Staring into the Dark

Do you sometimes stare into the dark? Do you like it? Are you afraid of the dark? Does it feel like you have less control when you can’t see fully?

How is the darkness behind your eye lids? When you have your eyes closed, does it feel pleasant or frightening or maybe just boring?

Darkness is a fascinating phenomenon.

Years ago I did a darkness meditation in a sound and light proof room with 60 people. No sound, no light, no movement. Just me and darkness. Besides keeping silent, the instruction was to keep our eyes open throughout the entire meditation which lasted for an hour.

After a few minutes of inconvenience caused by the mind coming up with scary however ridiculous fantasies about darkness, the energy generated by the meditation came over me like an invisible velvet veil and gently calmed down my mind. It settled like a dog having found its spot and lying down. Then it was only my awareness and darkness. The trick was to not close the eyes. For when the eyes are closed the power of the mind to hijack you is significantly higher.

The light of life energy.

I looked around, but of course couldn’t see anything, and slowly it became a fascinating experience. I took my hand in front of my face and moved it a bit. Wow, I started to clearly see a blue light around my hand. It became the stronger and clearer the less I focused. I was skeptical and spent the next minutes experimenting whether what I saw was a projection or the real deal. I took my hand down, gone. I took it up in front of my face again and could see my hand outlined by blue light. Seriously? I tested the other hand, same effect. I slowly turned my hand and could clearly see the blue light moving too; it had to be my life energy.

I remembered that 20 years ago when I led a group of seekers into one of the narrow but long lava caves of Lanzarote, Canary Islands, that when the last flash light was switched off I witnessed the same phenomenon.

With the mind, we can only see what the mind knows.

Ok, I put my hands back down into my lap – and stared again into the dark nothingness in front of me. After a while I noticed a slowly increasing bliss accompanied with me seeing stars, shiny points of light, just like the milky way on a clear night. It was not possible to tell the distance or the dimension of these lights, but they were there, hundreds, thousands.

Again, when I wanted to focus the awareness of the star lights dimmed. The meditation space allowed me to observe in slow motion what happens when vision of awareness gets replaced by mind awareness. With the mind we only can see what the mind knows. Those star lights it didn’t know. Only in pulling my energy away from the mind the stars returned.

And by god it was blissful. I always loved the stars. And frankly, who doesn’t? But these ones were in a dark dead-silent underground room. I wasn’t thinking or inquiring; just celebrating silently the real deal vision of thousands of light stars before and all around me.

Later I thought, wow, if only all of us knew by firsthand experience what space we are actually living in?!

It is an outrageous betrayal by the society we live in and having been brought up in to withhold this reality from us. The whole world pretends as if what we refer to as “the reality” is the only one.

Experiencing different realities.

I admit, that reading about others experiences of different realties doesn’t really make a difference as long as one hasn’t experienced these oneself. But if you do, it will impact you. It can put your life upside down, or better: downside up. You are expanded and you know it is not an induced state or a visionary illusion caused by chemicals you threw. You irrevocably know.

It very well may change your relationship to death, to life, to existence, to the world. Maybe you find that all fear of non-existence has dropped off you; a joy and freedom of unexpected proportions may fill you.

Your priorities get reshuffled and the non-material shifts from something you had to believe in to something you now know by your experience.

Will you let the consequences show you new levels of living?

Will you want others to share the same joy and freedom you stumbled upon? Will you radiate hope and compassion for those trapped in the limited box-view of our so called every-day reality?

Your eyes will reflect the invisible stars you see.