Darkness Shining Wild
~ 94 ~
In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not.
And the life is never so alive as after death.
— Sri Nisargadatta
When death finally comes you will welcome it like an old friend.
— Dilgo Khyentse
Seventy-six years, unborn, undying:
Clouds break up, moon sails on.
— Death poem of Tokken
First of all, a bit about Darkness:
Certainty stumbles down disheveled alleys, clutching at peekaboo walls, and Darkness shows up, effortlessly pouring into every corner and would-be getaway, until anxiety dishes out skewered meaning not only to the front rows, all the wind-up factfeeders and slumberseeders, but also to all of the no-shows who are out redecorating their prisons, installing tastefully recessed shelves for sentences that wouldn’t be seen in public with ones like this.
Darkness lifts a veil, an ebonized portcullis densely creaking, and a lush Spring flowers forth, budding and blossoming with deliciously pulsing succulence, belting out a chorus of wantonly ecstatic greens, layer upon swooning layer, everything moistly aquiver, upstart growth sweetly curling and nakedly ashiver, moaning so deep with rippling emerald recess and protrusion, all eloquently asway in the meandering currents of an ancient silken thrill.
A long sigh later, Darkness hoists a second veil, a leering relic of barnacled irony, and sudden fangs swell and gleamingly plunge, plunge sharply into an enormous flabby egg, rottingly speckled and oozing, splitting and splattering open, its thickly
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 95 ~
bubbling flood of neon-dotted putrescence carrying a half-gutted hermaphrodite, a silver and crimson creature with singalong eyes and terribly familiar cries.
Darkness remains in the shadows until we are no longer blinded by Light.
Darkness simultaneously entombs and enwombs us. It swallows us, densifies us, contracts and solidifies us, burying us alive, giving us ground to grow up from, ground against which to expand and form. Darkness brings us down, down to where down is growth’s key upper. Darkness is universal uterinity, ever pregnant with Being.
Darkness takes shape as a domain at once amorphous and increasingly labyrinthian, the inhabitants of which — human and otherwise — are only rendered threatening or nightmarish by our ongoing refusal to recognize and accept them as part of us.
Layered over this are our mindmade darknesses, our egoic mazes and convoluted have-more crazes, prowled by our overfed appetites. These psychostructural traps, these celluloid misrepresentations of Darkness, require careful entry, needing more than heroic swordplay or nobility of intention, because their inmates are typically violently opposed to nonresidents (outsiders and insiders), however much they might romanticize breakouts and outlaws.
Darkness tends to be overassociated with Death, Light with Life. The ultimate double date. Imagine our Cosmic Foursome — and we know which couple is in the backseat, making out in the shadows — looking for an auspicious parking spot at the omnipresent Divine Drive-In, checking out the featured drama (“God Only Knows”), steaming up the windows with Big Bang flirting, until suddenly the fog clears, the projector blows its circuits, the observer laughs its infinite heads off, and the accelerator moans with steely accuracy, the parking lot now gone, the highway and everyway that is wildly ribboning outfront like slaloming mercury now clearly recognized to have been created by the drive. So much is happening; nothing is happening. Since both are true, what will you do with your view?
See what’s out of sight. Do not belittle the phantoms gathered around you, nor mind their touch running through your hair, nor be put off by their need, for you too are a phantom, a self-conscious clearing in space, a self-centered fiction making self-serving news out of far too much, surrounding yourself with evidence that you do indeed exist.
Darkness Shining Wild
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Do not seek the homogenization of Light and Darkness. Instead, permit them interplay and intimacy. Allow yourself to be honed, refined, alerted, remade by their immense attraction for each other. Their loveplay is both your heartland and your deathdance. Allow their interaction to unravel and remake you. Know them as the primal threads of all form, as well as the loom of the Beloved. Give Darkness its full due, letting it lead you through every face of every shadowland, until it is no longer other.
Bent double amidst Its own inevitable rubble, Darkness lifts yet another veil, and an ancient sarcophagus is dragged into the sunlight and ceremoniously unlidded.
