staggers through a world that is both familiar and nightmarish, where violence and seduction blur until you are not sure what is real. It is neo-noir at its most hallucinatory, and it shows just how far the genre can bend without breaking.

Examination of the Clue

What are these novels doing that bends the rules?

1. Structural experimentation: The New York Trilogy blurs the line between detective and author, story and reality.

2. Unusual narrators: Motherless Brooklyn gives us a detective whose neurology changes form, voice, perception...everything.

3. Speculative worldbuilding: The City & the City couches noir in a city-split that forces us to “unsee” one world to navigate another.

4. Landscape as character: No Country for Old Men and The Black Dahlia turn their settings into oppressive presences.

5. Mythic or surreal violence: Baer’s prose twists reality so that the violence isn’t just physical, it’s metaphysical.

In my novel, the supernatural is not just window dressing. Spirits slither into the case, and the loa are not simply haunting signals. They are active presences, shaping the detective’s world in ways he cannot ignore. This echoes the way Miéville warps perception in The City & the City, or how Baer drags his narrator into a fevered dreamscape.

For me, the loa subplot becomes a key to stretching the noir frame, opening it to a spiritual threshold, a haunted gateway. Spirits heighten the noir vibe because they feed into the unknown, the uncanny. They intensify menace, push past realism, and open symbols like hidden safes. At the same time, they can risk derailing the tone if they take centre stage. The trick is to let the paranatural whisper at the edges of the story, never shouting, never explaining too much. My WIP, Pure Evil is still set to publish this Thanksgiving, so watch for that.

Neo-noir experiments show us how the genre opens when the detective problem bleeds into psychology, cityscape, memory, or the mystical. My voodoo subplot is not a gimmicky twist; it becomes the metaphysical corridor through which the case itself is reframed.

Now, with this key, we're just another quarter-turn away from opening the door. And I know exactly where to look for this last key. Because I was reading something just the other day that will give us access to that final key.

The Fourth Key: Instant Feng Shui by Richard Craze

Last time, I put Stephen Skinner’s Keep it Simple Series Guide to Feng Shui under the lamp. It was a comprehensive tome, weighing in at more than 350 pages. But “simple” it was not. The book buried me under competing schools of thought, strict rules, and endless dos and don’ts. After a while, I threw up my hands. Fascinating, yes, but utterly impractical. It left me feeling like Feng Shui was a locked vault that only a lifetime devotee could crack.

Enter Richard Craze. His Instant Feng Shui, first published in 1997, comes in at a lean 63 pages, but it packs more clarity and usefulness than Skinner’s heavy volume ever managed. Craze strips the subject down to its essentials. He speaks plainly, without jargon, and his logic is easy to follow.

What makes this book stand out is that it does not drown the reader in every ancient detail or school of interpretation. Those things may be valuable to scholars, but they add little for someone who just wants to understand and apply Feng Shui in daily life. Craze keeps his focus practical.

He explains how Feng Shui works by emphasising harmony with the landscape rather than imposing our will upon it. He walks through the symbolism of the four animals in language anyone can grasp. He shows how principles apply both inside and outside the home. And when it comes to formulas, he sticks to the eight enrichments and nine palaces, presenting them in a way that feels manageable rather than intimidating.

The strength of this book is accessibility. Instant Feng Shui succeeds because it gives ordinary readers a key to an ancient practice without burying them under centuries of complexity. And in that sense, it mirrors the very mission I carry in my own work: whether Taoism, noir, or deconstruction, the aim is to keep profound ideas simple enough to be lived.

Opening the Door, and Closing the Case

We've got it now. The key is turning, the door is opening. What's there on the other side for us? As I reach in and flip on the light switch, there it stands, like in broad daylight, staring at me like a temptress in a red dress.

At the heart of it all, the “mystery” I’ve been circling is accessibility.
Whether it’s Taoist wisdom distilled into five spare lines, breaking free from suffocating religion, bending the noir form with a touch of the supernatural, or finding a Feng Shui guide that does not drown you in technicalities, the real victory is when wisdom, art, and life are made livable.

That is the through-line: clarity amidst complexity, the light behind the smoke.

Because in every mystery, what matters is not the key that unlocks everything forever. It is recognising when you have stumbled across a key that opens just enough to let a breath of light break through.

And this room I have walked us into? Yes, it does contain that mystery we have been seeking. But it is not one final, perfect answer. Instead, as I suspected, it leads to more rooms, more doors, more questions. And that is exactly why I know it is real, not someone’s fabricated solution to the mystery of life. It's the genuine trail of a mystery that continues to unfold.

If you have enjoyed reading this, and if you've come this far, I would be over the moon if you were to buy me a coffee. My work exists because of the kind support of my readers and followers. I'm deeply grateful for any donation, large or small.

Peace, and keep asking the big questions,

The Sage Wanderer