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Group D: Beyond fixed distinctions
Enlightening Endarkenment: selected web resources on the challenge to comprehension (Part #6)
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In this mode the polarity between enlightenment and endarkenment is finally transcended experientially in such a way as to give meaning to the range of modes as an ecxpression of that understanding -- whether through endarkenment or enlightenment. This group may be understood as a re-embodiment of the world, taking responsibility for the quality of the environment as one actually experiences and engenders it.
Metaphorically the group might be associated in time with the period from dusk to midnight, intgerweaving light and darkness meaningfully without attachment to either -- as in one's elder years.
Mode 10: Enaction: "Laying down a path in walking"
This mode is closely associated with the first. However the ignorance of the first here takes a form of conscious "unknowing". This may be exemplified by so-called "crazy wisdom" or the themes of enactivism (as used by Bateson, Maturana, Rosch, Thomson, and Varela to label their theories). It is exemplified by the much cited-verse of T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding (the last of the Four Quartets):
| We shall not cease from exploration |
This mode might be compared to the tenth of the 10 Zen ox-herding pictures entitled: Entering the Marketplace with Arms Hanging Loose. The understanding that the unknowing of the transcendent darkness is actually the true knowing of the transcendent truth has been known to many mystics, notably of the West.
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 outcome of the third stage of the alchemical process associated with the previous mode:
This results in the grand climax, the achievement of the goal -- the lapis philosophorum, the hermaphrodite embodying the united King and Queen. This is the so-called "third thing", the "Rebis", the phenomenon of the union of love and soul itself, the soul that is engendered through love - this "divine birth" symbolising a re-awakening of psychological reality, a new ruling consciousness. [more]
## Jules. Locked into fear, we hate, not recognizing that the thing we hates is also us.
There is no answer to the question what is enlightenment and there is no answer either to the question of what is darkness. "Endarkenness" we could say. For both states of consciousness, enlightenment and endarkenness, are just expressions of the one mind that exists in all of us and what we get to do is to see what is the true mind of God in all cases and that of course we call enlightenment, and what is its function and its description is the whole of this book. And what is endarkenment is everything else.
## Giuliano Di Bernardo. Enlightenment from the Ritual. Freemasonry Today
The masonic path may therefore be viewed as an ascending ( raising ) staircase of Light, with seven steps. The first light is the light man receives with initiation, in which the visible darkness is overcome, while the last is the light preceding the mystic union with God, when non-visible darkness is reached. The seven steps can be described as : perception, examination, reflection, knowledge, understanding, wisdom and truth.
When the mason achieves mystic union with God ( in an allegorical sense ), the light-darkness duality ( the chequered floor ) disappears. The union can no longer be described. The Great Architecte of the Universe becomes the En Sof of the Cabalist: the unknowable, alogical Depth which appears to man's unenlightened mind as an impenetrable darkness. Fiat lux! Let there be light!
## On HarshaSatsangh. Nonduality Salon Highlights, #1090, 31 May 2002
I don't use the word enlightened anymore; it's a buzz word, it's a word which is a very, very tricky one, and I don't say I'm enlightened and you're endarkened. I do not say that. In fact, I don't feel that way. I don't feel myself to be enlightened in a world of endarkened people. I'm not familiar with the reasons why certain Teachers deny their capacity. For example, Tenzin Gyatso prefers to be referred to as a "simple monk" (hahaha). Perhaps it's a matter of finessing the students' entry onto the spiritual path. One result of denying one's enlightenment to would be students is to remove the "illusory" distance between enlightenment and endarkenment.
## Sharon G. Mijares. Message. A Lesson to Learn, 9 January 2005
One famous Zen quotation is: "Before enlightenment: chopping wood, carrying water. After enlightenment: chopping wood, carrying water." The same could be said for endarkenment, the negative experiences in life.
## Eight States of Jhana (Samatha Meditation). Dhamma collections from Buddhism Depot
Lastly, the meditation practices that the Buddha and other enlightened persons practiced after the enlightenment. After their liberation through voidness (Sunnata-vimokkha), they had no more truths to be liberated so they concentrated on the void (Sunnata-samadhi) as a kind of practices. This may be similar, as saying that in meditation, there is only reality and no experience of (more) truths. Emptiness is absolutely emptiness not because of there is nothing but there are no human’s words in any dictionary to represent the emptiness and condition of this level. Only the person who attains this level will understand.
There is a kind of emptiness but it is from Moha Samadhi (Fake and not Right Meditation). This kind of practice should be avoided because it starts from no concentration or concentration on nothing then ends at no awareness. It likes day dreaming with blank mind that gains nothing. It may be called the process of endarkenment.
