November 8, 2024
I spent much of the meditation teaching myself not to resist the darkness that was consuming my consciousness. It wasn’t all that different from other kinds of darkness I’ve encountered on these journeys but it triggered an instinctual fear in me that harkened back to my very early childhood.
I was always afraid of the dark when I was growing up. I think this is because of my inner experience, that of being surrounded by a ravenous darkness filled with unseen and unspeakable things. It terrified me. I equate it with the stark and absolute isolation I experienced, born into a family of people who were entirely blind to their inner nature. I faced an unhappy choice: Either become like them and enter into a life of suffering or resist and be consumed by darkness. Needless to say, it wasn’t much of a choice. What infant/toddler could tolerate being devoured by darkness? It was either insanity or depression and I chose depression. Depression because that was what joining the so-called world of the living meant: I was locked into a flat and oppressive existence with no opportunity to escape until I was an adult.
This terror of being consumed by the hungry dark persists deep within me, untouched for the most part by all of the experiences I’ve had with dissolving into the benevolence of the Absolute. There is still some primitive part of my psyche that resists dissolving because it feels like my very soul will be destroyed in the process. Total annihilation.
Today, I sat with the fear and allowed the darkness to penetrate as much as I could. This darkness is not pleasant at all. It’s like being drowned in viscous, black water or smothered in putrid black soil. It is antilife. Anti light. Anti anything positive or healthy. Or at least that’s my projection onto it.
I feel like I was able to see through this projection somewhat and very gradually a little of the resistance to being dissolved faded. It helps that I’ve experienced dissolution so many times before. Each time it gets a little easier. And each time I recognize the blackness a little more as my nature. This is a nondual experience, I have to point out, so there is really no you or me, just all one. Blackness. But there is a tinge of duality in the projection.
After a while, I became aware that my body was glowing faintly white. I realized when I looked down at myself, I was like a fluid ying/yang symbol with the darkness and light mixing in a swirl. The swirl of balance. As the light increased, I saw a frozen hand. It was coated in blackness like lacquer. The light revealed more and more of the body covered in black lacquer and I recognized a middle-aged, white guy with a beard. Had he committed suicide? His death didn’t seem natural and probably was self-inflicted. Perhaps his frozen, lacquered body offered an explanation of his death but I have no firm idea. He was dead and lost in blackness like the other souls I’ve stumbled across during these journeys.
I pulled him out of the shadows until his entire body was revealed. He was clothed but his clothes were covered in black lacquer as well. I held him in his hands and his eyes opened. They were misty blue. The color I’ve come to associate with the souls of the dead during these journeys.
I propped his rigid body upright and slowly he unthawed, regaining first his flexibility and the black lacquer slowly fading away last of all until he was basically a normal-looking man. His cloudy blue eyes, however, gave away that he was dead. He appeared to be middle-aged with salt and pepper hair and beard. There was something about him that told me that he was probably conservative politically. I don’t know why. He just had that air about him.
Perhaps because of his conservatism, he seemed very surprised by my presence and kept asking me who I was. I realized that I looked rather alien to him because my body was merely the outline of a human shape. The shimmering dance between light and dark inside of me provided my form. I was essentially featureless.
“I’m human like you,” I explained to this mystified man. “I’m still living in a body, though, and I’m pretty sure you’re not. Don’t ask me why it was me who found you because I really don’t know. It just happens sometimes when I’m meditating.”
As we ‘talked’ the blackness around us continued to fade away, gradually turning pure, radiant white. I looked up and found we were standing in a beautiful wood all of white. Snow covered the ground and the trees around us. Above us, a brilliant blue sky was visible through the trees and the sunlight streaming through was soft white. There was a giant stag standing motionless atop the rigid, staring down at us with its otherworldly blue eyes.
I recognized this stag. This was the same being that has taken the place of the Woman in White during these journeys. Like her, he takes different forms but I can always tell who he is. In the past, he’s appeared as a stag and as a winged lion, among other shapes.
The scene was incredibly holy, enough to bring me to my knees. Such beauty and radiance and wonder was a gift beyond measure and it shook me deeply. The forest, the snow, the sun, the stag, the luminous light and depthless sky. All wondrous.
Strangely, the man couldn’t take his eyes off of me even as the stag descended, walking in a stately manner, to claim his soul. I have no idea why he was so flummoxed by my presence when the stag was so much grander and exotic. Maybe it was because I was the one who found him in the blackness? If so, it wasn’t through any action on my part. I was just meditating, not looking for him. I get the sense that he’d been stuck in the blackness for a long time and seems to have given up hope of ever being found again. If that were the case, then it could explain his reaction.
I helped him up on the stag’s back and the animal turned without acknowledging me, walking back up the hill with his burden. The man, however, turned around to stare at me. The last thing I saw was him looking back at me, his face suffused with both confusion and wonder.
It wasn’t until later that I realized why he was looking at me like that. I’m pretty sure he’d committed suicide out of despair and depression. I think the reason he was looking at me in wonder, rather than at the stag and the magical scene, was because I was a living human. It’s quite simple why: He hadn’t realized the development of the soul to this potential was possible. He hadn’t understood that Pearl Beyond Price existed, much less that it is the natural development of the human soul…given enough work and dedication.
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