DARK RETREATS
Whats it all about in a few words?
It is simply decreasing your sensory input to zero so your inner world becomes more real than your outer world and you get to know that inner world intimately.
What is a Dark Retreat?
Martin Lowenthal in his book "Dawning of Clear Light" writes the following:
A dark retreat is a solitary journey done in total darkness. The dark retreat facility usually consists of a room for meditation and sleeping and an adjacent or nearby bathroom. The duration of the retreat will often vary from a few days to forty-nine days.
As we relax and practice free of distractions, the energy of aliveness in all its embodiments is revealed and amplified. All of our physical, mental, and emotional patterns can be seen clearly. We also can more readily sense the flows of energy in the body, the energy field of presence, and the qualities we share with all existence. The wisdom qualities of "being" become more evident. These qualities are uncovered, recognised, and then cultivated, not because of a sense of incompleteness but because of the natural impulse to share and manifest as a beneficial presence in the connections that we feel and that we come to know exist with all others.
The purpose of such retreats is to relax into the nature of our own being, allowing the mind to discover its natural awareness.
In this relaxation we discover the essential qualities of authentic presence, inner lights and visions, the energies of aliveness, silence, and listening, and sacred wisdom.
To find that relaxation and experience that wisdom means confronting and transcending our core fears, unspoken longings, and patterns of denial and addiction.
In a dark retreat, the play of the body-mind is exposed more clearly, without the presence of the usual multitude of external stimuli. External darkness becomes a screen for the performance of the internal theatre of images, stories, and reactions.
In these retreats, visions naturally arise and we learn to distinguish between those which are reactive projections of our body of habits, and those which are manifestations of our wisdom nature. We realise how all visions are a product of our minds.
Benefits of Dark Retreat
The dark retreat is a safe space to practice and accelerate our relaxation into the sense of ease with the nature of being (nature of mind). For many, doing even a short dark retreat can bring about a significant shift in their lives, revealing another way of being, of relating to life, and of being present with oneself and one's own mind. We gradually enter into ourselves more completely, and at the same time, into all being.
In dark retreat, the practitioner lives in complete darkness-eat ing, sleeping, meditating, and simply existing in a world without external light. The journey of the dark retreat is made through silence, in silence, and into the profound silence from which all sound arises.
The dark provides a profound opportunity to recognise our true nature and realise that our experiences are simply reflections of that nature.
The resulting clarity can lead to the realisation of profound wisdom, unshakable presence, spontaneous freedom from our mental and emotional habits, transformation of the ordinary into wisdom, and abiding in a state of Clear Light.
Clear Light refers to abiding in an open, non-dual awareness beyond any distinction between self and object. In Clear Light all there is, is is.
It is beyond experience and experiencer, beyond thinking and not think ing, beyond subject and object.
The dark is a kind of womb in which to grow into a new way of being. The particular advantages of the dark are many. The rest for our eyes, weary from overstimulation in our visually oriented world, pro motes an overall relaxation of body and mind. Living in the dark changes the body chemistry, particularly the pineal, pituitary, thalamus, and hypothalamus glands.
The less frequently used senses of hearing and touch expand in importance as we mindfully operate in ways adapted to functioning without the use of sight. The life is simple, allowing for more time and effort to be concentrated on practice. Without the stimulation of external light, the conditions are improved for seeing the inner lights, and it is easier to observe the thought patterns that arise out of the internal dynamics of our own minds. The visions and thoughts in the dark tell us what life is like in the unnoticed regions of our being.
The darkness is both intimate and boundless simultaneously.
Dark Retreats and Creativity
Increasing your creativity and "right brain" neuro-pathways can result from dark retreats.
Lowenthal goes on to say "In dark retreat I have not only benefited from formal practices, but also have found that writing-poetry, stories, dreams, teachings-has been a powerful part of the work of opening my heart. My writing is a spiritual practice, an engagement with creative and wisdom energies that open me to the unknown and shape me as I work"
Their unique beauty will flow
Dark Retreats and Meditation
Essentially, the aim of meditation is to awaken our aliveness with clarity and authenticity, to use it for the direct and intuitive experience of reality, moment to moment, and to manifest this in the world as a beneficial presence in our relationships, our work, and in our community.
Meditation is a path which acquaints the mind with our wisdom nature and cultivates the wisdom qualities of that essential nature as an authentic expression of our aliveness.
Aliveness involves manifesting the energy of life as a way of being and as a presence in the world that others can experience. Aliveness is on the edge. Presence is the connectedness of that edge.
Presence is made real and effective in our experience by remaining conscious in everything we do. We train ourselves to both radiate presence and behold and embrace the presence in everything around us, in trees, flowers, people, oceans, and in experience itself.
And we abide in the splendor of that presence.
Darkness and Shadow work
Jung stated the shadow to be the unknown dark side of the personality. He says : "A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps...living below his own level."
Our desire to eliminate darkness takes both material and spiritual forms. The harnessing of electricity and the invention of the light bulb have not only extended our days and transformed our rhythms of work, they have deepened our preoccupation with external images, especially with the coming of television and computers.
