The Dazzling Dark
Start close in, don't take the second step or the third,
start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take.
The fact that I'd undergone a radical consciousness shift began to become apparent only after everyone in the hospital had settled down for the night and I was left awake, feeling as if I'd had enough sleep to last a lifetime. By stages I became aware that when I'd awakened a few hours earlier, it hadn't been from a state of ordinary unconsciousness at all. It was as if I'd emerged freshly made from a vast blackness that was somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness that had no separation within it. That's no mere metaphor for a vague sensation; it was so palpably real that I put my hand up to probe the back of my skull, half wondering if the doctors had sawn part of it away to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn't in the least a feeling of being damaged; it was more like having had a cataract taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and myself properly for the first time, for that lovely dark radiance seemed to reveal the essence of everything. Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the following days, weeks, months, and years, my bewilderment was intensified as I discovered how all kinds of negative human experiences became marvels of creation when experienced by the Dazzling Dark. However, perhaps the most extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn't feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural: the realization that I never really left home and never could.
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| Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. Deep inside refuse to run. Longing and loss and fear of the future gives way to reality and the self. |
| We dwell intimately close to a door of revelation we are afraid to pass through. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. ~David Whyte |
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