What Does Darknesss Ask of Us?

Question:

A few weeks ago I found myself wondering if I had ever experienced true darkness. Anger, depression, anxiety, insecurity and fear, yes, but actual absence of light, Darkness, I’m not so sure. (Even capitalizing it gives me the chills, as if somehow, I’m imbuing it with power just by naming it.) This topic is very alive for me at the moment. In the past two weeks, through conversation, synchronicities and dreams, I have, for the first time, come into real contact with darkness. The most significant event was a dark sexual dream. Viscerally, I felt the terror of Darkness, a total absence of light. I felt like I had entered a living hell that had no hope, no escape and most importantly, no Love.

Brent:

Life is a bitch, and yet we cling to it.

It appears that there is a seed of light in the swamp of human suffering that can unfold like a lotus blossom into perfect enlightenment.

And there also appears to be a seed of darkness in the human heart that can collapse us into darkness.

Let us assume that we are in accord with the perennial philosophy of the awakened ones and that we accept, or intuit or take on faith that as human beings we have the potential to go in either direction, to live in darkness or to realize satchitananda or the Great Liberation.

With that understanding in place Sri Aurobindo encourages us to make the right choice and to make it real:

“The goal of yoga is always hard to reach, but this one is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender.

This yoga implies not only the realization of God, but an entire consecration and change of the inner and outer life till it is fit to manifest a divine consciousness and become part of a divine work. This means an inner discipline far more exacting and difficult than mere ethical and physical austerities. One must not enter on this path, far vaster and more arduous than most ways of yoga, unless one is sure of the psychic call and of one’s readiness to go through until the end.

By readiness, I do not mean capacity but willingness. If there is the will within to face all difficulties and go through, no matter how long it takes, then the path can be taken.

Nobody is fit for the sadhana - i.e. nobody can do it by his own soul capacity. It is a question of preparing oneself to bring in fully the Force not one’s own that can do it with one’s consent and aspiration.

When one enters into the true consciousness then you see that everything can be done, even if at present only a slight beginning has been made. But a beginning is enough, since the force, the power are there. It is not really on the outer nature that success depends, (for the outer nature, all self-exceeding seems impossibly difficult,) but on the inner being, and to the inner being all is possible. One has only to get into contact with the inner being and change the outer view and consciousness from the inner; that is the work of the sadhana and it is sure to come with sincerity, aspiration and patience.

For those who have within them a sincere call for the divine, however, the mind or vital may present difficulties or attacks come or the progress be slow and painful, - even if they fall back or fall away from the path for a time, the psychic always prevails in the end and the Divine Help proves effective. Trust in that and persevere - then the goal is sure.”

Over and over Aurobindo affirms that so long as our aspiration is pure, so long as we proceed with whole-hearted sincerity and patiently and persistently deal with all that is in us that would derail us from the path, we will receive help from the Divine and will be brought through to the realization of our True Nature.

So, that being said – and the importance of it cannot be over-emphasized - what do we do when we come across the darkness within us?

“It is quite within the possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.” – Carl Jung.

Your image of the Big Bad Wolf echoes the Native American story of the white wolf and the black wolf.

If you recall, an elder of the tribe is relating the story to a child. He tells the tale of two wolves that live within the heart of everyone. Throughout all the events of life these two are at war with one another. Finally, wide-eyed, the child asks, “So which one wins, Grandfather?”

“The one you feed,” comes the answer.

This is a story a child can understand, but it is amazing how many adults don’t. Or perhaps more accurately, how many adults act as if they don’t. Partly this is because the black wolf is furtive and tricky and hides from us.

The reason we need to bring our darkness into the light is that we cannot deal with it until we see it.

Most everyone who is fattening the black wolf think he is feeding the white wolf. Look at the purely man-made and global disasters we are creating, with our vast corporate and financial malfeasance. And yet the majority of those who participate in this collective insanity tell themselves that they are doing the right thing. If asked they would insist that they are feeding the white wolf, or at least feeding their family. Perhaps under their breath they would add, “. . . and fuck everybody else.” It’s a dog-eat-dog world, they might say. In living from that sentiment they feed the black wolf.

In truth, very few individuals overtly and consciously follow and feed the black wolf and we rightly identify such individuals as psychopaths or Nazis. Sadly, by their very nature they are all too often found in positions of disproportionate power. Driven by power, by their very nature they wrest power away from others.

“Where love rules there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.” – Carl Jung.

But the tendency is there in each of us. It is part of the hardware and so becomes part of the software, and paradoxically it exerts an influence in our life to the degree that it remains veiled to us. I am sure we can all identify people who are full of righteous intent yet are gripped by a dark and egocentric need to control and manipulate. And these manipulations are not necessarily diabolical power plays. More often than not they are wrapped in a pleasant demeanour and a smile If we listen to their words, they are all about the white wolf. Scratch the surface, however, and we find a black snout. Scratch deeper and the teeth will show.

