Reprinted from SFGate.com, with permission from the author.
Well before electricity kept us up at night, mystics and seers of many spiritual traditions retreated into literal, total darkness for extended periods to heighten their senses, gain clarity, and see worlds beyond ordinary sight. Prophets of the Old Testament performed such rituals, called dark retreats. So did ancient Greek philosophers like Parmenides and Pythagoras, as well as some Christian mystics and Hatian voudons.
How does going into the darkness tend to illuminate things?
Our visual capacities in everyday life are bombarded by lots of external images. Often, there isn't much room for other images to arise, other than in our imaginations.
The idea of the dark retreat is not only do you create a setting in which you have no visual stimuli, so that the eyes relax, but you also sufficiently relax your body and your mind so that the deeper aspects of your core awareness can arise. That's when these truths, along with lights and visions, can become evident.
Over the centuries, people have done these retreats in caves and in the basements of temples. Where do they do them now?
I learned the tradition from Tibetans, who have rooms built in monasteries for this purpose. There are a few of these centers in the United States, but not many. When I first started doing retreats, I converted a room in my house by blocking off the windows with materials used in photographic darkrooms.
How long does a dark retreat usually last?
That depends on the person. Tibetans often do it for 49 days straight. And there are stories of yogis who stay in for years. When I first started, I just did three days and I've worked up from there. So far, the longest I've done is a month, but I tend to do at least two weeks a year.
What do you do when you're on a dark retreat? Are you meditating most of the whole time? Are you moving around?
Generally, people start out by sleeping a lot because it's dark, and that's an important part of the process -- just relaxing. When you're not sleeping you can be meditating -- depending upon how much experience you have, between four to six times a day. The rest of the time you spend time relaxing and reflecting. Initially, doing any intense physical exercise is discouraged so that the body doesn't get too active. You want everything to settle down. But people tend to do some stretching and sometimes yoga.
What kind of meditation do you do?
The initial practices are often mindfulness meditations, where people focus on their own breathing or whatever is arising in their thought patterns or feelings. When they become fairly stable and are able to just be present, there are other practices they can do for cultivating qualities like compassion and the wisdom that's behind our emotional structures.
In Buddhism, there is an assumption that we all have a Buddha nature that underlies everything and it's our confusion that takes us out that understanding. Similarly, Christians might talk about everybody having a Christ. These practices are designed to get in touch with that essence.
Continued on page 2: Seeing rainbows in the dark... »
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