The reading this week goes into the relation between light and darkness that Gaynor, Peter, and others have already been exploring. The suggestion has been made that darkness can allow or embody light, but here Rinpoche is writing about a darkness “that reduces light to substance.” Does that way of describing it seem right to you?
The whole idea of living “in a kind of radiating gloom–a darklight” is very interesting to me. The suggestion is that this very world, our usual experiences, are bathed in this darklight; that our ordinary way of seeing and understanding is pervaded by this darkness that has reduced light to substance. You need to ask yourself what this means to you, in terms of your own experience. The description on the top of p. 210 is a good place to start.
Now, the exercises for this week are the TSK exercises we have been working with already. But there is also an exercise introduced in the reading, at p. 211: “The discipline that could lead to such lightness . . .” Much as people have been suggesting in their posts, the suggestion is to go into the darkness of our confusion, our usual ways of seeing and so on, and to discover there a lightness way of being.
In discussing practice, people have been talking about going back and forth from dark to light and light to dark. Here the practice is focused more on the content of experience, on ‘recovering’ light from the darkness of substance. I will be interested to hear how people do with this.
Jack