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.

I awoke, appalled, knowing this kind of darkness exists in the world. It took about a day for me to be struck by the obvious, that this darkness exists in me and that this dream was pointing me to it. What I was able to get in touch with in myself was a deeply buried, thin vein of self-hate. I am appalled again as I write this, that these feelings, while not dominant, are still present in me.

I am torn about how to meet this darkness. On one hand, I can hear a parental, religious voice telling me to avoid anything that brings me into contact with this kind of evil energy. It preaches fear, avoidance and safety as the ultimate value. On the other hand, I have a deeper intuition that this is arising in my life now precisely because I am ready and meant to meet it. I also believe that most of the time unconscious processes and patterns run our lives and any opportunity to bring these into the light is a gift. The deeper I go in this process, the more access I get to what lies hidden in my shadow and I don’t want to shy away from engaging with anything in my self that could bring more consciousness, choice and ultimately, Light.

You write, “A tantric path by its nature uncovers the darkness.” “We must bring light to our human darkness if we are to become whole.”

So . . . how best to meet this darkness in myself, in the world? What is possible with darkness? Is the goal to transform, let it be, get to know it and then avoid it? What are the risks? If Evil is a real, archetypal energy, then is there a risk that engaging it will bring it to life and give it form and power? This feels like a dangerous path through a dark wood. There may be moonlight, but what happens if the woods get too dense and I can’t find my way out? How does one meet darkness and explore it without feeding it? If both Light and Dark are necessary in this realm, then can Darkness ever really be transformed and illuminated? Won’t it just show up somewhere else to keep the Universe in balance?

Many questions. I’m not trying to figure it all out in advance. I just don’t want to be naïve like Little Red Riding Hood and get eaten by the Big Bad Wolf. ; )

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

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

It would also appear that there is a seed of darkness in the human heart that can collapse us into darkness.

We have the potential to go in either direction, to live in darkness or to realize the Great Liberation.

Sri Aurobindo encourages us to make the right choice:

“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.”

Aurobindo further says 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 what is to be done when we come across the darkness within us?

If you recall the Native American story of the good wolf and the bad wolf, an elder of the tribe tells the child 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 bad wolf is so tricky.

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 bad wolf thinks he is feeding the good wolf. Look at the divisiveness and collective insanity of these times; everyone is convinced they are doing the right thing.

In truth, few individuals overtly and consciously feed the bad wolf and we rightly identify such individuals as psychopaths. Sadly, by their very nature psychopaths gravitate towards positions of disproportionate power. Driven by the accumulation of power, they are often adept at manipulating the naivety of the ‘good wolves’ who can be led around by their ideologies.

That is why we have to grow up.

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

The tendency towards evil is there in each of us and it is influenced to the extent that it remains veiled to us. I am sure we can all identify people who are full of idealism yet are gripped by a dark and egocentric need to control and manipulate. And these manipulations are not scowling power plays. More often than not they are stridently moral. If we listen to their words, they seem full of righteous fervour. Under the words, however, lurk judgment and contempt. Given a sniff of power their idealism becomes tyranny and persecution.

We are continually being gaslighted by such people, who themselves have been gaslighted by others in a line that leads back to a far shrewder and calculating mentality. This also is our individual condition. We are gaslighting ourselves and there is an ulterior motive for it. Hiding in our shadowy recesses there is a wizard behind the curtain.

We need to know this about ourselves if we are to be fully integrated.

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 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 real. In fact it is a train-wreck waiting to happen. Reality will eventually derail it.

If we are to mature in this Way we must be revealed to ourselves. When this happens it is painful to realize what we have been up to all these years. We have been led around by a self-serving golem.

Is the golem our own or in the other? It is in both.

This encounter with our base humanness may undermine our idealistic notions of ourselves but it also lays the groundwork for realization. It takes an injection of the demonic 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

So how to deal with darkness? There is a lot of misunderstanding about this. 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 shows how unenlightened we are. Neither of these attitudes prove to be of much benefit in the face of reality.

In a mature soul our self-delusions are recognized as childish and immature. Somehow we are shaken out of our slumber by a naked encounter with darkness, and howsoever it happens we are obliged to put aside our wishful thinking and wake up to the implications of what we have just met.

And while it may come as 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 of the Heart, this truth does not cancel out the existence of evil.

My first clear encounter with my own lower self happened for me when, in the intensity of a Zen sesshin, something suddenly reared up out of the unconscious in front of me and began to hurl abuse in every direction. It was nothing less than demonic and - absorbed and unmoving in my zazen practice - I simply registered the nature of this ancient homunculus, this golem of ‘me and mine’. I clearly 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 he 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 this counter-egoic practice he was finally flushed into the open in his true – and really rather demonic - colours.