We need to know this about ourselves if we are to be fully integrated. We cannot be fully surrendered to the Heart if we are blind to ourselves.

It is actually an auspicious day when we discover, for real, the darkness within us. It is not enlightenment, as such. But it is a very important step in the process of realization. And paradoxically, it is absolutely necessary for heart-realization.

Without this ‘endarkenment’ our ‘enlightenment’ floats over the surface of life in a dissociated ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ haze of wishful thinking. Such a clinging to the innocence of childhood is human enough, but it is not wisdom and it is not empowered. In fact it is a train-wreck waiting to happen because the need in our own soul to get real about ourselves will eventually derail it.

And so, as we mature in this Way, the shakti will inevitably reveal ourselves to ourselves, and when it does it is painful to realize what we have been up to all these years, to realize to what extent we have been led around by a self-serving golem.

This embarrassing encounter with our base humanness may undermine our idealistic notions of ourselves but it also lays the groundwork for realization. It takes this injection of darkness to ground us in reality.

“I used to hate and avoid pain and resent its infliction; but now I find that had I not so suffered, I would not now possess, trained and perfected, this infinitely and multitudinously sensible capacity of delight in my mind, heart and body. God justifies himself in the end even when he has masked Himself as a bully and a tyrant.” - Sri Aurobindo

There is a lot of misunderstanding about how to deal with darkness. From the kind of denial that believes that even to entertain thoughts of evil is to encourage it . . . and therefore we must only think positive thoughts . . . to the kind of denial that denies evil’s existence, as if all talk of darkness is ‘dualistic’ and therefore unenlightened. Neither of these attitudes will be of much benefit in the face of real evil.

In a mature soul such self-delusions are recognized as childish and immature. We are shaken out of our slumber by the naked encounter with darkness, howsoever it happens. And at this point we are obliged to put aside our childish clingings and wake up to the implications of what we have met.

And though it is a rude awakening, it is a necessary one if we are to attain to spiritual realization. All realizers must integrate this uncomfortable truth: that while all and everything is of God, is ultimately Buddha-nature, this truth does not cancel out the existence of evil, much as we wish it did.

And so in the natural course of our spiritual evolution we must come to terms with the legacy of our pre-reptilian past even as it courses through our bones in the present. Only then can we make truly integrated choices about how we actualize in this world.

I have related my own startling encounter with the lower self when, in the intensity of a Zen sesshin, it suddenly popped up to consciousness in front of me and began to hurl abuse in every direction. It was no less than demonic and -absorbed and unmoving in my zazen practice - I simply registered the nature of this ancient homunculus of ‘me and mine’. I saw that this was the very one who had been running my life up to this point. And even as I recognized all the ways it had tried to throw me off the spiritual path by initiating every kind of avoidance, the call and commitment to practice had ultimately proved stronger and now in the intense heat of the counter-egoic practice it was finally chased into the open in its true – and really rather demonic - colours.

And just to see it so clearly immediately resulted in the diminishment of its power. From that moment I recognized its scripts and its self-absorption and I could make other choices. Basically I could choose ‘What needs to happen here?’ over ‘What’s in it for me?’. That became my discipline and sadhana and eventually became the easy and natural bodhisattvic activity of serving the Divine. And what a relief it was to live a life free of its manipulations.

First we must be able to accept the gift of seeing this in us in all its fearful and bitter self-enclosure.

And then . . .

Sri Aurobindo: “Do you not know the story of the Elephant Brahman? All is Brahman (buddha consciousness), but in action you have to treat the elephant as the Elephant Brahman and the Asura (Evil Deity) as the Asura Brahman and neither as merely Brahman pure and simple. One has either to avoid the Rakshasa (demon) or overcome him; otherwise the Rakshasa may eat up the man, all Brahman though both be. The Brahman realization is an inner static realization until one has become the dynamic instrument of the Divine Consciousness and Force (Shakti) - then the problem of the elephant and the Rakshasa won't arise, for the Divine Consciousness will know and the Divine Force will execute what is to be done in each case. There is no need to hold hostility inside, but to be friendly with the Rakshasa is not prudent, as the Rakshasa is impervious to that kind of thing - he will take advantage of it to further his own purpose.”

I suggest reading the above passage several times over.

