Month: April 2023

This is an outline of a talk given to the Blooming Heart Sangha on  4/27/2023

Close your eyes and remember.

• Remember what it was like to stare up into the dark sky, away from lights, away from anything blocking your view.
• Remember the strong attraction, the invitation to be pulled into the darkness, into the vastness; remember the invitation to experience the whole cosmos around you, to be swallowed up in the darkness.

A couple months ago, I got such an invitation from Rilke.

• Not from a night sky, but from a few lines of poetry:  

                        You see I want a lot;  maybe I want it all:

                        The darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light                                              of each ascent.

Tonight, I want to pass that invitation on to you:  an initation  into darkness…….now you can open your eyes, but I still invite you to enter into the darkness.  an invitation to experience it all.

This is not easy:  First of all, I am aware that we have subtle ways of avoiding darkness.

• We call some of our history the “dark ages” because, frankly, we don’t know a whole lot about them.
• Only recently, within the last century, it was discovered that 96% of the universe is unknown, made of what we simply call dark matter and dark energy;   we only “see” the atomic part, 4% of what is there.  
• I have learned to dread the “dark night of the soul” some western mystics described.
• Most of us light up our streets and our yards because of the presumed dangers lurking in darkness.   

Like Rilke, I want it all, which means embracing the dreaded darkness.   

I’ve wondered how have I come to avoid the darkness?  There are numerous ways.

            –           I think that when I was born, my culture gave me a mask that                                                attempts to shield me from a fear of the Unknown, the                                                    Unseen, Unsafe

–           I have learned to live in an artificial atmosphere of hierarchy, racial stratification to keep me safe; I live with cultural blinders on.

–           Like most of us, I have learned to celebrate speed, action, productivity, attachment,         success, destination, linear time, rationality, logic. ….rather than relax in to the darkness. 

–           Sometimes we even engage in a kind of spiritual bypassing: to escape the messy world, seek transcendence, crave calmness, even celebrate out of body experience. The darkness is not a calm, energy-less place

            –           The bias is to the light over darkness; we seek enlightenment 

            –           All help me avoid the darkness.

I think that the opposite is my destiny; darkness is our destiny.

–           I can find freedom by turning to darkness, letting go of fear, turning to where my fears lurk.

–           Metabolizing, ommuning with, plunging into darkness opens me to an unwavering, luminous, inner light; enlightenment in darkness; everything is there.    

Examples: What does turning to the darkness mean in practice? 

–           I think it often means simply answering the question: ‘What would Thay do?’

–           Entering in to darkness means my deeply experiencing grief for the planet, its people, plants and animals.   Opening up to the possibility of a passionate, caring response to the plight of the planet, expanding my capacity to love, yielding to deep intimacy with the world.

–           Entering into darkness means deeply experiencing the trauma of my racism;  my own; it means I enter into the dark realm of my own racism.

–           It means I allow myself a more relaxed relationship with those MAGA , sleazy politicians or family members.

–           Entering into darkness means welcoming the trauma of my childhood; it means befriending those troubling seeds that Thay speaks of, those seeds that frighten me, that I don’t want to grow.  

–           It means embracing my shadow side; all the things Jung spoke of.

–           Entering into darkness means deeply experiencing my fear of “other”, entering into my fear of anything different.   Fully absorbing the awareness of the binary nature of our culture.

How do I do this?  How do I enter into darkness:   for me, the doorway is not a bunch of concepts, but the doorway to darkness is through the body. 

–           I begin by allowing myself to feel the vast spaciousness within my body;  the darkness within, the vast storehouse of energy within my body.

–           It means I slow down; allow the feeling of spaciousness to open inside; feel the darkness of each endless fall.

            –           It means that I accept there is no need to find answers; let go of pursuits.

            –           It means that I become open and curious; cultivate and develop “beginners mind”

            –           I Trust what I experience within; no resistance; no                                                        preconceptions;  embrace my internal authority.

            –           I be patient with the arrival of darkness; remember that                                               I have been conditioned otherwise.

            –           I abandon convictions and beliefs; rely on my intuition of                                             the present.

            –           I be gentle on myself; allow myself to feel fully what                                                     arises in the moment.

In summary: For me, it is a transformation of consciousness, 

            –           To enter darkness allows everything to enter with me:                                                  fear, aversion, joy, illumination.   

            –           There is a deep form of intimacy in darkness.   a deep                                                 form of awareness.   

–           For me entering darkness is the key:  I want to become intimate with everything. 

–           I offer you the invitation to enter darkness.    

Questions:

            –           What is it like for you to walk in the woods in the dark?

            –           What waits for you in the darkness?

            –           Is there an alternate way of understanding Darth Vadar’s attempt to draw Luke into darkness?

–           Are there ways of embracing fear rather than be controlled by it?

–           What do you want to metabolize in the darkness?

I absorbed many books and many classes as I was training to become a theologian. I read, I listened, I wrote papers. Eventually, I was recognized as a master of theology, of religious science. But under all that effort, a different frame of mind was developing and evolving. Rather than becoming a theologian, I was slowly emerging as a geologian.

My frame of reference gradually was becoming not what was theoretically above my head, but was perceptively under my feet.

Even though I had the credentials of a theologian, I was becoming aware that the God of western christianity had died, had lost relevancy. It was not so much the work of Neitzche that sent me in that direction. It was the urging I got from Teilhard, the theologian who dug into the earth for fossils, that brought me to that realization.

Teilhard has, of course, not been my only teacher. There have been many others, including the two professors who taught me the mysteries of earth dynamics this past semester. The plants in my garden constantly bring me to a deeper kind of awareness, as well as a growing assortment of scholars in the buddhist tradition.

The books on my shelves do not exclude the world of western christianity; I continue to be interested in the work of modern biblical scholars like Elaine Pagels. But my reading has become more focused on poetry and earth science. I am constantly inspired by a deepening understanding of the mind, guided by skilled writers and my own reflection on how my mind works.

It all is centered not on what was the realm of theology, but on earth science as I open my mind to the reality of the world which presents itself to me directly . I walk on it, I touch it, I see its reflection. My own body speaks to me more clearly than the theologians ever had and with greater validity. I am becoming a happy geologian, discovering the world that enthusiastically unfolds all around me. I am finding my true home, as it always has been.