May 16, 2003

• Dark Ramblings

  
  

  Have you been through a dark night?  You'll know if you have, although you can't describe it.  What words would you use to share the utter lack of all feeling?  In the dark night, all sensation dissipates.  All physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual senses are silenced.  No one can enter the dark night with you, no one can help you face it.  It is the place of utter existential aloneness. 

  
  

  Mystics, saints and sages have from time to time voluntarily entered this place apart.  Ragged in spirit they journey through time and space where the cold fire of deprivation burns away the ego and the mask leaving a raw molten purity.  

  
  

  If you haven't been there, you can't understand it.  Once you've come through to the dawn, you can't discuss it.  Everyone has a dark night at some point.  Those who've made it through recognize each other on a viseral level.  No verbal claim to have been there need be offered, the experience is stamped in your eyes, in the tilt of your head, and in the movement of your hand.

  
  

  There is a false dawn that deceives and lures the unsuspecting to despair.  In this time between night and true dawn, anger, grief, confusion, and fear crowd in around you and say, "It's all over now, you feel again."  But they lie.  It isn't over as long as you remain in the place apart.  The temptation is strong to believe them, in the same way that we believe the tingle of awakening nerves after sensation has been deadened.  We may say, oh, thank God, I have feeling in my hand.  Not noticing that the hand remains contorted and dysfunctional.  It's only after the tingle passes and the nerves are calm that the experience has ended.

  
  

  With deadened nerves the push of biochemical chain reactions guarantees that once the process of sensing begins, it will continue until the part that was 'asleep' resumes it's normal state.  With emotions the push is not a chain reaction.  It's the movement of will.  Unless you will yourself past anger, past grief, and past all fear, there is no guarantee you will emerge from the night.  The very emotions which seem to indicate a return to the arena of the living in fact prolong the aloneness which is the defining characteristic of the darkness.

  
  

  The end of the journey is not solitude, but communion.   True community begins with the vulnerability of one heart to another.  Anger, fear, and grief subvert and prevent vulnerability.  They form a crust over the lava of purity that prevents the healing flow from one heart to the next.  The lava of purity flows in tears of joy, and sorrow.  Tears fall like the rays of dawn into the black of night.  Then it's over. 

  
  

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  Doesn't that sound almost poetic?  Much better than, I'm having a bad day, so I'm planning to eat a pound of chocolate then cry myself to sleep.  Which I'm not actually planning, BTW.  I don't have more than a half pound of chocolate in the house. 

  • 3:59 pm
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