*

Of course, it is possible to see and feel the compulsions of the lower self and still be in its grip. For centuries spiritual individuals have wrestled with what Aurobindo calls this lower or vital self. Every child innately recognizes that the human condition gives us a choice between higher and lower values. But adults themselves are more clouded. We live in a secular, post-modern age under a philosophy of scientific materialism that denies our essential spiritual nature. This bio-mechanistic philosophy effectively states: there is no underlying divine ground to existence, there is only random physics, the ‘selfish’ gene, and a vast meaningless cosmos in which humans are as innately predatory and selfish as the reptiles from which they have evolved. This philosophy has spawned social and psychological and economic theories that promote selfishness as the central principle of human activity and which dismiss any conception of human beings as other than complicated self-serving automatisms. Hard as it is to believe, there is something within us that is nullifying our humanity. As announced by the cartoon character, “We have found the enemy, and it is us.”

In earlier times moral guidance came from the churches, but these institutions made such a mess of it that with the emergence of the scientific method – along with its demand for evidence and verifiability - the church lost this philosophical and moral high ground. Thereafter there followed a kind of rudderless collective bewilderment out of which has emerged a lazy supposition that because physicists have plumbed the mysteries of physics they must have also plumbed the mysteries of metaphysics and life altogether. Smart physicists know that the business of physics is physics. But because the man-in-the-street has bought into the idea that everything is physics, then he has come to believe that physicists will shortly give us the final say on God and everything. In fact, even though physics can calculate the exact moment of the Big Bang it is still baffled as to what ‘caused’ the Big Bang . . . or came ‘before’ the Big Bang. And this too is – from the point of view of physics – purely a physics problem. And so this is a problem.

Let’s face it, if a kid lets off a firecracker in the school washroom at recess and the principal demands an explanation . . . it is not physics that is going to supply the answer.

Still, the dimmer physicists think they have - or soon will have - the answer. Because they hold to a blind and irrational faith that physics covers everything, they also hold to a blind and irrational faith that physics will provide the answer to everything.

Of course, we are not talking about the Einsteins of the world here, who are plenty aware of the parameters of their science, but of the host of dimwits in white coats who have been inducted en masse into the fundamentalist trance of a somnambulistic scientism.

Why does this matter?

Because in the same way that the ‘man-in-the-street’ used to cede moral authority to the Church he now cedes authority to white robed scientists and doctors.

And in erasing a spiritual or divine ground to human life this philosophy also removes the capacity to discern the shadow. In the ‘flatland’ of a barren science there is only the physics of charcoal, sulphur and potassium in a confined space to account for the firecracker in the washroom. It is scientific but it tells us almost nothing that we actually need to know.

In fact, to ask the children would be a better bet.

And though in our sophistication we imagine that we have outgrown simplistic moralisms – interestingly enough - we do still think in terms of right and wrong. Listen to an interview with a post-modern relativistic deconstructionist or with a nihilist or even a Satanist and they will all justify their world-view and castigate the opposing position as inadequate. Whether it is the rabid lunacy of an Adolf Hitler or the calm and soothing platitudes of a Stephen Harper, they both propose what is ‘good’ and are against what is ‘bad’.

We are inherently moral beings and although we will disagree violently on what constitutes good and bad or even whether such terms mean anything, we still function within these categories.

And just as scientific materialists will argue that there is no such thing as consciousness or meaning, these being only later effects of earlier causes, causes which were themselves random effects of still earlier causes . . . nonetheless they do expect to be listened to and respected and studied as if their words did convey meaning and significance and were not just random efflorescence.

In a ‘godless’ scientific universe, however, there is no coherent context from which to understand psychological and spiritual darkness, for the entire cosmos is conceived as a chance and meaningless accident.

In this view we are not timeless buddhas born into bodies with the seeds of an ancient darkness within us, seeds that can flourish into a callous and destructive egocentricity if we are not vigilant. Nor are we consciousness itself, forever free and transcendent of this biological vehicle in which we temporarily find ourselves. On the contrary, this philosophy cannot see consciousness. It cannot account for it, and just as it does with everything that it cannot account for, it denies it. It only sees the workings of a deconstructed Nature, which it can only conceive as machinery. This dissociative unfeeling non-relational and heartless philosophy cannot discern spiritual darkness for the same reason that it cannot discern spiritual light. It only sees ‘blind-bio-chemical-mechanisms-colliding’ . . . and this as an article of faith, as dogma.

The tendency to comprehend things by reducing them to clockwork is a legacy of science’s seventeenth century infancy. But this distorted reductionism has filtered into society and has now become a kind of pervasive background noise for the man-on-the-street. Thus our man-on-the-street can justify all kinds of monkey-business because – according to the authorities – he is not a fallen angel as he once believed himself to be back in the medieval ‘Dark Ages’, he is a clockwork monkey.

