DARKNESS AND LIGHT

I have just returned from a holiday in Vanuatu, a beautiful little nation of islands in the south Pacific. Being there gave me the opportunity to experience the luxurious light of the tropics – so dazzlingly bright, with sunsets of incredible depth. In such a place the quality of illumination is evident, both in the people (recently rated by a UK based research institute as the happiest nation on earth), and in the beauty of the natural environment. I took the opportunity while there to reread The Joy of Being, as we are currently working with the Advanced Kum Nye Exercises within our Turiya Yoga Group. Unfortunately on our last day there I fell off bicycle and broke my right elbow, so I am now reduced to two finger left handed typing.

I notice that the exercise for this week (Week 6) begins to explore the issue of locating light within darkness, a subject which really interests me. In many of my practices, both TSK and yoga ones, I experience a deep velvety blackness. Far from feeling this as being negative, I find in it a richness, a great reassurance. I really like Tarthang Tulku’s comments: “Become familiar with darkness; be ready to let yourself sink into it without losing awareness completely…experience seems lucent and free” (p.327). This is very much what I have found in my meditation experience. There seems to be a tremendous luminescence within the depths of the darkness – in one past experience, I found that sinking into that deep black hole felt like moving into a preview of my own death, but totally without fear. As Tarthang Tulku says on page 329 in relation to Ex 22 “In its initial stages, it continues to support a distinction between light and darkness, but as you become more familiar with it, you may sense that light is available everywhere”.

There are points in the Comment on Exercise 22, however, where the word darkness seems to have a negative connotation placed on it. On page 328 “If our experience exhibits darkness, it is self-constructed”, and on page 329 “..the darkness that accompanies ordinary patterns of mind: the compulsive, repetitive thoughts, the targetting that catches us up in the content of thoughts, and the emotional responses.” Is Tarthang Tulku saying that there are different forms of darkness, depending on the level of awareness on which one is operating? Is the dark richness that I  have experienced within meditation only available when we step outside the ‘ordinary patterns of mind’?

I really respond to what I feel as the complementary and mutually reinforcing natures of light and darkness, and look forward to practising Ex. 22 further this week.

Gaynor