Group C: Experiential processes

Enlightening Endarkenment: selected web resources on the challenge to comprehension (Part #5)

In these modes there is the engagement in practice with healing processes (as a necessary consequence of the previous group) associated with the "endarkenment" (namely what had been repressed) as part of a larger cycle whose paradoxical and mysterious nature becomes apparent. This group may be understood as a re-engagement with the body -- a re-embodiment of the phenomenal body (if only for health reasons), giving expression in practice to the quality of life for oneself, for others, and for the entities of the environment.

Metaphorically the group might be associated in time with the period from noon to dusk in which the perspective and ambiguity associated with the experience of the darkness within enriches the actual quality of life -- or as in the period of late adulthood.

Mode 7: Therapeutic processes

Here the focus is on the actual experiential processes and engagement in them. The body is rediscovered and re-engaged. The disassociation is remedied.

This mode might be compared to the seventh of the 10 Zen ox-herding pictures entitled: Ox Forgotten - Person Remaining

As noted earlier, with respect to the alchemical symbolism so extensively explored by C G Jung and his successors from a depth psychology perspective [more], it is worth considering the relation of this mode to the first stage of the alchemical process, the nigredo:

At the beginning is the so-called "dragon", the chthonic spirit, the "devil" or "blackness". The nigredo, as the initial stage, is either present as a quality of the prima materia (or original substance), or else produced by the separation (solutio, separatio, putrefactio) of the elements. Either way, the encounter with "blackness" destroys the original form to produce chaos, suffering or pain. [more]

For Jung:

Self-knowledge is an adventure that carries us unexpectedly far and deep. Even a moderately comprehensive knowledge of the shadow can cause a good deal of confusion and mental darkness, since it gives rise to personality problems which one had never remotely imagined before. For this reason alone we can understand why the alchemists called their nigredo melancholia, "a black blacker than black," night, an affliction of the soul, confusion, etc., or, more pointedly, the "black raven." For us the raven seems only a funny allegory, but for the medieval adept it was . . . a well-known allegory of the devil. [The Conjunction, Collected Works, vol 14, par. 741.]

As expressed by Bernard D S Butler:

In the Nigredo (black) phase, we start to become aware of all those parts of ourselves of which we were hitherto unaware. Most of those parts are bits we would dearly love to deny in ourselves and only see in others; that is, they represent shadow material for us.... First, we realise that we aren't the pure-living, decent rational person we imagined, so we become understandably depressed. Second, because the ego represents not only our idea of what we are, but is also bound up with our body image, we feel our old attitudes dying, but may even feel our body itself is dying.... Many people at this stage feel they are becoming rotten, repulsive, or loathsome, and may often have persistent unpleasant images of death, graveyards, and dismemberment. What is actually happening of course is that the previous neatly organised personality is undergoing a process of breaking down, and we perceive that process as if it were happening to our body, not just to our ego. If this confusion between body and psyche persists, images come of being reduced to a bare skeleton, which is then ground to dust, which is then cast to the winds. That gives a measure of how completely the old personality has to be dismantled before its new integrated version can form in its place. [more]

## Michael A. Harvey. The Hazards of Empathy: Vicarious Trauma of Interpreters for the Deaf

A Jungian analyst, Jean Shinoda Bolen once led a group of women into an underground cavern. They were told to sit still for hours without light or discussion. Upon returning to the "light," nobody reported enjoying the experience of darkness; everyone experienced degrees of terror. But they all reported benefiting tremendously from the ordeal. The group coined the term "endarkenment" to describe the archetypal wisdom that comes with going into the darkness and coming back again.

Mode 8: Spiritual quest: enlightenment through endarkenment

Here the capacity to learn through the dark is engaged deliberately (through variants of the Via Negativa) or through such experiences as the "dark night of the soul".

This mode might be compared to the eighth of the 10 Zen ox-herding pictures entitled: Person and Ox Both Forgotten

Again, in terms of the alchemical symbolism explored by C G Jung from a depth psychology perspective, this mode may be considered in relation to the second stage of the alchemical process, the albedo:

In alchemical language, matter suffers until the nigredo disappears and a new day dawns. The material slowly starts coming back to life. The albedo, the second stage, was said to result from the washing (ablutio, baptisma) of the products of this nigredo. Psychologically, it represents the later stages of shadow integration within the intimacy of the analytic "retort" -- the process of washing one's dirty linen in public; it being in the gross matter or "shadow" of our worldly affairs where contamination has taken place. [more]

## Rabbi Fern Feldman. Endarkenment as a Spiritual Practice (Chevruta)

## Yossi Chajes. Jewish Religiosity and the Quest for Endarkenment

The "Quest for Endarkenment" session is a chance to look at how Jewish spiritual ideas may be very different from the religious ideals of other spiritual traditions most of which seek "enlightenment" in one way or another. It's meant to be something of a challenge to the Jewish-Buddhist trip..[more]

## The Jews of the Near East (the Donmeh) who followed Sabbatai Zevi into Islam in 1666, as part of the Sabbatean Movement, secretly continuing to practice Jewish rituals, instituted one called "The Darkening of the Light."