True, at a certain level of brain-function we are indeed monkeys. And at a deeper level still we are reptiles. But it is also true that we are buddha-mind. And we have within us the impulse to awaken to our Buddha-mind. It is this high intuition, born of a deep and innate consciousness, that we are potentially realized beings, that requires us then to come to terms with our lower, vital self which has a different agenda. Monkeys and reptiles do not have the capacity to encounter themselves with this kind of higher consciousness, and as a result are not split and conflicted about their own lower nature.

Perhaps it is this intuition that initiates us into the spiritual life and prompts us to realize what this something deeper is. Luckily there is a rich legacy of those who have come before us and have bequeathed us practices by which to get to the bottom of it.

However, it is exactly this deeper identity that a clockwork science denies. There is no authentic need for the real spirit of scientific inquiry to indulge in this destructive reductionism. In fact real scientists are often deeply spiritual – Einstein being an example: ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind’.

It is only this one-dimensional fundamentalist street-level version of science that is so aggressively hostile to the notion that we are anything other than bio-chemical mechanisms. Unfortunately it is this aggressive materialism that has established itself as the increasingly accepted worldview and which results in our collective self-assessment that we have no such deeper identity. We are not divine. We are not of the Divine. We are not buddhas. Instead, we are clockwork. We are cogs.

Meanwhile, this ‘war of the worldviews’ is the myth of our time, playing out in movies continually. The clash between the machine-men and the humans takes many forms, and not just in the movies. We meet it every day in our interactions. Any one who has to deal with the robotic functionaries caught up in the machinery of today’s corporate and institutional work culture knows how refreshing it is to come across a ‘human being’. And we all know those human beings who have so introjected the idea that they are bloodless mechanisms that they have pretty much morphed into one.

And because this pervasive de-spirited mentality sees neither spiritual elevation nor depth, only functions, for that very reason it renders itself susceptible to the invasion of darkness. To succumb to this state is to become one of Jung’s ‘mass-men’ who in their unconsciousness pose such a great danger, who feed themselves to the black wolf because they don’t see it. One of the startling revelations to come out of the war-trials following the Second World War was that the vast machinery of the Nazi Wehrmacht was fuelled by little mediocrities, each one of them ‘following orders’, each one of them quite content to be a cog in some great ‘homeland’ enterprise.

This has not gone away. There are many ways in which humans can be dehumanized without actually goose-stepping down Main Street. In our valueless culture of celebrity and consumerism, in the ‘flatland’ of our valueless science, we are happy to go to sleep in front of our flatscreen TVs. Meanwhile we are being socially engineered. Or perhaps I should say, we are socially engineering ourselves. All of this is possible because we are asleep and – frankly - we prefer this sleep.

“The great danger is the psyche” – Jung    (Watch here)

But the confusion about who and what we are is not confined to those who prefer sleep. Waking up in no easy matter either, because what we wake up to is that a big part of us wants to stay asleep. People read about reclaiming the Shadow and use the teaching, not to bring it into the light, but to whitewash over it. They imagine they are applying therapeutic principles and instead they have just found another way to put themselves to sleep. This is an inversion of Jung’s teachings, but it is possible because of this all-pervading background noise of the Zeitgeist.

It is the curse of the ‘green meme’, the belief that it is somehow ‘unenlightened’ to point out the presence of evil - as if any such thought could only come as a result of our own projected evil and sadly unevolved thinking . . . the kind of thinking that rejects terms like ‘liar’ as a ‘judgement’, as not an appropriate term for an individual who, after all, is only choosing to ‘follow his own truth’ . . . and what is ‘truth’ anyway? There are no truths, just differing perspectives.

This kind of thinking makes us mental, unreal . . .

On the contrary Jung was insistent on the necessity of calling evil by its name and deplored any tendency to whitewash the human condition. This, as he pointed out, is the exact way to empower the darkness, which thrives when its presence is unsuspected and undetected.

The narcissism underlying much of today’s spirituality utilizes spiritual doctrines and ‘liberates’ us from evil by defining it away. Saying that everything is ‘empty’ and so we don’t have to deal with it. Saying that everything is Buddha and so nothing need be done. Saying that the mind that discerns a problem is ‘dualistic’. All of this is neurotic, but worse than neurotic, it is a helplessness that enables darkness.

All of these spiritual teachings come from an awakened consciousness, and all of them can be used to put ourselves to sleep.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said,

“Religion is a good thing for good people, a bad thing for bad people.”

Similarly we could say enlightened teachings are enlightening for the enlightened, but unenlightening for the unenlightened. So it is proving to be in the immature and narcissistic West where the very notion of an enlightenment to be achieved is now only for those still caught in dualistic thinking (who are not yet enlightened enough to realize they are already enlightened).

