I’m listening to the silence. It buzzes lightly, a quietness louder than sound. These phases of no-thingness used to be nightmarish. Dark, electric, weird. I’d flail about in confusion, panicking. Now, I hear something in the rich and textured stillness. Unnerving and rewarding, otherworldly yet familiar. I can’t fight it. I don’t want to anymore.
How to traverse the night came to me while sitting on a sunlit patch of grass beneath a clear blue sky. It gave itself to me as both a question and an answer. I remembered a dream I once had where I stood by a cabin at the edge of an illuminated, night-bathed forest. Animals and strange beings of energy and light surrounded me as I watched my city in the distance burn under a blood red sky. I felt safe and yet also deeply grieved.
I don’t claim to know the way through darkness. I only know my darkness. Having become intimate with it over thirty years, I simply share how, once it enters me, I make my way through it.
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What is Illusion: Everything inside the night is unreal. Yet each image and sensation along the inner path sends sparks toward you, compelling you to catch flame and burn. So obscured and ignited, you might then tumble down a rough slope or step into quicksand, or rush into the arms of a mental demon so vast that you create a prison in its embrace. Unreal, all of it. Keep walking, even while you burn and flutter in and out of yourself.
What is Desire: Everything you’ve ever wanted, ever created or destroyed, is an illusion. When night comes, you must let it all go. The dreams, the desires and the deaths you’ve experienced only weigh you down. Release them. It is safer, and far easier, to traverse the night when you are light.
What is Reality: You are real. A soul, a frequency of energy, transporting itself across dimensions, every breath another world. Live inside those realms of inhale and exhale. They are the closest you will ever come to union in physical form.
What is Bright: The night is actually very bright. So illuminated and insistent that it appears unseeable. Look at it anyway. Out beyond the illusions lies an expanding place where you can rest. Silence.
What is Love: When you wake up completely inside the darkness, love is there. You become the vast vision and perfect void, and nothing is impossible. Inside the night, you learn to See, to keep looking. To not turn away. When you experience this Staying with yourself, love opens inside every unnameable thing, even violence and death, and there is nothing else to do but bring everything back to wholeness.