## Mantak Chia. Darkness Technology: Darkness Techniques for Enlightenment. Universal Tao Center, 2002

All spiritual traditions have used Dark Room techniques in the pursuit of enlightenment. In Europe, the dark room often appeared in underground form as a network of tunnels, in Egypt as the Pyramids, in Rome as the catacombs, and by the Essenes, near the Dead Sea in Israel, as caves. In the Taoist tradition caves have been used throughout the ages for higher level practices. In the Tao, the cave, the Immortal Mountain, the Wu San, represents the Perfect Inner Alchemy Chamber. Meditating and fasting in the cave is the final journey of spiritual work. The caves are the Earth Mother and its energy lines. Like the hollowing bones, caves contain the earliest information of life stored inside the Earth. Caves contain the vital essence of the Earth Power. The Tao says: "When you go into the dark and this becomes total, the darkness soon turns into light."

## Harbor Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Via Negativa: Befriending Darkness, 30 January 2005 (Commentary on Matthew Fox, Original Blessing):

Letting go of busyness is a true challenge for many of us. Fox coins an arresting term in the following quotation: "If it is true that the ground of the soul is dark, then the human race cannot continue to afford to flee the dark-ness and to embrace an Enlightenment that does not include an Endarken-ment."... Western Civilization has embraced the Enlightenment for the last several hundred years. While it brought many blessings to our society, it also presents challenges. Let us allow the idea of Endarkenment to mellow in our minds, to stir our hearts, to inform our actions, and to bring balance into our living.

## Peter Collins (Secrets of the Night) clarifies:

Though the "Dark Night of the Soul" is often used in a more loosely defined sense, it is most properly associated with this stage which involves the intense erosion of the deepest conceptual structures. In its extreme form this is an exceptionally harrowing experience, which involves a kind of obscure anguish and psychological distress with no real parallel in other experiences. Due to the negation of all conscious phenomena one must learn to live entirely by faith. (This is interior illumination - concealed as darkness - which incubates for a long time in the spiritualized unconscious).

Collins usefully distinguishes five phases of the experience -- relating these to the quadrant schema of Ken Wilber (An Integral Theory of Consciousness, 1997). He also offers a formalization in the light of his interest in holistic mathematics. He then explores at some length a very interesting comparison -- in terms of "remarkable unrecognized structural characteristics" -- between the "Dark Night" of psycho-spiritual development and the Black Hole of Physics. He argues that in the "Dark Night" process:

... the structures of the personality collapse under a massive internal spiritual gravitational pull. No light can escape and this explains the prolonged darkness and the considerable difficulty with conscious communication. Also additional psychic matter in one's immediate experience, is continually sucked inwards. Anyone, who has gone through this stage, will recognize the powerful one-way direction of experience, whereby it seems as if the whole world is drawn under this intense "great attractor" inside one's psyche. Not surprisingly this creates an enormous feeling of internal psychological congestion.

## Peter Kingsley (Reality, The Golden Sufi Center, 2003), in an extensive description of a mystical tradition at the roots of western culture, focuses on the role of Parmenides, conventionally understood as the founder of western logic (in the light of much studied poem of his), notes the following:

In short, the Daughters of the Sun have come along to fetch him from the world of the living and take him right back to where they belong. This is no journey from confusion to clarity; from darkness to light. On the contrary, the journey Parmenides is describing is exactly the opposite. He is travelling straight into the ultimate night that no human being could possibly survive without divine protection. He is being taken to the heart of the underworld, the world of the dead...

There was a specific and established technique among various groups of people fo rmaking the journey to the world of the dead, for dying before you died. It involved isolating yourself in a dark place, lying down in complete stillness, staying motionless for hours or days. First the body would go silent, then eventually the mind. And this stillness is what gave access to another world, a world of utter paradox, to a totally different state of awareness.... And there was a name that the Greeks, and then the Romans, gave to this technique. They called it incubation.

## Ray Flowers (Incubation: Within 2 Other Withins. San Graal School of Sacred Geometry, 2002) provides further insight into the relation between incubation and darkness, citing the biblical reference "And there contained in the darkness is the Light, and the darkness knoweth it not." (John 1:5):

The idea that Consciousness attains Self Awareness by going inside to see what is outside is fundamental in approaching incubation. The Flower of Life Geometries speak metaphorically of how mitosis and incubation occur, and suggest great possibilities of what is inside and ultimately outside the Egg.

