Go in the Dark - Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too, was a gift...

Mary Oliver

(I still don't understand it :)

with thanks to Under My Umbrella and Beyond

~

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight, and
find that the dark, too, blooms and sings and is
traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

~

Art - Mystic Meandering
Nordic Forest
(drip painting)

 

The "Good Dark" - Ivan Granger

What is the "Good Dark?

The Light is so often considered one of the attributes of the
Divine, but we forget that dark too is also a metaphor...  The
Eternal is sometimes called dark because IT is beyond the
ability of the limited intellect to see.  It is the realm where
there is no longer separation; nothing is seen as separate
from That [The Eternal].  It can feel like a shining darkness.
So the Sacred Dark, the Good Dark is the Eternal, that
exists in its mysterious, invisible, indefinable form.  Vast
beyond comprehension.  [It is the Eternal] that gathers
everything, even light, into ItSelf.  This is the darkness
where there is great joy.  This is the immense Mystery...

In we understand the Divine to be that living, mysterious 
darkness, then we finally recognize ourselves as the same
as that darkness. [The light and dark being the same - think
Yin-Yang, where the light is contained within the dark and 
the dark within the light.]  In the 'half-light' [partial under-
standing] we are still distracted by our own faces, we are 
confused, more aware of ourselves than the holy mystery
that we touch.  We become like a young lover, too self-
conscious to simply lose oneself in the embrace of the
Belove.

...[when] we have no 'face' [identity] of our own separate
from That, then we can melt silently into the Good Dark,
into the Mystery of the Divine.  This is the place where
concepts fall, where reality is no longer parceled out into
dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong, (no division
of opposites)...  There is nothing (except the Divine Wholeness
that is within all things).  The ego-mind is no longer able to
segment reality.  Underlying the complex diversity of
creation is a single Unity.  And within that Unity, the
individual is not separate or different from the vast Divine.
There is no separation between individual self and the
center of all selves...  Just Pure Being...

If you can settle deeply into this awareness, then you will
find yourself drinking the ecstasy of true love-wisdom.

Ivan Granger
Poetry Chaikhana

[brackets mine] (parentheses his)

~

We are from the fathomless depths,
the "darkness" of "The Deep"
before Light began...
from which Light emerged...
We are the Deep Ananda of
The Divine...
without knowing how or why...
without the need for certainties,
for answers ; only the
ever-available Presence of
Divine Love...Pure Bliss
Pure Blessing
OMmm...

Mystic Meandering
January 2017

~

Photo Art - Mystic Meandering

 

Courage - Matt Licata

A certain 'death' occurs as part of the ["spiritual"] process;
in the deepening of self-awareness...  There is a fantasy that we
can come out the other side intact, without having to sacrifice
some aspect of ourselves in the fires of transformation.  But it
doesn't really seem to work this way...  There is wisdom within
the reorganization itself that we cannot know if we abandon
[the process] prematurely.

When we engage in any work of depth, we inevitably come up
against a cultural bias toward the light, the upward, and the
brightened dimensions of the path.  We cannot sidestep or bypass
the darkened condition, those parts of the psyche buried and
hidden beneath ordinary awareness. This turning into the dark
can be quite challenging, especially if we identify as a 'spiritual
person' - kind, compassionate, giving, selfless, [loving], grateful,
forgiving, at peace, and not ever caught in the so-called
negative emotions of fear, rage, and depression.....but we must
find the curiosity and courage to engage this dimension.

[In this dimension] we see things that could not be seen from
the held-together state.  The old dream crumbles - the image
through which we'd been seeing ourselves, or any emotionally
significant part of our world - has finished its time here.

The wisdom in the dark is preparing the vessel [us] for the
next illumination.  The invitation is to allow the old to wash
away, and let our perception be reorganized.  New images, new
myths, new lenses must emerge through which we can navigate
a new world. [A new way of being in the world.]  A shift in the
heart is most required, a willingness to befriend ourselves at
levels previously thought impossible.

We must clarify within us what is most wanting and needing 
our attention, awareness, care and love.....even if it feels
unspiritual.  The intelligence in the heart brings forward the
prima materia for us if we slow down and open into the
unknown - and the unknowable...
We must honor the realities of our hearts...

Matt Licata
from - A Healing Space:
Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Yin/Yang Bowl

 

The Soul of the Night - Chet Raymo

It is a thin membrane that separates us from chaos...

The space between the stars is silence.  How are we to 
understand the silence of the Universe?  Beyond the earth's
skin of our thin sky is silent.  Stars blow themselves to
smithereens, we hear nothing...