In dark retreat we are turning this situation around facing our dark sides. They are able to be met.
Darkness and Psychology
Many of our therapeutic psychologies see the dark or shadow as the abode or dimension of our personality that is the unacknowledged source of irrationality, suffering, and abusive behaviour.
Darkness and our culture away from it
A society prone toward light and away from darkness
It is counter intuitive to move towards darkness or the hidden but sometimes this is exactly what is needed.
Our light-oriented rationality began at the time of Plato and, pro pelled by the European "Enlightenment," has tried to explain and con quer all mystery, and the sacred itself, in much the same way the West has subjugated lands and peoples. As Matthew Fox says, "we were robbed of savoring mystery and its darkness. We need to retrieve our rights to mystery and to the darkness in which it is so often immersed and enmeshed.
Many religions and cults seek to root out or suppress any and all hints of non-virtuous behaviour and character in the quest for salvation through and into the light.
We pay for this exclusive orientation toward light with fear of the dark, a flight from mortality, and superficial lives relegated to experiencing only the surface of reality.
This denial and fear of darkness leads to addictions that keep us from experiencing the discomfort and pain of depth. We numb ourselves with food, alcohol, and drugs, or we seek distraction through constant stimulation and entertainment.
These habits also fuel the inevitable explosions of violence, depression, and madness that result from repression and indulgence, and the societal attempts to control such outbursts.
Your unique original mind and dark retreat
Quoting Lowenthal: "In the psychological or spiritual search we often try to learn from teachers and others who seem to have profound knowledge.
This can be useful as long as we do not settle into the safety of believing the word of others.
By making the decision to do a dark retreat, we are taking the risk of searching inside ourselves and in the darkness all around us for the wisdom that we can embody.
Dark retreat and fear
If we look deeply at our everyday habits, we will see fear and longing lurking in much of what we do, haunting how we move, what we say, our posture, our tone of voice, our actions, our drives, our accomplishments, our failures, our boredom, our relief, and our joys.
When we let our deepest fears guide our actions, our relationships, and our way of being, we are hostage to those fears.
There are many types of fear of the unknown. These include the fear of what we are unwilling to know about ourselves-what we have disowned, what we cannot accept about ourselves, and what we do not know how to know and to use.
In dark retreat we are making the intention to turn this around - to look deeply into this
Doing a dark retreat
If you would like to do a dark retreat please get in touch with Masih via email at masihk@hotmail.com
Dark Retreat and Community
A dark retreat builds both individual and community capacity.
In the dark retreat I came to know that I was giving other people pause with my own pause.
It is my experience that when one member of a community is on retreat. Fellow practitioners tend to have a stronger practice concurrently.
Lowenthal quotes :We are connecting and working mutually at a dimension of being that is collective, non-separate, and which weaves a rich tapestry from the efforts we all make"
Solitude and Loneliness
In the context of retreat, it is clear the solitude is totally different from loneliness.
John O'Donohue points out that "sometimes when you're lonely, you are very taken up with the idea of your own separation. Whereas solitude, rather than being a withdrawal, is actually an entry into and a coming home to your own deepest belonging."
Dark Retreats and Sexual energy
In the Taoist and tantric systems, any experience, desire, emotion, or force can be used for spiritual growth.
The principle is to consciously and intentionally work with these energies with the clarity of the natural state and channel them within the body in ways that transform us from a body of reactive habits to an expression of wisdom and divine radiance. The sexual energies are considered to be the most powerful and transformative of the internal capacities that we possess.
The careful arousal of desire, the systematic use of the activated energies, the retention of seminal fluid, the conservation of ovarian energy, the extension of orgasm, and the exchange of male and female energies all employ sexual energy in the conscious acceleration of spiritual growth for each partner.
Dark retreats are an environment in which these energies can be cultivated in more subtle ways.
Doing a dark retreat
If you are experienced with meditation and have a sense of stability with mindfulness practices, doing a two- to three-day retreat on your own can be very useful.
If you would like to do a longer retreat you will need a guide.
Dark Retreat and DMT
The pineal gland (or epiphysis) is located in the centre of the brain, more or less at the height of the eyebrows, and is a gland of which little is known.
It produces melatonin and is therefore photosensitive: with the light of day it wakes up the body and the mind while in the dark it makes them sleep.
Recently it has been discovered that it is not limited to this but is also capable of producing DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine. DMT highly hallucinogenic substance that is found in various plants and that is used by Amazonian shamans who prepare it in the drink called Ayahuasca. The pineal is said to produce it during birth, during death and in particular states of meditation, trance, lucid dreams.
Recent studies have found that the long exposure of the body to total darkness (and must be absolutely total) leads the pineal to produce DMT. Which the ascetics of the past understood intuitively.
After about 3 days in the absence of light, the gland begins to produce another substance called pinolina, which allows experiences of lucid dreams and visions, this up to the fifth day. From the sixth onwards, the pineal begins to secrete the notorious DMT (dimethyltryptamine), the so-called "spirit molecule" that allows the famous "hallucinations" that are experienced with Ayahuasca.
This is what happens chemically during prolonged exposure to darkness.