Hi Tom and Lenka,
I’ll try to honour your request and describe how my week-long dark retreat went and what followed it up to today, which is exactly one month since I stepped out of the dark chamber in your garden in Lomec near Úmonín. I don’t think I’ll go into a descriptive account of my journey, the place itself or what preceded my experience – all of that has been said here by many people many times, so I doubt I could add anything new or revealing. Besides, it doesn’t actually strike me as essential. What matters is how the darkness worked on my soul, and that is what I’ll try to share with you.
I won’t pretend that during the dark retreat I managed to distinguish perfectly between my observation of the situation and the emotions and thoughts racing through my head – my interest in the whole experience was partly “analytical”, that is, to live through the experience in the dark and describe it through my own eyes, and I also believed that the dark retreat would bring about certain changes in me that would ultimately benefit my life. On top of that, a good acquaintance of mine, who was the first to give me some information about dark retreats five years ago, had told me his own account of the experience, which to a large extent shaped my expectations – and as is probably clear from the previous sentences, my expectations were fairly considerable 🙂
I was afraid to switch off the light and face the dark
Even before I switched off the light in the room myself and sank into the darkness, I went through an oppressive moment when I feared the darkness would weigh down on me like a heavy duvet I wouldn’t be able to breathe under. Since my most common way of “defending” myself against things I don’t have full control over is to say a prayer, I asked God (or the force corresponding to him) to let the darkness be more of a den I could settle into comfortably than a suffocating eiderdown. And my prayer was heard, and afterwards I really did perceive the darkness far more kindly than I had initially expected. Even so, the expected long and uninterrupted sleep that many people with experience of the dark talk about did not arrive on the very first night – in my case it was more of a stupor, with various hints of symptoms of illness flickering between individual dreams – I’d liken it a little to a childhood experience of fever with its mild delirium. I had a kind of half-dream that there were two other people in the room with me, and I also had the feeling that light kept streaming into the darkness from somewhere – the dream was in fact a never-ending effort to plug all the constantly appearing imaginary windows, peepholes and cracks that seemed to be “spoiling” the darkness experience. Then again, during the first two days I really did catch a glimpse of light a few times, whether because I didn’t close my eyes in time when Tomáš arrived with food or when, exploring the space of the sanctuary, I came across the indicator light on the electricity meter under the washbasin – the price of nosy curiosity J
Apropos dreams: throughout the whole dark retreat my dreams were unbelievably colourful, varied and very easy to remember (probably also because, on waking into darkness, they weren’t immediately pushed out of consciousness by the influence of the outside world), but what intrigued me about them perhaps even more was that they were, in some mysterious way, stable – a dream castle, for instance, kept the same shape and layout of rooms for the whole long duration of the dream, a dream about a car ride through Prague’s Libeň, Holešovice and Žižkov more or less consistently followed their real map, and a non-existent little square in some town on the Elbe even appeared in two separate dreams. I don’t know what to make of it, but in any case the dreams were probably the most real contact with the unconscious part of my being (bringing these opposites closer together was another expectation and goal of mine) that happened to me during that week. There’s probably no room to describe them in more detail, but if at any point in that week I had the feeling of being in contact with the “objective psyche”, with something in the landscape of the mind that transcended me, it was precisely in the dreams, and when I now, some time later, go back over the notes of the dreams I jotted down after coming out of the dark, I’m amazed at the richness of material that appears in them. Perhaps I won’t resist after all and will share a scene I dreamt on the last night in the dark, in which a young man was being executed – according to the dream a patriot and hero of the American Revolution, sentenced for some unspecified act to execution by guillotine, from above and perpendicular to the axis of the head – that is, so that he would be split exactly lengthwise and remain undamaged when seen from the front (for the purpose of displaying his body in a museum of national history). Although I and several other people were assistants at the execution, which in a strange way he carried out on himself, and we were in fact its only witnesses, we did not agree with it. In some attempt to find a reasonable meaning in the whole bizarre situation, I uttered the sentence that “an affair like this would break any other country, but it will make America stronger.” Without wanting to drag current political events into the timeless world of the unconscious, I had to pause over the fact that I had this dream on the day when, “outside”, Donald Trump was being inaugurated as President of the United States 🙂