The geometric approach suggests a fruitful association between "incubation" and "cube", namely the need to go through a cubically contrained space, understood as darkness, in order for birth to occur into spaces characterized by more complex geometries. Elsewhere Flowers also sees the cube as the ultimate magic container: "It is The Box and the Incubator in which breeds the Putrefacation of the seed of First Light, the concept by which we believe in death and resurrection". [more]

There is a certain irony in the current widespread use of "incubator" to refer to a business-research zone in which innovation is facilitated -- when the architecture in such zones is typically cubic. More generally it might be argued that the cubic pattern, characteristic of so much of modern architectural and conceptual organization, could be understood as a place of darkness and endarkenment through which new modes of understanding will be born -- represented metaphorically by more complex cognitive geometries. In this light modern civilization, and its associated thinking patterns, could be understood as the cubification of the environment (cf Charles de Bovelles on the cubification of the sphere) -- justifying its description as a process of endarkenment. Given the mindsets typical of innovation incubators, feminists might also explore the association with the "incubus" of European folklore: a male demon (or evil spirit) who visits women in their sleep to lie with them in ghostly sexual intercourse. The term derives from the Latin for nightmare -- a tempting link to the first line of the Orphic poem so extensively explored by Peter Kingsley (cf The source of light is at home in the darkness, 2003) in his studies of incubation (In the Dark Places of Wisdom, 1999):

The mares that carry me as far as longing can reach rode on, once they had come and fetched me onto the legendary road of the divinity that carries the man who knows through the vast and dark unknown.

### Starhawk. (Dreaming the Dark: magic, sex, and politics. Beacon Press, 1997, 15th ed.)

Mode 9: Embracing the dark

This is the mode most characteristic of nature religions. It is also the mode most readily labelled as failing to distinguish appropriately the light from the dark -- notably when its proponents indeed fail to do so, and embrace the dark to the exclusion of the light. Just as there is a challenge associated with "wallowing in the light", there is a corresponding challenge with "wallowing in the dark". However it is this mode that has the best articulation of the experiential relation to both light and dark as they characterize the gestalt of circadian rhythms and the rhythms of human relationships.

This mode might be compared to the ninth of the 10 Zen ox-herding pictures entitled: Returning to the Source

Again, in terms of the alchemical symbolism explored by C G Jung from a depth psychology perspective, this mode may be considered in relation to the third stage of the alchemical process, the rubedo:

To make the opus come alive into a fully human mode of existence it must have "blood", or what the alchemists call the rubedo or "reddness" of life. In this final stage, the white becomes united with red through the raising of the heat in the fire. The white is associated with the Queen and the red with the King, who now arise out of the mercurial, tranformative "waters" of the unconscious to perform their coniunctio oppositorum, the union of all opposites as symbolised by the conjunction of the archetypal masculine and feminine in the "chymical marriage", the hieros gamos.

The poet John Keats (Negative Capability, 21 December 1817) is renowned for recognition of the essence of maturity in terms of "negative capability". This is the capacity of

"being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".

## Rani. Enlightenment, before, during and after. Sannyas News

Enlightenment comes to life when we embrace our endarkenment in the very same way. We realize deeply that our human reality will always be here, that pain will always be here, that suffering is an integral part of human life. Either we suffer unconsciously or we do it consciously. We realize that the freedom we thought we had found in the bliss and joy of the Enlightenment high is not the real freedom at all. It is much deeper. It is truly accepting what IS.

## Anna. Nurturing Magic: Restoring the concept of 'Black' to its rightful place.

I used to go around on the workshop circuit years ago, when there was even more talk about enlightenment and the glory of white and the light and people wanting to get in touch with their higher selves and all that, then there is now. I had fun offering some workshops in 'endarkenment' and 'consciousness lowering'. It's not that I think there is anything wrong with 'white' and 'enlightenment', but I felt that the old black womb needed someone to speak kindly about her. I feel still deeply that the colour and concept of 'Black' needs reclaiming by all of us as an essential complement of 'White'. Without the two of them being equally valued, we can never achieve balance and harmony within ourselves or society.

## Bonnie Hoag. Chiaroscuro: In Defense of Darkness (extract from Snake Medicine, 2001)

Imagine, now, with me, how our overall health could improve if we could release our "addiction" to light. Imagine how the land could rest again at night, without the creeping light of cities, shopping malls, prisons. Imagine the possible implications of welcoming the darkness, of dwelling in it, returning to a rhythm which allows night, and darkness. I would feel safer in a world that does not sanctify light above darkness. The production of electricity, our main defense against the dark and fear, is costly in many ways. Imagine the desirable consequences for our air, water and land if we did not fear the dark but learned to work with it and to sleep and dream when the earth and sky called us to do so.