And this is the point of all of this: if, in our well-meaning preference for the light, we blind ourselves to the darkness, we actually feed and empower it.

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." - Jesus, from The Nag Hammadi Library.

And so, this bringing light to our darkness is the way of redemption and eventually enlightenment.

This is also the spirit of confession, a spiritual law that has been recognized for millennia: through bringing what is hidden up to consciousness we are cleansed and renewed. Through meeting it we are matured.

Thus, to come to wholeness we must recognize and assimilate and metabolize this seed of darkness within us. The seed within us that turns from the light does so, not because the light is abhorrent, but because life has shown us its abhorrent face. Betrayal, abandonment, or the slow poison of toxic love and mirroring . . . these wounds fester into a core bitterness. As long as this raw wound remains unhealed, a whole complex of reactivities and avoidances bedevils our life and a dark vortex of self-victimizing dramas perpetually replicates itself. At the centre is an autonomous complex, but it is better acknowledged as a being, a personality. This may manifest as a ‘daemon’, a ‘golem’, an ‘inner wounded child’, but as long as it remains hidden it will remain a destructively unintegrated and quasi-permanent factor of our psychic life.

The healing that is required – stripped to its simplest form – is to bring light to this darkness. And the fundamental difficulty with this simple solution is that the darkness by its very nature shrinks away from the light. This it does in its neurotically egoic form, even more so in its sub-personality form, and even more so in its archetypal or daemonic form:

“The lower parts of the being have their own rights and, if they are to be truly transformed, they must be made to consent to their own transformation. This is difficult to bring about because the natural propensity of each part of us is to prefer its own self-law, its dharma, however inferior, to a superior law or dharma which it feels to be not its own; it clings to its own consciousness or unconsciousness, its own impulsions and reactions, its own dynamisation of being, its own way of the delight of existence. It clings to them all the more obstinately if that way be a contradiction of delight, a way of darkness and sorrow and pain and suffering; for that too has acquired its own perverse and opposite taste, rasa, its pleasure of darkness and sorrow, its sadistic or masochistic interest in pain and suffering. Even if this part of our being seeks better things, it is often obliged to follow the worse because they are its own, natural to its energy, natural to its substance. A complete and radical change can only be brought about by bringing in persistently the spiritual light and intimate experience of the spiritual truth, power, bliss into the recalcitrant elements until they too recognize that their own way of fulfillment lies there, that they are themselves a diminished power of the Spirit and can recover by this new way of being their own truth and integral nature. This illumination is constantly opposed by the Forces of the lower nature and still more by the adverse Forces that live and reign by the world's imperfections and have laid down their formidable foundation on the black rock of the Inconscience.” – Sri Aurobindo – The Life Divine

*

It can be seen then that cosmically the principal of darkness feeds on this contraction away from the Light. This contraction is familiar to all of us as the perpetually arising form: ‘me’. But as the traditions of awakening points out, seen through the eye of awakening, there actually is no ‘me’, only the activity of contracting itself. Such traditions, like Buddhism, point to this essential unreality of the self-sense, and make a practice of seeing through its utter provisionality or unreality by diligently cultivating awareness of the consciousness that contains it, is free of its activity, the pure consciousness that is forever present as the ground consciousness underlying all provisional forms, inner and outer. This consciousness Buddhism calls buddha-mind. Strictly speaking one cannot become aware of buddha-mind, but one can become aware as buddha-mind. In becoming aware as buddha-mind there is the simultaneous recogntion that one is buddha-mind. This realization of buddha-mind is achieved by entering the unitive state of Samadhi or ‘just this’. To practice ‘just this’ is to follow the Way of the Buddha.

In actual lived human terms then, it is not so much the ego or the sense of being a self that bedevils us, but this being caught by the activity of ‘selfing’, this contracting away from the sacred ground of Being. When consciousness is ensnared in this, it inhabits a small world unto itself, the dynamics of which forever revolve around this central ‘me’. In the span of a human life this contraction is inevitable and as necessary for one’s evolution as the shell around the acorn is for the eventual grandeur of the oak tree.

To be caught in the narcissistic stages of this development is inevitable and inescapable, and is only ever ‘escaped’ through some kind of brain pathology or maladaption that disturbs what is a natural unfolding of the self-sense.

When once consciousness transcends this contraction even for a moment – and this might happen at any time in a human life – the seed of one’s Buddha potential is planted, even though consciousness is still fully caught up by the swirling of egocentricity.

These transcendent moments that come into a life unbidden open windows on our true nature that we can never forget and that invite us to awaken to the bright sky beyond the clouds of egoism.

