Light Awareness

I find Chapter 20 of DTS evokes for me the times in my life when I have felt most despairing and also how at my lowest point something healing would intervene.  The description of being imprisioned in hopelessness (“As thought stumbles along in the darkened arena it has constructed . . .’) is very familiar, although mercifully it feels like my past more than my present.  And the text on page 210 (“The alternative is to investigate our situation lightly . . .”) which Jack suggests as a practice, also evokes how I have been rescued from my darkest moments.  But I wonder how it happened.  At the time it didn’t feel like a deliberate act to turn away from the enveloping darkness, although it may be that in that moment something allowed me to look more deeply into this darkness (and it was this that allowed the shift to a lighter heart).  The image I have used to interprete these moments of recue in my life is that I descended to such a dismal point that I could no longer believe in the assumptions that got me there (assumptions about how impossible and irrelevant all my dreams were). Then light would flood in as I relinquished the chains of negative thinking, which had caused me to condemn my own life, and then the world would seem fresh and full of unexplored possibilities.  So perhaps this dynamic–which in the past has seemed to arrive by grace when I most needed it–is here offered as a practice which I can knowingly undertake to invite more light into my consciousness? (Perhaps this is an instance of the maxim that you don’t have to hit bottom in order to initiate positive change in your life?) –Michael