We seek enlightenment. When will we also seek endarkenment? Darkness is the dreamtime, whether at night cozy in our beds or when entering the journey, the alpha state of what is called non-ordinary reality. Darkness is what was feared in women, the very womb as replicated in the tradition of the sweat lodge, and in the moon, coming and going through its phases, dropping us sometimes into total darkness. In many cultures the moon is symbolic of woman. Is it the darkness in woman that has led to her oppression around the earth? Is it something so primal in us as fearing the dark mystery, the potential of the womb?

## Hyun Kyung. ZH Interviews. Zion's Herald, September/October 2003:

Western logocentric enlightenment was very one-sided in its development of human life. It valued only light -- light skin, white people, white people’s science, white people’s philosophy. I think in order to really heal the world we need the "wisdom of darkness." This can be the Third World, dark people, women, or our "shadows," to use Carl Jung’s term -- all the things we do not want to confront within ourselves, so we project them onto others and call them terrorists. So, I think that we need "endarkenment" for awhile, not enlightenment, to heal the world.

## Lauren Raine. Death - Rebirth Oracle Painting

In the beliefs of the pagan peoples of early Europe, lives revolved around the wheel of the year, the spiral dance of the natural world. Everything arose from the Earth, from Mater Dea (or matter) and eventually returned to the dark womb of the threefold Goddess. Agrarian people knew that everything must die beneath the snows of winter in order to be reborn in the spring. This was the original reason the dead were buried in the ground. They were thus returned to the generative womb of the Earth. Halloween, traditionally the end of the agrarian year, comes at the time of the last harvest and the first frost, and was once called "The Witch’s New Year". In Germany, this last month belonged to the Goddess Hell or Hella, Goddess of the underworld. In Mexico, November 1st is still celebrated as "the Day of the Dead" - a time when the veils between this world and the other worlds are thin, a time to honor the ancestors.

Today we tend to be "afraid of the dark". We speak of "enlightenment" - but there is another way of knowing, another kind of wisdom, that might be called "endarkenment". This is the journey into night, into formlessness: into the Great mystery from which everything arises, passes away, and holds the promise of rebirth.

## Deborah Hoffman-Wade. Endarkenment: The Celebration of Being with the Dark, 2004

Mystery and Reflection: Endarkenment is the mystery of inner reflection and renewal. This is the time we spend becoming one with our shadow. Again we equate our shadow sides as those parts of us we keep hidden or are afraid of. Instead I look to find those parts of my self that are essential for the development of my inner self. Learning to balance the things that have not been part of my life which could contribute to my development is part of inner reflection.

Mystery is unclear. Mystery is just that, unexplainable, obscure, ambiguous, vague, and deeply spiritual. We, as a people, are constantly trying to solve the mystery, make clear the unclear and explain every detail. Endarkenment revels in the mystery. In contemplation of the sweetness of not ever knowing, endarkenment is celebration. It is taking some things on faith. It is resting in the presence of not knowing. It is mystery. It is the time for endarkenment. (Re-formed Congregation of the Goddess, International, 2004)

## Maze. Kinesthetic Magick

Enlightenment is the attainment of a pure Yang energy. The enlightened direct what they are doing, and know where they are going, and how to get there. The enlightened usually arrive where they are Heading. The energy is one of potential, of movement, of creativity. It is the active force in the matrix. Endarkenment is the attainment of a pure Yin energy. The endarkened finds something to do, and knows how to [literally] ride the flows of energy in the matrix. There is a powerful intuition attainable with endarkenment. The energy is one of acceptance, of being moved, of inspiration. It is the passive force in the matrix.

## Connie Zwieg and Jeremiah Abrams (Eds) Meeting the Shadow, 1991

Like Beauty embracing the Beast, our beauty is deepened as our beastliness is honored. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke realized this when he said he feared that if his devil's left him, his angels would take flight as well.

## F. David Peat. Art and the Environment in Britain

The English artist Anish Kapoor, whose extremely powerful work also has roots in sacred Hindu art, is particularly concerned with the creation of sacred spaces. His work involves powerful forms, voids to be inhabited by energies and powers, dark sculptural absences in which the mind can reach "endarkenment". His concern is with the dualities of the universe, yoni and lingam, light and dark, presence and absence, the power for creation held by Kali, Goddess of destruction.

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Group C: Experiential processes