For those who pass through those clouds and awaken to the bright sky beyond, there is no other way to describe the contracted ideations of the egoic condition than ‘asleep’. When consciousness awakens to its unbounded, deathless freedom it is almost incomprehensible how one could ever be caught by the self-hypnosis of the ego-mind.

Just as the audience at a stage hypnotist’s show finds it virtually incomprehensible that someone can be so powerfully deluded by the mind’s suggestibility as to believe he’s a chicken, so it is for buddha-mind when contemplating the squawkings of the common or garden ego. Awakened consciousness simply stands free of all that clouded and conflicted ideation, the nature of which is now revealed to be darkness.

When we know nothing but the perpetual darkness of egoic consciousness, we do not even know that it is darkness. There are good days. There are bad days. However, we do remember those special moments when something bright and unexpected came shining through and turned everything golden.

But should we awaken, through deep spiritual work, and break through into that light, it becomes clear wherein lies the principle of darkness.

It is ‘me’.

‘Me’ is the darkness.

In the heart traditions, therefore, the emphasis is placed on the self-surrender, or the yielding of the ‘selfing’ activity back into the connectivity and even union of self-forgetting love. In such moments of self-forgetting love the radiance of our naked condition shines through and we taste the Divine nature of ourselves and everything.

Once freely surrendered into the Heart the ego-functions are no longer subject to the dominion of Darkness, but move freely in response to the heart-impulse. This is the way of heart-realization or the progressive surrender of egocentricity into love. This is the graceful process that the heart-transmission initiates and which then unfolds as a response to Grace or the Shakti-force of the Heart.

The sadhana of the ego, then (because it is the ego that needs the sadhana) is the self-surrender into the Shakti-force of the Heart rather than to the darkness of the self-contraction.

As Bob Dylan sang, “You gotta serve somebody . . .”

With the adoption of a true sadhana we choose to become self-surrendered servants of the Heart. But as narcissistic Westerners some of us have a problem with that. In our childish entitlement and naivety about reality we assume that we can dictate the terms of this service, and so that by the time we have designed our spiritual path from the smorgasbord of possibilities we have successfully watered it down to a lukewarm affair that mirrors our egoic preferences and avoids any kind of fire that would truly transform us. A typical Westerner’s spiritual path is thus made into a shallow affair that is little more than a lifestyle choice. And this is normal and acceptable and Lulu Lemon will sell you the gear.

But the real thing is different. Typically in the Way of the Heart we have been granted a vision or taste of the Beloved. For a while, perhaps, we are sublimed. By Grace our heart is activated . . . But then – sooner or later, and sometimes with only one egocentric thought, we are gripped by the panicked contraction and find ourselves awash in demons and neuroses swamping our psyche and polluting our consciousness with all the messy unfinished business that is yet undealt with in our karma-bound psyche. This is when – if we can stay present and don’t put ourselves to sleep - we see what is on our plate. These moments are a call to action, because just as when we shine a light into a well, all the creepy-crawlies are visible for just a moment before they quickly scuttle back into the shadows.

With this the sadhana becomes possible. The heart has been activated. The light of the heart-fire has illumined what lies in the shadows. And now we must deal with it. This is the sadhana.

And it no longer helps us to revert to the innocence and purity of our aspirations, even less, to our righteousness or victimhood because, in doing so, we turn our back on our potential wholeness. This facing up to our shadow is the door to our realization. If we naively self-identify with that part of us that is love and light only, blinding ourselves to our lower nature we feed our darkness and remain forever conflicted in our being. We must become whole and real.

Most ‘good’ people hide from their darkness and err in that direction but we can also make the exact opposite mistake of feeding the darkness by indulging it. Maybe it gives us a sense of power . . . or it titillates us. Truly, we must get to know this part of ourselves otherwise we can never come home. But to walk through this swampy terrain we must also be fully established and committed to the good, the true and the beautiful. We must be fully attuned to the Light if we are to conquer the Darkness and manifest as a fully realized human.

To do that we need help, and to receive help we need to be fully self-surrendered into the Divine. Attuned to the Divine we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

But to be engaged spiritually and out of a misplaced hubris or cavalier sense of devil-may-care to invite darkness is a fateful mistake . . . a fateful one because the darkness will accept the invitation.

In this world where we have blinded ourselves to the reality of darkness it is that much easier to feed our lives to it, even casually.

But the good news is that the darkness only has power over us if we have given it our power.

And if we have, we can take it back.

Thus the way is neither by repression, nor by indulgence . . . In the words of Jung,

"How can evil be integrated? There is only one possibility: to assimilate it, that is to say, raise it to the level of consciousness."

The problem is the contraction from light and love. The solution is the restoration of light and love. But not via a partial and merely egoic self-identity. That is how spirituality goes wrong. Light and love must penetrate down through the swamp to our toes.