With extreme yet supremely elegant slowness its lone inhabitant sits up, appearing to some as a successful initiate, to others as a vampire, and to the rest as a dream.
There are no veils left. Darkness lies pinned beneath a dogmatic stake of well-meaning daylight, sentenced to life. The witness of this is nailed to a different wall, hung up on its immaculate detachment. But does not something that is not really a something make unexplainable sense of all this for us, even as we paint ourself into corner after corner? The Secret is out, but we are in, constellated around our interiorized separateness, peeking through our veils, trying to rehabilitate Darkness, instead of adventuring right to its heart.
Darkness shining wild. Now back to the story:
Through my 5-MeO NDE, I’d been “thrown” into a flaming cauldron of maddening heat and equally maddening light. I was in agony and could not imagine enduring it much longer. Whatever faith I had was quickly fading.
For many years I had prided myself on my capacity for “playing the edge”
(both externally and internally) and now I was somewhere beyond the edge, peering into bottomless insanity, the ground below me crumbling into nothing.
In my arrogance and misguided heroics, I’d habitually conceived of myself as being able to face the Real without any buffers, and now, sickeningly ubiquitous now, I was cowering before it like a trembling animal, far from wanting to face the all-devouring, ever-fluxing, seamless finality of It.
No escape was possible, since there was only It. Only one Sky, one Dance, one Moment, one One. No beings, but only Being. Every exit, every distraction, every consolation, every thought, every object, every incarnation was but a shaping, a play upon, a transparent crystallization or expression of the one and only One. Now, and forever now. This was not liberation to me, but pure hell.
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~ 97 ~
Any appearance, any manifestation, was possible. Conceiving of making an appearance as this, that, or the other, indeed as everything — since there clearly was no time limit — absolutely terrified me. My mind, jammed with dark intimations of Eternity, raced through my body like a barbed-wire lunatic on amphetamines, screaming for release. Death could not end this. In fact, Death only kept the whole show going.
The scale of this did not so much dwarf human achievement as dissolve it.
A sentence I’d read long ago (from a Da Free John book whose title eludes me) kept insinuating its way through me, a one-liner that once had interested me primarily because of its structure, but that now made me reel: “All there is is Is.”
All my notions of purpose, even sacred purpose, kept shredding to nothing, in a kind of cosmic agoraphobia. I was — and I shrank from this with all of my will — what I was afraid of, and what I “normally” took myself to be was but a diaphanous phantom, floating raggedly and quite insignificantly near the periphery of my attention.
I could not shut off my multisensory feeling-visions of endless recurrence, regardless of how much novelty was factored into it. My death, your death, our death, humankind’s death, planetary death, solar death, death of the whole cosmos, would unfold before me with nauseating intensity, making a mockery out of human achievement and evolution, and then, worse of all, it — the entire fucking universe — would somehow start up again, then once more extinguish itself, over and over and over, ad infinitum. No beginning, no end.
The entire universe less than a breath in the eternal, self-aware, boundless continuum of Is-ness.
That this transcended imagination did not mean that it could not be intuited;
my body shook and pulsed as if in complete cellular accord with such realization.1 An infinite, ever-evolving succession of endless forms. I wasn’t only part of this; I also was it. And, furthermore, when had I not been it? All I could see was the Real, absolutely out of control, playing peekaboo with Its perpetually perishing appearances, before which my mind writhed drooling and mute.
Such intimations often made me feel as if I’d been slammed with a wrecking ball, my pulverized remains crawling with what seemed to be irreversible
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madness. A one-way ticket to psychosis. Gates dynamited beyond repair, the edge of my world somewhere back there, out of reach.
But was not all but edgeless Mystery, impregnated with a significance beyond any conceivable meaning, simultaneously devouring and birthing Itself on unimaginable scales, disguised only by our obsessive self-involvement, our compulsively ordered fencing of things?