The fireball of Creation exploded from a pinprick of infinite
energy - there is no soundtrack - the Universe is silent...

If we converted the radiant energy of stars into sound what
would we hear?  The static of electrons fidgeting between 
energy levels in the atoms of stellar atmosphere;
 statistical, indifferent noise...

In the almost perfect vacuum of interstellar space, stars
detonate, meteors blast craters on moons, and planets split
at their seams without sound.

What's up there is just one galaxy after another, magnificent|
in their silent turning.....a primeval silence...  The silence of
that which cannot be named...

Chet Raymo
From: The Soul of the Night

~

"In a dark time the eye begins to see."
Theodore Roethke

Medieval Mystics embraced the darkness...
The Night is our window into the Infinite...

Few people willingly choose to walk the dark path,
to enter the dark wood...

Chet Raymo
From: The Soul of the Night

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Lunar Eclipse May 15, 2022

(taken with my cell phone :)

 

 

Embrace the Darkness - unknown

Everything is embraced/held by "The Mystery",
including what we experience as "darkness."

Nothing is excluded,
even the "darkness"

however that manifests
in our minds.

You have to be willing to dance
with the darkness,
which only means that
you are willing to meet it,
to be with it,
and not try to push it away;
not resist it as something
absent of Light,
but seeing that the 
darkness
is not the opposite
of Light.

Just dance with whatever
shows up...

The darkness is also
part of the dance.

Nothing is excluded.

Everything is embraced.

It is Love dancing with ItSelf...

Unknown author

~

Photo - Light and Dark Vortex Art
done with fingers
MM - 2011

 

The Darkness has Wisdom too - Brooke McNamara

painting by Joe-Maccer Deviant Art

If you can't change yourself, after all
the efforts, change the light
by which you read your story.

Exchange overhead for something softer -
a lamp, a candle, a vine of shining
holiday lights - and feel yourself
become hugged by the fabric of shadows.
You see the darkness here has wisdom too.
You see the objects around become related
by the pregnant emptiness that holds them,
and you.  Let this light reveal the rapture
of being just this.  Then, further still, try
moonlight, or no light, until, at last,
this open, sourceless incandescence
which you are
no matter who you think you are
will follow you from the inside
wherever you may go, however
you may change, or not.

Brooke McNamara
from - Feed Your Vow -
poems for falling into fullness

with thanks to The Dawn Within

Precipice - Fred LaMotte

The bold become themselves.  There is a point in meditation,
if it is true meditation, when you fall off the precipice of practice
into groundlessness...  You can no longer resist the subtle sorrow
in your flesh, that which the Buddha called Dukkha...

You've been carrying it for years, for centuries, the stuff made of
stories about a suffering 'me.'  It is buried deep in the rind of your
body, but neatly packaged in the sterile cellophane called 'spirituality.'

Now the time has come to let the wrapping go.  Be vulnerable to
yourself.  Allow your every distant ache, the brittle anguish of a
 trillion nerves, the  secrets of grief, the worms of rage, the clogging
 undigested waste of blame, this whole discomfort you are, to erupt
 in one magnificent purple blossom of pain, fragrant with the gift
 of tears. Let it flower from the subtle into the gross, gushing
 without name, and without distinction between good and bad,
beautiful or ugly.

It is just Dark Energy, percolating wordlessly out of your molecules,
yet pulsing with photons of fire and swirling suns.  It is holy
destruction and healing, cosmic in scale yet intimate with every
cell of your body.  It is the chaos of possibility.  It is the cleansing
smile of...No Secret Me Any More...
It is pure love, the stuff of your bones.

Be bold.  Let your edges dissolve.  There is no one else in all
the universe for you to become.

Fred LaMotte

Uradiance

Light in the Darkness - Matt Licata

In speaking recently with a friend, I was reminded of the great
bias in our culture toward the light and away from the darkness.
When we meet with someone who is down, feeling hopeless,
empty or otherwise not beaming and joyful, we can become
quickly convinced that something is wrong, that they are
"broken," and that we must act urgently to "fix" them.  We
scramble to put them back together, to remind them of all the
gifts in their life, impart spiritual techniques and philosophies
to them, suggesting that they just "focus on the positive", letting
know that everything will be better soon, and that it will turn out
okay.

...we might see the subtle aggression in this, this insistence that
they come out of their immediate experience and into the one
we believe they should be having instead.  We can start to see
how much of this "fixing" activity arises out of the disconnection
with that which remains unmetabolized within us.