We must be enlightened in our body. We must be enlightened in our psyche. The whole swamp must be illumined and surrendered in place, in its darkness, into the light of a descending Grace of kindness and consciousness.

This heart-process is the Blessing of the whole being through Grace. When we are transmitted, heart-activated, we are opened to Grace, to the shakti-force, penetrating down through our whole being.

What we must then do is take responsibility for that seed still in us that would turn away. In every aspect, in every chakra, our contraction from love into unlove will be revealed to us by this process.

It is not enough to enjoy the heart-transmission or be warmed by this sacramental connectivity whenever we make ourselves available to it.

It is when we are not blissed-out but turned from the light into our darkness that we must be saved, blessed, and illumined . . .

Through a succession of disturbances we will be introduced to this seed of darkness within us.

And this is not the ‘problem’. This is the gift. Our disturbances are opening us to this gift. It is this fire set in our heart that will reveal this, our darkness to us.

And this is where our sadhana must penetrate. This is where we need Divine help, where we have turned away from the Light in pain and bitterness and shame and rage. This is where the work must be done. This is the coal-face. And so now we must deal with it. This is the sadhana.

We have seen it. Now we must bring it up and deal with it.

How do we deal with it? We must consciously unfold our contraction and give our selves humbly and wholly over to the Great Heart, laying down all our bitter, defiant, prideful, shameful, swampy human shit in the age-old and archetypal gesture of self-prostration and self-surrender back into the embrace of the Divine Beloved.

And not just ritualistically, but over and over, in every moment until perfect surrender becomes perfect service becomes the total liberation of our heart into its source condition or sat-chit-ananda.

This is the Way of the Heart.

And the first thing to notice is that we avoid it. We avoid the fire. We shrink. We run. We hedge. We bullshit ourselves. We anaesthetize ourselves according to our preferred method. We demur. We negotiate. We self-medicate. We take up other practices. We act out. Some people never get past this fundamental avoidance of their fiery destiny in God. And after all, no-one can just do it, just like that, with one swift prostration . . . How can we, when our very sense of self is built on this well-practiced set of avoidances?

Our entire life has been built on the handed down seeds of a contraction that traces itself back through generations of humanity . . . back through our genetic inheritance . . . back to our brain-core . . . back to our collective condition as a phenomenon in the cosmos . . . and now our spiritual process is likewise shadowed, darkened and avoidant.

The ego, in the sense that it is a ‘problem’ is so because it is a me-centric constellation of avoidances wrapped in bubble-wrap that will do everything it possibly can to stay in the bubble-wrap and create a spirituality that suits its bubble-wrapped perspective on itself.

This is its darkness. On the surface it is just bubble-wrap, but down below it has a different face.

Down below, love has been ruined. Through a succession of wounding encounters our physical and emotional body has sustained a lifetime of scars. These register in the physical and emotional body and if there has been trauma our psychic integrity may have been split and shattered. These schisms and scars we associate with the body and its various energies because it is in the feeling body that we sustain these wounds. But this is guilt by association rather than any inherent problem in the body itself. We are buddhas inhabiting bodies with the seeds of contraction built into them, but also with the seeds of enlightenment. Spirit born, our bodies are light, or constellations transparent to light, in which the only darkness is the darkness we create by our activity of shielding or turning away or knotting ourselves . . . Our knots are real knots, but they are knots in light.

Enlightenment, or the the self-deliverance into light, this our ego resists out of fear and shame and sheer bloody habit. And yet this very same body, once yielded to the love that is Grace-given in this heart-process, becomes a transparent vehicle of love and enlightenment itself and all our bodily energies likewise. This is the way and ‘tantra’ of heart-realization.

What then must be ‘confessed’, or yielded up, or surrendered is not the born condition as such – that is already of God, it is already light - but that more intimate movement within our born condition that has turned away from the Divine. We are only in darkness because we have turned from the light. How can we possibly do such a thing if we are inherently the light? How can we be turned away from the light if we are ourselves the light – if the very light that we are, is our enlightened buddha-nature?

This is the paradox, or koan of our human embodiment. We are already light, already love, already Buddha. But we are moment to moment creating our darkness based on a belief, a thought, a seed that is itself the principal of darkness. It is called ‘me’ and it is an illusion and it is nothing, and it is also the archetypal Lord of Lies and it destroys love.

This is the ‘shtick’ of ‘me’.

Religious and spiritual communities are houses built on shticks. If we are not yet honest enough to face up to our darkness then we need a teacher to hold us to the fire until we are. And this is when we need friends who are fierce with us and not ‘enabling’ and who are themselves dealing with their own shticks.