Just to see him so clearly resulted in the diminishment of his power. From that moment I recognized his scripts and his egocentricity and I could make other choices. From that moment I could consciously choose ‘What needs to happen here?’ . . . in preference to a semi-conscious ‘What’s in it for me?’

‘What needs to happen here?’ This became a 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 from his perpetual conflicts and manipulations.

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 as it is the key to this whole question.)

*

Of course, as is often the complaint, it is possible to become aware of our shadow and still be in its grip. For centuries spiritual individuals have wrestled with what Aurobindo calls the lower or vital self. A child comes to know the difference between good and bad. Adults are more clouded. We live in a secular, post-modern age under a philosophy of scientific materialism that denies any essence or 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 we 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. Thus we have programmed our own minds to nullify the very qualities that makes us human.

How did this happen?

In earlier times moral guidance came from the churches, but these institutions became corrupted and with the emergence of the scientific method – along with its demand for evidence and verifiability - the church lost its philosophical and moral high ground. In the absence of religious certainty the new dogma of scientism took over the collective mind. We started to think that not only have physicists plumbed the mysteries of physics they have also plumbed the mysteries of metaphysics . . . and of life altogether.

Smarter physicists know that the business of physics is just physics. But because the man-in-the-street has bought into the mindfuck that everything is physics, then he has come to believe that physicists will in due course give us the final say on God and everything. 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 . . . the physical theory of combustion is not going to give the answer.

Still, the dimmer physicists insist that it will . . . and that they hold - or very soon will hold - the answer to all and everything. Because they hold to this blindly irrational faith that physics covers everything, they also hold to a blind and irrational faith that ‘all and everything’ is merely a complex mechanism, ultimately explicable with the formulas of a dry physics.

Why does this matter?

Because in the same way that the ‘man-in-the-street’ used to cede moral authority to a doctrinaire Church he now cedes authority to scientism.

But through the dogma which erases the prior existence of consciousness itself - as if it were an embarrassing stain - the philosophy of materialism unwittingly deprives itself of the capacity to discern reality. 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 just ask the children would be a better bet.

In such a ‘godless’ scientific universe, however, there is no context in which to understand spiritual light or darkness; the entire cosmos is darkness. 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, inherently free and transcendent of the biological vehicle in which we temporarily find ourselves. On the contrary, this philosophy cannot even 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 soulless 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’.

Thus our man-on-the-street no longer conceives of himself as an actor in a moral universe . . . a ‘fallen’ angel or a shard of God . . . No, he is a clockwork monkey.

We are monkeys but we are also buddhas. And we have within us the impulse to awaken. It is this high intuition, born of a deep and innate consciousness, that demands that we come to terms with our lower, vital self. Monkeys are not burdened by self-consciousness, and are not observed to pursue a religious calling. It is perhaps an irksome itch that propels us into the spiritual life. But it is exactly this deeper pursuit that a clockwork scientism aggressively denies.

Why this hostility? A dull-witted and aggressive materialism is trying to establish itself as the official worldview. We are not buddhas, according to this reductive scientism. We are clockwork. We are cogs. Where is this leading? To what end is this purposed?

Such reductionism sees neither spiritual elevation nor spiritual depth, only material functions, and consigns humanity by definition to a meaningless void. Thus benighted we become like Jung’s ‘mass-men’ who in their programable unconsciousness fulfilled the functions of the Nazi Wehrmacht, content to ‘follow orders’, and be cogs in a great collective enterprise serving evil.

This herd mentality has not been left behind us, flickering dimly in the black and white newsreels of history. It is '1984'. It is now. There are many ways in which humans are dehumanized without actually goose-stepping down Main Street. In today’s shallow culture of celebrity and consumerism, in the ‘flatland’ of a valueless science, in the thought conformity of political correctness we are being put to sleep. As we contemplate the digital content on our screens we are being socially engineered. And all of this can be done to us because we prefer the comfort of sleep over the challenge of waking up and growing up.

Political movements, religions, as well as the shallow spirituality of the New Age pander to this desire to be soothed and comforted by platitudes.

We are gaslighted at every step. And please . . . please don't make me have to grow up.

A naive narcissism characterizes our spirituality, turning the wisdom of the masters into platitudes. It would ‘liberate’ us from fear of evil by defining it away. Saying that everything is ‘empty’ means we don’t have to deal with it. Saying that everything is Buddha means nothing need be done. Saying that the mind that discerns a problem is ‘dualistic’ means that we can remain undisturbed. Saying that we are enlightened because we have paid for an enlightenment weekend is gaslighting.

For while it is true that the truest spiritual teachings are expressions of an awakened consciousness, there is not one of them that cannot be used to put people to sleep.

As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said,

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

But it is also a bad thing for good people if the good people are naïve and choose comfort. The ego wants self-satisfaction, not truth.

