Being in total darkness recently took on new meaning for me.  Rock bottom is not necessarily a bad place to start when you’re looking for true light.

The “dark night of the soul” may mean different things to different people, but for me, my dark nights occur when my connections with loved ones are destroyed.  I feel intensely alone, no matter what the surrounding circumstances.  My world caves in around me, and I feel trapped in the remains.

Enclosed in the Hell Realm

Last week, knowing I was going through what Buddhists call the “hell realm,” a friend sent me an excerpt from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

When we left the monkey he was in the Hell Realm, trying to kick and claw and push his way through the walls of his house.  The monkey’s experiences in the Hell Realm are quite terrifying and horrific.  He finds himself walking through gigantic fields of red-hot iron, or being chained and marked with black lines and cut apart, or roasting in hot iron crucibles, or boiling in large cauldrons. These and the other hallucinations of Hell are generated from the environment of claustrophobia and aggression.

There is a feeling of being trapped in a small space with no air to breathe and no room in which to move about.  Trapped as he is, the monkey not only tries to destroy the walls of his claustrophobic prison; he even attempts to kill himself in order to escape his excruciating and continuous pain.  But he cannot really kill himself, and his suicide attempts only intensify his torture.

The more the monkey struggles to destroy or control the walls, the more  solid and oppressive they become, until at some point the intensity of the monkey’s aggression wears out a bit and, instead of battling with the walls, he stops relating to them, stops communicating with them.  He becomes paralyzed, frozen, remaining enveloped in pain without struggling to escape it.  Here he experiences the various tortures involving freezing and dwelling in harsh, barren, desolate areas.

However eventually the monkey begins to become exhausted from his struggle.  The intensity of the Hell Realm begins to diminish, the monkey begins to relax, and suddenly he sees the possibility of a more open, spacious way to be.

A Cave Story

I was immediately reminded of an illustrated short story I wrote a couple of years ago, In the Dark.  In my story, a woman wakes up on the floor of a cave bruised and injured.

She surmises that she fell in and lost her memory due to a concussion.   She looks for an escape, but all she finds is a dense crevice above.

She cannot reach it or fit through it.  She digs into the cave walls with no success.

She screams for help, but she’s left behind.  Finally, hungry, cold, and tired, she gives up.

Only in the moment of complete surrender does she begin to notice light shimmering in the darkness.  The light is the dance of her own mind.

She recognizes the cave itself as an extension or magnification of that light.  Soon, she realizes that there is no cave beyond what is created in her mind.  She and the cave are all mind.

The cave dissolves, and she becomes the space in which the cave was manifested.  A new world materializes, one of illuminated joy and play.

I am the cave, I reminded myself again and again during the days that followed.  I am the cave.

Sensing Absence

I tried to remember the original insight that inspired my short story, the transformation in my perception and the expansion of awareness that dissolved my pain, but the most tenacious and convincing illusion in my world is that of social isolation or disconnection.  Which is odd, because I’ve had more and more experiences during the past few years of just how deeply and continuously connected we are with one another, yet separation still anguishes me.

The connection is real.  The scientist in me can scarcely wrap my mind around it, and for a time, I felt a bit crazy, but my view gradually shifted, and now the experience of empathic connection with others is firmly incorporated into my world.  Why then do my feelings of abandonment persist?  Perhaps empathy has made things even more difficult, because the feeling of indifference is all the most perceptible.

Once, I was holding the hand of a close friend.  His hand felt alive and energized, present and full.  Suddenly, it felt like a dead fish, as if I were holding a fake hand.  I asked him about it, and he said his mind had been wandering.  So, we tried an experiment.  I held his hand and asked him to be in his hand, to put his attention on it.  I felt the energy and aliveness again, the pulse of something ineffable.  “Now let your mind wander away from it,” I said, and again, dead fish.  Not the most rigorous experiment, but it was enough for me.

On a grander scale, I think I sense this happening with people I love.  They come in and out of existence, and each time they are gone, I feel their absence, and I wonder if they will ever come back.

A Darkness Meditation

A few days later, on Halloween, a relative I hadn’t spoken to in years, aware that I was going through a period of suffering, called me from out of town to suggest I try a particular meditation.  He instructed me as follows.  First, I should enter a state of profound relaxation, then:

Begin by visualizing complete and total darkness as vividly and realistically as possible.  Even when you close  your eyes, you still see light.  You see the visions of your own mind.

Again, I was reminded of my short story, In the Dark.  He continued.

Imagine a veil of pure black before your eyes.  Make it so black that you see no images at all, not even the images of your imagination.

Then, with all your power of concentration and will, imagine poking a small hole in the black veil.  Imagine a bright light beaming through the pinhole.  Continue poking holes into the veil until you reach the limit of your capacity to imagine the holes.

At that point, something from beyond one’s own small mind then dissolves the veil, leaving only light.  He described it as a direct experience of universal love, understanding, and peace.

A Real Cave

Later that evening, I searched the local listings for children’s activities.  The only event still taking place, through to November 1, was a trick-or-treat tour at a vast underground cave in Wisconsin.

We drove an hour outside of Madison to reach the cave.  The cave was impressive.  Beautiful stalactites and mineral formations lined hidden chambers and cathedral-like rifts in the planet’s belly.  I had forgotten that I was claustrophobic, but I survived the narrow passageways.

Along a bend in the path, the tour guide turned off the lights.  For one minute, fifty feet below the surface of the earth, we experienced total darkness.  Pure black.

I am the cave.

I was elated.  There is a special beauty to total darkness, something indescribable.  As I embraced the darkness on the outside, I embraced it on the inside as well.

The tour guide turned the lights back on.  Everyone was still there, of course.  Then I remembered that in my cave story, there was a figure outside the cave who tried to rescue the woman, but he disappeared, and the cave sealed up.  She felt abandoned, but after the cave dissolved, she found him waiting patiently on the outside.  He never left.

I tend to think total darkness means that love is no longer present, but perhaps it simply means that my capacity to feel it has been blocked.  When I sense absence, maybe I am just temporarily blinded by my own illusions of separation.  And the veil of darkness is just an eyelid over the heart.