We must find ourselves out and deal with the seed of darkness within us. And then we must be true friends, not friends who ‘compassionately’ go to sleep with each other, admiring each other’s hallucinations.

And – inevitably - what will trip us up is our darkness.

What will trip us up is our unconsciousness.

We are unconscious, but we are doubly unconscious when our unconsciousness keeps us unconscious with focused unconscious intent. In this condition our activity is distorted by projections and contractions and self-sabotage but until we awaken to this contraction we justify and defend it as compulsively as if we were defending our deepest soul.

How does this happen?

Because our unconsciousness presents as ‘me’.

We are literally unconscious of the way our life is being usurped from within.

The self-destructive yet defended activity of a complex may be obvious to others but to the individual bedeviled by it a great deal of courageous self-examination is required before this inner shadowy ‘me’ will let itself be seen. It will literally put us to sleep rather than let itself be seen. It will destroy all our best destinies, sabotage our best ideas, and when it takes on transpersonal dimensions it will undermine our plans and bring them to naught with a breathtaking arrogance.

Once we become aware that there is something within us that is obstructing our life – and this awareness is usually brought about by sheer mounting frustration - we then typically get serious about trying to fix the problem . . . while still staying identified with the source of it. We want to get happy but without releasing the activity we are always doing that is moment to moment creating our unhappiness. We thus continue to compulsively act from an unhealthy centre while at the same time applying spiritual and psychotherapeutic remedies. We have not yet woken up to the grip of this destructive and shadowy usurper, this complex in consciousness that Adi Da calls Narcissus. We have not yet ‘found ourselves out’.

We all know people who get triggered and gripped by a fixed idea and who, while in that state of quasi-possession, say and do things they would never contemplate in their saner moments. This is common enough in life, and is heightened in this process, being a characteristic of the working-through of the shakti. This can be quite conspicuous in cases where there has been trauma and psychic schisms, but what about those cases where the ego is more stable, more grounded in the real world and where the ego’s fundamental narcissism is well-managed and functions in a way that is socially and psychologically acceptable?

From the viewpoint of awakened consciousness this well-adjusted narcissism is just as ‘crazy’ as the acting out of someone caught up in a full-blown phobia. It is only ‘not a problem’ in the same way that it is ‘not a problem’ to be engaged in life as someone totally other than you are . . . it is ‘not a problem’ until reality intrudes.

Many individuals would be delighted to attain to a stable condition of well-adjusted narcissism – most human gatherings are made up of and run by such people content to massage each others egos – but if for some reason our soul has matured to the stage of being ready to awaken to a deeper reality, the fundamental ‘lie’ of the ego-contraction will start to intrude into consciousness. The mask of our false and provisional self will become more and more apparent.

And at that point we are ready for a sadhana.

If we are activated in a heart-transmission such as this, our soul has already spoken, has already moved. Our deeper nature has made a choice, and just as when we fall in love, it is not a choice that our ego has it in its power to make. The Way of the Heart is chosen at a much deeper level than our narcissism.

But our ‘me’ very much has it in its power to resist. And this it does, with a vengeance.

And wherever our self-structure happens to be on the scale, from barking mad neurotic to admirably integrated, it will resist being transcended and outgrown by the deeper impulses of the Heart.

If the former, it will both cling to the Heart as well as aggressively undermine the Heart in a colourful display of inner conflict, if the latter it will do its best to hunker down into a familiar comfort zone and present a good-enough display of spirituality to fool itself and maintain a status quo of discreet self-maintenance.

Eventually, through sincere and patient attempts at self-awareness and discipline and self-surrender, we may yet - despite ourselves - ‘find ourselves out’. This is the genius of the Buddhist practice in its ego-eroding effect, as well as the genius of the shakti in showing us our shticks.

However, the genius of the Buddha at waking us up is more than matched by the ability of the ego to keep us asleep, as any quick look-around will reveal.

If we truly ‘get it’, we will become aware of this contraction and be moved to release it, but always there to counter-act our efforts are the same familiar thought-forms by which we have been bound and hypnotized and assimilated, all of them distortions, but ones that we have repeated to ourselves so many times that they are unconscious – like driving a car.

“A man will renounce any pleasure you like, but he will not give up his suffering” – Gurdjieff.

He will not give up his suffering until he is moved and inspired to reach deep down inside and commit to that which is more loving, more real, more true, more sacred than what he is currently by habit attached to . . . more golden than ‘that ol’ familiar feeling’of being a ‘me’.

In this process we are tremendously aided by the fact that the ‘something more golden’ has reached down into us and is working its way through our resistances, from crown to toe.

It is an incredible gift.

This Grace will liberate us, but only if we discover our darkness and submit it – in the form of ‘me’ - completely into the unconditional love of our own heart-fire.