I had expectations of the dark retreat
But let’s leave dreams now. I’ve already mentioned that I entered the dark with plenty of expectations, and the story of that week was really an instructive journey of those expectations mostly not being met and of me coming to terms with that fact. Based on my friend’s account, for example, I assumed that sooner or later deprivation-induced visual hallucinations would set in, and in the first days I was even somewhat nervous that none were coming. I wasn’t far from various musings about a “boring unconscious”, which at that moment I interpreted on a personal level, which was decidedly foolish. On the other hand, perhaps precisely thanks to the gap between my expectations and what the darkness was actually offering me, I came upon matters that were considerably more interesting. I was helped in this by short conversations with Tomáš, which took place around midday along with the bringing of food – I gradually realised more and more that those expected illusions would in any case have been more of a “fairground” delusion without real meaning, and that the essence of a dark retreat lies elsewhere. Through this chain of reasoning and thanks to Tomáš’s facilitation, I gradually arrived at the question of the observer, the real, more lasting essence capable of watching the swell of mind and body and realising that it is not identical with them. I belong to those people who, given their rather logical make-up, have read a great deal about the nature of the absolute but have only very rarely managed to have any real experience of it. And that is exactly where a dark retreat is valuable and beneficial – thoughts, and to a certain extent emotions too, really are easier to observe there, and in a way to be aware that they are merely happening to me but are not identical with me – the darkness provides, on the one hand, distance between the observer and everything external, and on the other it somewhat slows down the flow of thoughts and perceptions, which again helps me let myself be less absorbed by them. I certainly wouldn’t presume to claim I reached enlightenment in the dark, but I was finally able, perhaps for the first time in my life, to touch through experience the matters I had until then only heard and read about. Although not for a moment (with the exception of sleep) did I have the feeling of having stepped out of my standard daytime, rather intellectual consciousness, at the same time I had no doubt that things were being set in motion even in those parts of the soul I cannot see into. I couldn’t entirely rid myself of the notion that a dark retreat ought to give me some meaning and purpose – when Tomáš asked me whether it wasn’t enough for me that things simply are, I had to
The end of the retreat
Stepping out of the dark was impressive. During the last night I didn’t really sleep much, because in a way I could hardly wait to step out of the calm timelessness of the dark chamber back into life (it is odd, though, that despite the aforementioned absence of impressive visual illusions, I actually wasn’t bored in the dark apart from a shorter episode between days 5 and 6 – rather, the now more slowly flowing thoughts provided enough material for an attention that needs something to cling to, and that in itself was quite an interesting adventure) – to return from cyclicality back to linearity. When I stepped out into the outside world again, the light of a quarter moon was falling on the snow crust of the garden, surprisingly strong for my eyes accustomed to absolute darkness. It was about minus twenty degrees, but even so I decided to set off up the little hill beyond Úmonín to watch the sunrise, and I certainly didn’t regret it – the view of the heavens was imposing. The return to life wasn’t complicated – I naturally took away plenty of impulses I needed to process, and many of them still jump out at me even now, a month later, but at the same time I was still “me”, as I know myself – unaffected on the conscious level. Nevertheless I felt, one might say, and still feel today, how things in my life are somehow being set in motion, even things seemingly unrelated or over which, rationally speaking, I surely can have no influence – but what that means for my life is too early to answer. It might be interesting to look at the experience of the dark from an even greater distance, say a year, because I tell myself that at this point I can still only guess where the movements that began to unfold after the dark retreat will lead me. One thing cannot be doubted – although the whole experience looks seemingly passive and boring from the outside, it is a rare adventure that has few parallels among the possibilities of human life.
Ondra