The ego would prefer to gaslight itself than be disturbed. Because the truth is disturbing.

The ego will gaslight itself into an imaginary 'enlightenment' rather than look at its own disturbed condition (and the condition of the ego is always disturbed). This is the curse of spiritual by-pass, of a naïve idealism, of ‘green meme’ thinking, this belief that it is somehow ‘unenlightened’ to point out evil - as if any such thought could only be our own projected incomprehension, our lack of enlightenment. This kind of wishful thinking is immature, dissociative, mental, unreal . . . these are the smiley-face good intentions like billboards on the road to Hell.

Jung deplored this tendency to whitewash the human condition. This, he pointed out, is the exact way to empower the darkness, which of its very nature thrives on being undetected. We become possessed by what we refuse to see. This is the law.

"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, The Nag Hammadi Library.

Through the spirit of confession, through bringing light to our darkness we find redemption and enlightenment.

Through bringing up to consciousness what is hidden we are cleansed and renewed.

To come to wholeness we must recognize and own our shadow. That which turns away from the light does so, not because the light is abhorrent, but because it has been cast out, shamed and rejected. At the heart of our psychic being there is a pool of shame, and in it there lives a being, a sub-personality; it may manifest as ‘resistance’ or as ‘the inner wounded child’. But it is an intelligence and for as long as it can remain hidden it will be a destructive factor in 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 hides. Near the surface of consciousness it cloaks itself in the avoidant and reactive patterns of our own ego, but at deeper levels it takes on archetypal, even demonic 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 dynamization 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.”

SriAurobindo – The Life Divine

*

It can be seen then that - even cosmically - the principal of darkness is this same 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 contraction. Buddhism points to this essential unreality of the self-sense, and makes a practice of cultivating awareness of the consciousness that contains and permeates it, that is free of it, the pure light that is forever present as the ground consciousness underlying all form. Strictly speaking one cannot become aware of buddha-mind, but one can become aware as buddha-mind. Indeed we are already aware as buddha-mind, but not consciously so. In truly becoming aware as buddha-mind there is the simultaneous recognition that one is buddha-mind, as is everything else. This is samadhi or ‘just this’. To practice ‘just this’ is the practice of the Buddha.

In actual lived human terms then, what bedevils us is this perpetual ‘selfing’ which is a 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 the ‘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, but to be caught in the self-enclosure of it is as constricting to our growth as the acorn would be to the oak were its shell to stay forever intact.

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 upon us 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, 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 hard to believe that someone can be so 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 clearly revealed to be ‘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 fully 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. By this graceful process, initiated by the heart-transmission the progressive surrender of egocentricity into love unfolds as an intuitive response to the active Grace that is the Shakti-force of the Goddess.

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

So who's it gonna be?

The sadhana and redemption of the ego, then (because it is the ego that needs a sadhana) is the practice of self-surrender into the shakti-imbued heart-impulse rather than to the darkness of the self-contraction.

With the adoption of a true sadhana we choose a life as 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 our sadhana, so that by the time we have designed our spiritual path from the smorgasbord of possibilities we have 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 Lulu Lemon will sell you the gear and you will look cute doing it.

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 has been activated . . . But then – sooner or later, and sometimes with only one triggering thought, we are gripped by a panicked contraction and we 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 psychic swamp. This is when – if we can stay present and don’t panic or put ourselves to sleep - we see what is on our plate. These moments are a call to action. Just as when we shine a light into a well, all the creepy-crawlies become visible for just a moment before they scuttle back into the crevices.

With this Grace 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. Now we have a sadhana.

And it no longer helps us to revert to the innocence and purity of our aspirations, even less, to our adolescent righteousness or victimhood; this would be to turn our back on our potential wholeness. This facing up to our shadow is the portal to 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. We must become whole by becoming real.

This is not an ego project. It is Life living us. It is what will naturally happen if our ego gets out of the way. But of course the ego is not so accommodating.

An ego that has hidden from its shadow can also make the exact opposite mistake of 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 turn this swampy terrain to gold 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 Grace, and to receive Grace 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 walk the spiritual path and out of a misplaced hubris or a cavalier sense of devil-may-care to invite the darkness in, this 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 all too easy to unwittingly feed our lives to it, even casually. It is so cool, the darkness, particularly if you have been trying so hard to be good. After all, the Devil is sexy as all get out . . . The Devil has all the best tunes . . . goddamn it . . .

Actually, this is the Church speaking. This is the neurotic complaint of those who down through the centuries have bought into the doctrine that pleasure is evil. The puritan fear that "someone, somewhere may be happy”. Thank God for the black churches of the South where the ‘dancing and songs are the voice of the Dharma’ and the heart-shakti is busting the beams and bursting the seams and the music of Mingus and Coltrane was birthed.

