Illuminating the darkness within
My solo meditation retreat (Part 1)
Earlier this month, I entered into a womb-space built from Earth bags – a dark dome measuring four meters in diameter. I closed myself into a space devoid of light as well as frequency. I was cut off from the world, free from all external stimulation and all usual distractions.
The dome was equipped with a simple mattress on the floor, a few meditation cushions, a yoga mat, and an adjacent space with toilet and shower. It has a plastic tube placed in the wall through which I received food delivery and left scrawled messages on bits of paper.
This was not my first time sitting alone in the dark. I did my first total darkness solo meditation retreat in 2019. I stayed in the dark dome for five days that time. And I did another five-day darkness retreat in 2021. But you know what they say, the third time’s the charm.
Just before going in, I noted to a friend how hard it is to not have expectations. On both of my previous retreats, I experienced moments of deep bliss, profound insights, and glimpses into non-ordinary states of consciousness.
I know better than to carry hopes or expectations for repeat occurrences, so I tried to talk myself down from that. “This time, it might just be really boring,” I said to my friend, shrugging. “Or, it could just be a lot of suffering,” he quipped.
As it turns out, we were both fairly accurate in our predictions.
For the first day or two, I mostly slept. There was nothing else I could do really. I felt existentially exhausted. Once settled into the darkness, my functions completely shut down. I went into a state of deep rest. As my eyes gradually adjusted to the total darkness, I experienced some familiar visual effects. I started seeing (or sensing) a flashing flickering of light – a subtle strobe effect originating from the neighborhood of my third eye, floating a few inches in front of my forehead.
After a while, when you really look into the darkness, it no longer appears as a uniform field of pitch black. It starts to have a texture. Black is not just black. It contains infinite variations.
One moment you are staring at a wall of diaphanous lace curtains. That curtain slowly thickens into a pool of rose petals. The petals start to harden into press-on fingernails. The tips of these fingernails melt down into irregularly rounded jelly beans. If you stare long enough the jelly beans, they spread apart and flatten into bubble wrap. This visual spectacle is endless, everchanging as long as you are present to witness it. Everything-ness emerges from the nothing-ness.
What I find fascinating is that the texture of darkness is constant — no matter whether you look left or right, and no matter whether your eyes are open or closed. And yet, the texture is constantly moving and shapeshifting.
The texture of darkness is impervious to the watcher’s position and orientation in space. But it is ever at the whim of the vicissitudes of time.
We often hear it said that we are the ones who are projecting our reality. Immersed in form and experience, it is easy to forget this. In a world of color and sound, with light striking objects, we tend to focus on the is-ness of objects. When we focus out there, the constancy of our filtering perception becomes invisible to us.
In the total darkness, the filtering perception is all there is. Because there is nothing happening “out there” that we can confuse or distract ourselves with.
It is the reminder that darkness brings us: what we experience as Life is defined by the content of our minds, more than any external event or circumstance.
If I had checked myself into the dark dome for any particular mission this time, it was to clear out my mind attic. Once I had caught up on much-needed rest, I started methodically going through the content of my mind. It was almost as if I was opening up all of my mental drawers and filing cabinets, one by one.
I reviewed the last few years of my life since the last darkness retreat that I did. I poked at all the moments of hurt and disappointment. I fondled the moments of gratitude and celebration. I was scouring my mind’s archives to see if I could find anything unprocessed.
I was surprised to find that there wasn’t much that I needed to process. If I was somehow pulling out all of the thoughts in my head and unwinding them like a spool of thread, they came out pretty cleanly and smoothly. I could lay the thread flat on the ground, without any knots or tangles in it.
Perhaps I was bit too pleased with myself about that. You could even say I was arrogant, thinking how awesome I am because my mind is so clean already.
Oh, but wait. This is about the boring part. The suffering part comes next.
Read the second part of this essay, Letting go of the need to win.