Was not all a centerless, infinite, self-fertilizing, transcendental Wonder beyond wonder, existing as the heartbeat and consciousness and substance and all of everything? A horizonless Wilderness of Being animating us and everything else? A Wonder beyond any conceivable framing. This is not to say that I knew what It was; knowing that It, and It alone, was was more than enough for me. I saw and felt Death everywhere, but was far more troubled by my insanity-stained sense of deathlessness.
I remember reading a letter from a troubled community member. It was simply a letter until I came to the line, “I feel as if I’ve been lost forever.”
Although she’d said this in the context of feeling badly about herself, I took it absolutely literally the very instant I saw it, shifting from relative calm to pure dread in a second or two. Lost forever — this appeared to be what was really happening to one and all, at least to what was left of me.
So who — no, what — was in charge? And what if, what if that which was animating the whole damned cosmic show was itself irreversibly out of control? What if the madness that was possessing me was not madness?
These and related questions savagely ricocheted in my mind, their implications metastasizing too quickly for any answer to take significant hold. Lost, lost, lost — but exactly what was lost?
At times I felt as if I were simultaneously existing both as an infinitesimal speck and as the all-pervading presence of unfathomable Is-ness. Sometimes I was locatable and sometimes unlocatable — being everywhere meant being nowhere in particular.
I didn’t feel as though I had achieved anything. I felt stuck, trapped, bound, regardless of my freeway skills; roadkill lay everywhere, guts frying on the asphalt, bloody eyeballs reining me in. My eyes. Insects splatting against my windshield, tiny greenish-yellow Rorschachs, in exactly the same position as me.
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 99 ~
Like all that was, I was nothing, and yet I was also everything — this was not a paradox to me, but rather a terrifying knowingness from which I struggled to distance myself. I desperately wanted this to be just a hallucination, a PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) hangover, but was it? Any evaluative criteria that I could construct clearly had no more substance than anything else, including the me that was constructing them.
The nothing that I was was composed of everything —including black hole hell-realms — and the everything that I was was devoid of any intrinsic existence, any definitive substantiality, making more than sense but less than a self.
So what the hell was I doing here? And where exactly was “here”? This blue-green, glistening marble — this achingly beautiful planet — spinning through black space, with its ever so fine film of teeming life-forms, a rich but momentary brilliance, already dying, the Sun’s upcoming supernova but a moment away...
My pulse would all of a sudden jump and buck, my mind would paranoically race and froth, and I, like a fish shuddering its last on some waterless boatdeck, would literally shake before the ungraspable Weirdness and Wonder of it all.
Such was my situation for months after my fateful inhalation — but not all the time.
During terror episodes, I’d sometimes be able to stop making a problem out of the me who was making a problem out of my condition, and would then often feel profoundly and simply at home with whatever was happening, experiencing a quality of acceptance that made possible an intimacy with even the darkest or most sordid aspects of Life.
Going toward, rather than turning away from, what I “normally” would avoid became more of an imperative, as is reflected by the following dream (which occurred about a month after my NDE):
I’m in the throes of 5-MeO hyperterror, in a small, blackish-grey room that is all mirrors from waist height to ceiling. The air is grey, saggy, subtly viscous. A young boy, perhaps six or seven, is standing in front of me, wraith-like yet still substantial.
I am begging him to kill me, to drive a knife through my chest, because I am in such extreme agony and despair. We circle within the room once, with me on my knees, half-floating.
Darkness Shining Wild
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Soon, my pleas sound hollow to me, and I feel some of the strength I had earlier in the dream when, after starting to hyperventilate, I’d forced my dreambody to stop breathing for a while in order to stabilize my surroundings (I had been aware that I was dreaming at the time).
Immediately I find myself outside the room, watching a red-haired young man enduring the effects of 5-MeO. People are filming him. He runs out of the room, apparently to go to the bathroom, and I fear that he is going to commit suicide there. But he emerges, crying very hard, obviously deeply disoriented.
Now I’m walking in bright sunshine with Nancy. I feel loose and easy, but soon feel a tremendous pull to turn around, and do so — the young man is staring at us, his eyes literally almost out of his head. I feel such love for him that I turn back and go to him, taking him gently by the shoulders.