It is possible the kindest thing we can offer our suffering friend
is to sit in the darkness with them... removing the burden that
they change, transform, feel better, or heal in order for us to stay
near.  As we turn to embrace our own unmet sadness, grief, and
despair, we remove the projection of our unlived lives from them.
We lift the weight that they take care of our unresolved anxiety
for us.

As we learn to trust and to rest in the wisdom-field of our present,
embodied experience, we see that love is a movement of totality.It is whole, and is raging and alive even in the darkness.

In the core of the fire, the sadness, the grief, and the despair
is something very real, breaking through the dream of
 partiality.  But what this is may never support our cultural
 and spiritual fantasies of a life of invulnerability.  Here, you
are being shown that the wild, untamed, creative movement
 of love will never conform to your hopes and fears, and that
things are unlikely to ever turn out the way you thought they
would.  This is not evidence that something has gone wrong,
but of how alive you are.

From the perspective of this radical sort of wholeness, every
experience is beheld as utterly valid, totally workable, and
an expression of the path itself.  Here there is no obstacle.
From the center of your being, it is seen that life is not only
the joy and the sweetness, but at times will arrive raging as
the darkness, in order to reorder your world and to remind
you of something you have lost contact with.  In this surging
of your inner family, the true nature of your experience will be
revealed, and the portals to Presence will be shown as they are...
as infinite.

May you stay close to your suffering and the suffering of others,
careful not to cut it too quickly, curious and available to the
wisdom as it unfolds in unexpected ways.  Open your heart to
the golden, full-spectrum nature of love and the jewels hidden
in the dark before you discard them, and finally see what it is
that they have to say.

Matt Licata

Photo from Matt's blog

A luminous middle place - Matt Licata

Let us not forget the descendant current, flowing into the unlit
places, the lower worlds, and the dark caverns of the psyche.
The invitation here is one of embodiment - into the vulnerability,
the chaos, and the deflation that the path of the heart will
inevitably present us with for holding.

There is a cultural fantasy that we are supposed to know what to
do with our lives, that things are supposed to be clear at all times.
But love is full-spectrum and will use the energies of not-knowing,
disappointment and uncertainty as part of its revelation here.  The
process of dissolution is non-negotiable...
For it is by way of this sacred washing of the known that new
 forms can find their way here.

Even in the darkness, the numbness, and in the appearance that
nothing is happening, there is birth, but the new can never fully come
into being without an honoring of re-organization and death
 [of the old]. The challenge is that there is no map for this territory
 as it is too alive, too creative, and too wild to be pinned down,
 controlled, and known ahead of time.  While this degree of openness
 may be disorienting to a mind seeking resolution, it is exhilarating
in the heart, in the body, and deep within the soul.

It is natural and easy to disconnect from this [descendant] current, as
we overly identify with the ascending, the upward, the light, and the
transcendent.  In the rush to exit immediate experience - for something
that is higher, purer, less messy, and less contradictory - we turn from
the waters of life and lose touch with essence.

While it is natural to have a bias for one current over another, let us
not do so at the expense of fragmentation.  In ways the mind may
never fully understand, there is a luminous middle place where the
currents intertwine.  It is buried in the secret chamber inside your
own heart.

Enter there...
Rest there...
Play there...
Dance there...

Matt Licata

~

Art - Shadowy Caverns
Craypas oils done with fingers
2011

"Deep Space"...

Molten golden light
splays itself out within a fathomless darkness,

like a million jewels tumbled out into the stillness of space;
dancing particles of Divine Illumination...

The shutter of Infinity opens and the light
imprints its glittering image within Divine Darkness.
In a moment of stillness, a moment of no breath,
a moment in the timelessness of deep space,
the Light and the Darkness merge - like twilight...

In this place of Primordial Existence,
the Darkness and Light intermingle
in the purity of cosmic fusion;
forever "blended",
neither the enemy of the other,
neither opposed to the other,
both expressing the same Source...

In the depths of The Deep
there is a dance of Life -
an inexpressible expression of
the Aliveness of the Absolute -
revealed in time as a movement of creation,
a movement of birth,
a movement and a breath of
Light and Darkness
forever merging...

In "Deep Space"
the Light and the Dark
exist together within the wholeness of
The Infinite Mystery...

Mystic Meandering
April 2001

~

Photo - a street light through tree branches
digitally altered to create this affect...