Real God is not anti-life, anti-pleasure, anti-sex . . . but we have been indoctrinated (literally) with the conviction that a godly life is one that must renounce pleasure. Bertrand Russell, who wrote ‘Why I am not a Christian’, grew up with a grandmother who would not allow herself the pleasure of sitting in an armchair, only a wooden hard-backed ‘puritan’ chair . . . until after dinner was put away when the armchair became her guilty pleasure . . .

In such a tradition all the juiciness of life was given over to the Devil. This way of thinking still colours the psyche. This split between Life and the Divine still shapes our culture. It still feels weird to put ‘God’ and ‘sex’ in the same sentence.

The need to restore Eros was perhaps the one thing Freud and Jung agreed on. But for Freud this meant demonizing religion instead of pleasure. And this is where we are now at. Instead of healing this schism it just reversed the neurosis. This Jung could not stand. In Jung’s eyes Freud was ‘in the grip of a daemon’, was a man caught up in shadow projection and not wholeness.

By contrast Jung’s work was the ‘alchemy’ of restoring Eros to God, and so the split between them was not just a cultural watershed, but truly cosmic in scope and significance.

THIS IS THE POINT: A true sadhana is renunciate, as every true sadhana must be. But the real sadhana of Real God is the renunciation of the ego, not the renunciation of Life.

This is what is meant when Adi Da says that the Reality Way is a ‘tantric renunciate’ practice.

This is what is meant when Sri Aurobindo says “Renunciation of ego, acceptance of God in Life is the yoga I teach – no other renunciation.”

And the good news – when we finally find ourselves coming to grips with darkness – 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.

In other words, the idea that you can ‘sell your soul to the Devil’ is a con. It’s true if you believe it, though. The Devil is a con man. He will gaslight you with your very own thoughts. But it is a lie and it always has been.

Your True Nature in God is Your True Nature Forever.

You can gaslight yourself into misery and the servants of darkness will lead you down that path, but you do it on your own dime. We are given free will and we are set loose in the cosmos to plot our course according to our own predilection and karma.

And the practice of the Way of the Heart 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 away from light and love. The solution is the restoration of light and love. But not via a partial and merely egoic or surface 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 that is 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 and through our whole being.

What we must then do is take responsibility for that within us that turns away into selfing. 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. Through a succession of disturbances we will be shown where darkness works within us.

Nor is this a ‘problem’. This is the gift. Our disturbances are the gift. It is the light cast by the fire set in our heart that will reveal the darkness to us.

And this is where our sadhana must kick in, this place where we have turned our face from the Light. This is where the work must be done. This is the coal-face. Here we are . . . and now we must deal with it.

How do we deal with it? The first thing is to notice 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 impasse that is actually the avoidance of Real Life . . .

The ego is a me-centric constellation of avoidances, and the spiritual ego 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 the darkness. On the surface it looks like bubble-wrap, but down below it is the dark wolf.

Our physical and emotional body has sustained a lifetime of scars. There has been trauma and our psychic integrity is compromised. It is in the feeling body that we sustain these wounds. But it is like guilt by association rather than any inherent problem in the body itself. We are buddhas.

Spirit born, our bodies are light, are energic constellations transparent to light, in which the only darkness is the darkness we create by this very activity of turning away, of knotting ourselves . . . These knots are real knots, but they are knots in light.

Enlightenment, or the self-deliverance into light, is blocked and resisted 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 process, becomes a transparent vehicle of enlightenment itself and all our bodily energies likewise. This is the ‘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 us 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 light – and if the very light that we are is itself enlightenment, is 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. It is nothing. But it is also the Lord of Lies and it will destroy love if it can.

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. 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.

What will trip us up is our darkness, 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 but until we awaken to this cramp we justify and defend it as compulsively as if we were defending the most precious possession.

We gaslight ourselves.

How does this happen?

Because our unconsciousness disguises itself as ‘me’.

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

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 might just 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 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 it is heightened in this process, being a characteristic of the working-through of the shakti. It is 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 a false self, as someone 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 where we are now 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 the 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 ever had it in its power to make. We choose and are chosen for the Way of the Heart 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 this week - from barking mad neurotic to admirably integrated - it will resist being transcended and outgrown by the deeper impulses of the Heart.

If it is 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 its comfort zone and present a 'good-enough' display of spirituality to fool itself and maintain a 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 Goddess Shakti in showing us our shticks.

However, the ability of the Buddha and the Goddess to wake us up is more than matched by the ability of the ego to keep us asleep.

“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 heart-process we are 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.

And this Grace will liberate us – this is guaranteed - but only if we uncover our darkness and submit it – in the form of ‘me’ - completely into the flames of the Heartfire.

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