Suicide sometimes tempted me — I, knife in hand, considered stabbing myself in the heart one night — but never was really an option. Taking my own life would provide no real relief, it seemed to me, but would only launch my prevailing habits elsewhere (perhaps into another round of incarnation), still seeded with the very same fear that so seductively and chillingly whispered to me of suicide.
In this there was no significant sense of personal reincarnation, no convincing belief in a series of lives lived by some self-contained, curriculum-providing entity or soul, but only a hypervivid intuition of the Absolute making countless appearances, human and otherwise, on every level possible. (Tibetan Buddhist teachers point to something like this when they say that at one time or another every being on Earth has been our parent.)
I remember being stunned when, in Grade Five, I saw written across the classroom blackboard: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Now the blackboard was my sky, already aflame, already gone yet still here, its physics lesson a living reality to me rather than just a concept.
In the dream just described, I was both the sufferer and the witness of that suffering. I desperately wanted to be killed — anything to get away from my agony — but only when I stood apart from that tortured me was I able to go toward him.
Assuming the position of witness can provide considerable detachment from pain. This is generally useful, especially in its allowing a larger, more lucid perspective to emerge, but not so useful when it overseparates or strands us
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from our pain. Yes, healthy detachment is needed, but so too is a distance-dissolving encounter with the object of our detachment. Separation and connection — the mutual dance of which generates intimacy.
And we cannot just do this so to earn spiritual merit or points with the Divine.
A deeper motivation is needed, wherein we are not looking or bargaining for some kind of immunity, but rather are looking inside our looking and touching our pain with compassion, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the only thing to do.
Consider the following dream, which I had about a year and a half after my NDE:
Becoming aware that I’m dreaming, I leap up to fly, but fall back, twice. Then I surrender, inwardly asking to be taken where I most need to go. I’m in the air, a few feet above some pavement. Suddenly I’m pulled backward and downward at a tremendous speed, my body almost totally vanishing during my “flight.” I land in an underground, poorly lit room. Its walls are all floor-to-ceiling mirrors, all equally sized and all bizarrely distorting my reflection. Though fairly large, the room feels quite compressed. I’m in the middle, afraid but not panicked.
Slowly, I walk toward one wall, seeing all sorts of mirrored “fragments” of myself. A darkly eerie, heavy feeling saturates the room. Everything is sickeningly greyish. I gaze into my reflection’s eyes, seeing less of the hallucinatory than I expected. Then I walk into and through the mirror, finding myself in an even more compressive space. It’s extremely uncomfortable; if I wasn’t still aware that it was a dream, I would surely escape as quickly as possible.
No exit in sight, though — just claustrophobic greys, amorphous and hideously alive. I keep moving, as if through jelly — fatly quivering, ever denser protoplasm — existing both as a dreambody and a disembodied observer. Finally, I can barely move.
In despair and helplessness, I go down on my knees, crying and wordlessly praying, aching for release. As the observer, I see my eyes turned up, my hands in prayer position in front of my chest, my face deathly pale. Surrender. Suddenly, I am vaulted into another world, vaguely sensing that I am in a hospital, watching a group of doctors tend to a covered-up patient. A series of events transpire [which I cannot recall], ending in joy.
In many lucid dreams, I have moved or have been pulled toward places of luminosity, often dissolving in their radiance. Sometimes, though, I have gone
Darkness Shining Wild
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in the “opposite” direction, going deep into the Earth, into mineral and dense dark. In the preceding dream, I’m being pulled below the surface, deposited in much the same environment as in the 5-MeO dream in which I was begging to be killed.
Let’s permit the image of being in the grey, underground room to unfold itself, to “speak”:
When underground, I don’t appear to myself as I usually am. When I see myself reflected all around, I don’t appear to be myself.
Wherever I look, I see my reflection, so long as I remain in the center of the room.
Though there is a lack of illumination when I am underground looking at myself, there is enough light to see. The ceiling and floor are the same; above and below
Though there is a lack of illumination when I am underground looking at myself, there is enough light to see. The ceiling and floor are the same; above and below