Behind the Mask - "The Good Dark"

The above piece is a work in progress, except that I *love* this piece the way it *is*!  It speaks to me so deeply about what is behind the masks we wear: the Infinite Spaciousness of Eternal Beingness.  Even though the masks we wear themselves may be beautiful, what is behind them is the Infinite Spacious Cosmos ItSelf – represented here by “the dark” canvas behind the mask.   And so I left this sitting on an easel in my creative space to inspire me.  I see it every time I walk by the room, which is several times daily – admiring its simplicity, and its subtle message – that who we *think* we are (our egos, our personalities, our minds, our bodies) is only a mask that arises out of Infinite Cosmic Beingness.  Eventually this piece may be “finished” as I envisioned it – but I am waiting, listening for it to call to me…

Several weeks ago in meditation I got the image of a mask lifting off what in my mind was an outline of a “meditating face”, an “empty” face against a black background, that I crudely drew with ink pen, in my journal notes, so is a bit messy…  This inspired me to go out and try to find a mask, which obviously I did, at a local craft store, and basically just hung it over the black canvas; an old canvas that I had previously painted over several times…  After I hung it I was hesitant to draw the outline of the “meditating face” in – but wanted to just sit with it.  I was drawn to the very visceral sense of the mask *emerging* out of the darkness – which soothed something within me – as if a recognition was occurring.

This piece speaks to me in so many ways, one being the Zen saying:  Keep stepping back until you step into That which is looking through your eyes – seeing through the mask you wear - pointing to what we really are as Infinite Space, Infinite Beingness, Infinite Spirit.  That is what is looking through the mask – our Eternal Being.   I find that inspiring – that who we are *is* the Infinite Cosmos ItSelf – our True Being, which is of course Internal.  It is not “out there” somewhere in space :) – but right Here in the very Heart of our Being – and yet – we ARE that Cosmic Spaciousness as well – our Home, our Cosmic Mother so-to-speak…  We ARE the stuff of stars… 

So often we view the darkness in our lives as “bad”, something to avoid, to not allow into our experience because we have labeled it as being the opposite of light, or something “evil” – a dark, foreboding abyss.  When in fact, according to some traditions, it is the light that emerged out of Infinite Darkness – out of the Cosmic Womb – the Primordial Stillness, if you will – out of which our planet, solar system and galaxy emerged…  Fascinating!

About two weeks after putting this “piece” together on the easel I received an on-line newsletter called NonDuality Highlights.  It featured an article written by Ivan Granger from Poetry Chaikhana giving his interpretation of a poem called “The Good Darkness” by Hakim Sanai, a Sufi poet. (You can view the poem and entire article HERE).  As I read through it I thought, what timing!  It all came together for me.  I have only printed an excerpt here, because it is those parts that say what I wanted to say about “The Good Dark” but couldn’t articulate.

He says:

“What is this “Good Dark”?  Light is so often considered one of the attributes of the Divine, but we forget that dark too is also a metaphor...  The Eternal is sometimes called dark because IT is beyond the ability of the limited intellect to see.  It is the realm where there is no longer separations; nothing is seen as separate from That [the Eternal].  It can feel like a shining darkness.

So the Sacred Dark, the Good Dark, is God [the Eternal] vast beyond comprehension, [it is] Being that gathers everything, even light, into ItSelf.  This is the darkness where there is great joy.  This is the immense Mystery…

If we understand the Divine to be that living, mysterious darkness, then we finally recognize ourselves as the same as that darkness. [the light and dark being the same – think Yin-Yang where the light is contained within the dark and dark within the light – as a symbol of oneness].   In the ‘half-light’ [partial understanding] we are still distracted by our own faces, we are confused, more aware of ourselves than the holy mystery we touch.  We become like a young lover, too self-conscious to simply lose oneself in the embrace of the Beloved.

…[when] we have no face of our own *separate* from That [our face before we were born – maybe my “meditating face”?], then we can melt silently into the Good Dark, into the mystery of the Divine.  Your face gets erased – the false self, the little me, the ego [the mask - your sense of separateness *from* the You that is Divine].  This is the place where concepts fail, where reality is no longer parceled out into dichotomies of good and bad, right and wrong (no division of opposites)...  There is nothing (except the Divine Wholeness that is all things, emptying individual things of their substance.) The ego-mind is no longer able to say ‘this is separate from that.’

In the mind’s deep stillness, reality is perceived as one, whole, unsegmented, pure – beyond the ego’s attempts to segment reality.

If you can settle deeply into this awareness [that there is nothing except Divine Wholeness, beyond the mask], then you will find yourself drinking the ecstasy of true love-wisdom!”

Ivan Granger, Poetry Chaikhana…
[brackets are mine] (parentheses his)

~

For a more humorous look at this topic
see my post:
Who would you be if you weren’t who you THINK you are…