## John Sherman, I Know Nothing At All. River Ganga Foundation, Public Meeting, 8 June 2002
When I considered enlightenment, I thought maybe enlightenment might be something different. It sounds like something different. You know, realization doesn't seem to have a counterpart: unrealization... Enlightenment does seem to have a counterpart: endarkenment, ignorance, or something of this nature.... It seems that these experiences of beauty, and peace, and clarity, and connection, and oneness come unbidden, not as the result of anything whatsoever I can do... .So I gave up on "enlightenment". And I advise you to do the same.... But in any event, the outcome of all of my investigations of a spiritual nature is that I don't know anything at all. So far as I can tell, there is nothing at all to be known.
There is another way of putting this, which is "I am already radiant, full, clear consciousness" and therefore, anything that I do to try to attain that is a moving away from that. Anything I do to try to seek knowledge and understanding of my identity, my being, is nothing more than suffering itself. But it seems somehow simpler to say that there is nothing to be known. There is nothing to do. If there is nothing to be known, and there is nothing to be gotten... the only thing standing between you and self-realization is the belief that you are not already fully realized, just as you are. So, if this is in fact the case, then there is nothing to be done.
## The Sunyatayana Of Samantabhadra: The Way of Voidness of the Primordial Ultimateless
The suchness which is written here has never really been written, nor has it ever needed to be written, spoken, known or thought of. Suchness is more immanent than the most primordial, beyond all implications of absolute ultimate transcendence, yet it is unexceptionally ordinary. Suchness is such that high indifference and complete absorption are equally void. Suchness is such that oneness and allness are equally void. Suchness is such that multiplicity, duality and nonduality are equally void. Suchness is such that nothing is knowledge or ignorance, consciousness or unconsciousness. Suchness is such that there is no one to be and not be. Suchness is such that enlightenment, endarkenment, dreaming and awake are equally void.
## Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses, 1978), as quoted by Andrew Louth (The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 1983) with reference to the "divine darkness" of Christianity as the final stage of the soul's journey, notes:
The progress is a progress from light to deeper and deeper darkness. The initial stage is the removal of the darkness (skotos) of error by the light of the truth. But, from then on, the farther the soul progresses the deeper is the darkness into which it enters, until eventually the soul is cut off from all that can be grasped by sense and reason....
It thus leaves all surface appearances, not only those that can be grasped by the senses but also those which the mind itself seems to see, and it keeps on going deeper until by the operation of the spirit it penetrates the invisible andthe incomprehensible, and it is there that is sees God. The true vision and the true knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing , in an awareness that our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility. Thus that profound evangelist, John, who penetrated into this luminous darkness, tells us that "no man hath seen God at any tine" (John 1:18), gteaching us by this negation that no man -- indeed no created intellect -- can attain a knowledge of God
## A H Almaas (The Inner Journey Home; soul's realization of the unity of reality. Shambhala, 2004) considers that the concept of enlightenment and liberation has become the focus of the Eastern traditions, while that of union and annihilation in God has become that of the Western -- namely going from knowing to the darkness of unknowing. Unknowing is then merging with the divine darkness, while enligtenment is the clarity and light beyond mind. He notes:
It is interesting that the more we recognize the indeterminacy of the absolute, the deeper is its darkness, and the more luminous. We go further into the unfathomable depths as we accpet its mysteriousness. Such darkness is pure bliss and realization, for even though it is the absence of all being and knowing, it is enlightenment. Its darkness is luminous and brilliant; it is the spiritual midnight sun. This darkness bathes us, caresses us, melts us, dissolves us, annihilates us, until we are all gone; there remains only the majesty of the luminous crystal night. We realize then that this darkness of being and knowledge is God's knowledge of Himself. It is not normal knowledge, it is pure basic knowledge before any discrimination, before any conceptualization. It is nonconceptual knowledge, which is not what we ordinarily call knowledge. Thus the indeterminacy of the absolute is the same as the divine darkness, the inscrutable nature of the divine, the ultimate essence of Being.
## Henry Corbin (The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971) quotes a Persian Sufi, Lahiji:
I saw myself present in a world of light. Mountains and deserts were iridescent with lights of all colours... I was experiencing a consummate nostalgia for them; I was as though stricken with madness and snatched out of myself by the violence of the intimate emotion and feeling of the presence. Suddenly I saw that the black light was invading the entire universe. Heaven and Earth and everything that was there had wholly become black and, behold, I was totally absorbed in this light, losing consciousness. Then I came back to myself.
## Lee Rosenthal. Getting Up By the Same Ground By Which We Fall. Vista View Newsletter Online, March 2005
Buddha's enlightenment must be preceded by "endarkenment." The Law of Change must be seen within the context of our "mind." Once done, we cannot but help to see our deludedness. The ground by which we fall is the same ground by which stand.
This thing of darkness I acknowlege mine. There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in. William Shakespeare |
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