Warm greetings
, friends,
with the kind permission of Lenka and Tomáš Roud I now have the opportunity to share some of my perceptions and experiences of a dark retreat, and thereby offer a small glimpse into the mind of one quite ordinary human being and everything it goes through during waking/dreaming in the dark. I won’t tire you with lots of information about this and that, because how the journey to your destination, the sanctuary itself, its surroundings or the two beings who will guide you through the dark (to the extent you choose) affect you depends solely on how your own mind perceives them, because “A person perceives only the world they carry within themselves” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
The moment of switching off the light is entirely up to each of us; there is no one here who forces or is forced, the door out is not locked, and even the light switch is always within reach, and it is precisely this freedom that encourages us all the more not to give up so easily. After all, we have all come here (or will come) to process something, to resolve something and to face it head on, whether consciously or subconsciously. Perhaps someone will tell themselves they wanted (want) to try it just out of curiosity, but after deeper introspection you will realise that it is really otherwise – everything has its very good reason. Incidentally, it really is literally healing by darkness, and as you can read for instance in the book The Queen of the Sun (Christian Jacq), people in ancient Egypt (and not only there) went through a similar procedure quite routinely; pharaohs and other statesmen holding important royal offices underwent this at least once a year as a purifying process whose task was to clarify and calm the mind and thus make it far easier to govern for the proper exercise of the office in question. Perhaps at this moment you are beginning to feel and sense more clearly why this is so important for you and why it has brought you all the way here.
A dark retreat in the western sanctuary
By the workings of some kind of forces, the western sanctuary fell to me, from which, after switching off the light, I watched through the still half-open door a beautiful scene and a lone poppy in the field, experienced tender and sad thoughts of my Beloved and her gorgeous, smiling face, followed by a last breath of outside air and then simply the calm and firm closing of the entrance door. At that moment, alongside the darkness, a deep silence surrounds you, and what was previously locked away inside suddenly senses that there will soon be an opportunity to get out. Although I had placed no expectations on the dark retreat, there was already a fairly desperate wish to answer at least one of the 3 questions (about the past, the present and the future) that had been tormenting me for the last 4 years and which all related to Her, who is everything to me. I received an answer to 2 of them and something far more besides, but let’s take everything nicely in order…
The first night was packed with a whole series of varied dreams. I didn’t note down the first 3, but then something happened that switched me onto a completely different track of thought for the rest of the retreat. After the end of the 3rd dream I saw quite distinctly a pair of hands, beneath a switched-off projection screen the size of a large living room, which looked like a single pane of glass without any frame, inserting into some device something like a videocassette with “no. 4” written on it. Until then I had had a whole series of lucid dreams and several astral journeys; I know and always greatly enjoy those feelings when you wake up and know you are still asleep, or walk through places you know intimately and then “fall” back into your body. This, however, was something entirely different – I felt like the one to whom those hands belonged, yet at the same time I perceived emotions like a crash-test dummy on whom another experiment in a new environment is about to be carried out. At that moment the already existing split in perception between me and the Self deepened greatly, which in the following days made it possible to understand other incoming information. About the dreams of that night I’ll add that the 6th dream was two-layered – anyone who has seen the film Inception (2010) will understand: I was standing in the middle of the night at home in a room next to my bed, which doesn’t normally stand in that spot, and thanks to that I knew clearly that I was asleep and that I wanted to wake up. Then I did come round in some dark sanctuary, but it was only a higher level of the dream, and soon a piece of the ceiling came crashing down with a great roar and bright morning light began streaming in. I also remember that a moment later I heard Tom’s voice outside the door saying, at the sight of this mess, “I must be dreaming!!!” 🙂 So sorry, Tom, I really didn’t mean to demolish it on you; I hope you’ll have it patched up soon. 😉
Whether it is still night or dawn has already broken, you can tell by listening to the birdsong, which carries gently even through the otherwise very solid sound insulation – you simply can’t stop nature. I quickly grew used to the little cabin, and every bit of it seemed friendly to me, as if it had been built with precisely that intention. The next 2 days and nights passed very peacefully. I let my body rest for most of the day, and although I always did about half an hour of light exercise before lunch (taller people, seriously watch out for attempts at a “running” handstand), for the first 3 days I really did sleep something like 18–21 hours a day, and I was glad I had packed a sports cycling top so that my body could breathe more easily during the longer hibernation. Morning thoughts of the “I’ll lie here till daybreak” kind fell on roughly as fertile ground as the phrase “we’ll paddle till nightfall”, which slips out of your mouth quite easily during several weeks of kayaking through the fjords of Svalbard in the polar day. 🙂 Otherwise, while awake, exercising and walking around the cabin, many will surely also find it pleasant to take their clothes off for a while – when you are already face to face with the darkness and the assaults of your hidden emotions and thoughts, you are naked anyway, and this way you will feel it even more strongly. You won’t need much during that week, but it’s good to lay your things out under the bed and “photograph” and feel them so that you can find them easily afterwards. You may also occasionally find yourself hunting for, say, a tube of toothpaste that you knocked over because half a second earlier you weren’t sufficiently alert, but the interesting thing is that some objects you will always grasp with immense precision; the interior space is very well perceptible even without the lights on. The only thing I didn’t quite get on with was the air conditioning – despite all my efforts I didn’t manage to get it into a state where it neither heated nor cooled the air but just brought in the outside breeze unchanged. Well, that is surely partly due to the fact that I only began studying the remote control after switching off the light.
Food during a dark retreat as a surprise
Around midday an immensely warm-hearted being brings you an absolutely magical feast, and you certainly won’t go wrong if you don’t let them reveal the contents of the “delivery”, because that way you will deepen and refine your perception even further. Carefully carrying, tasting and sniffing unfamiliar (and immensely delicious) food in the dark is a bit like cuddling and then falling asleep in the embrace of a beloved being, when alongside sleep you are carried away by the gorgeous scent of her hair and skin while the warmth of her Heart brings tears of happiness to your eyes… Lenka will probably tell you that it’s the darkness that does it, but she herself is a real wizard in the kitchen, and you will surely feel with your own senses that she cooks with Love – no more need be revealed.
After the 3rd night, when a song by D. Deyl (“…never again will I betray your soul”) kept playing over and over in my mind, the answer to my first question appeared – I finally understood what had actually happened back then, years ago, and that all it had apparently taken for all of it was a single lie of mine! It is not really possible to describe in words everything that then went on with my mind and emotions, but I felt immense relief; years of sadness dissolved as if by a magic wand into tears, into even deeper gratitude and perhaps into an even stronger Love than before, if such a thing is even possible. A single moment, and how it managed to shake the whole soul… Were it not for the dark retreat, I would certainly have gone on tormenting myself for many more years. The relief manifested itself in very deep layers; afterwards I sang to myself in my mind, laughed at all sorts of things (forgive me, but a description here would really take too long) and everything took on a completely new flavour.
On the 4th night I again had very strange dreams, and this time I saw quite clearly that during dreaming a specific situation is deliberately created while a certain aspect of the mind is tested to see how it will react to it, whereby a kind of study and development takes place similar to what we all go through in everyday life. And above all, you once again feel strongly that you and the mind are not one and the same. A few years ago I had the honour of spending several days with the master Nukunu, when among other things he spoke of the stream of thoughts and emotions as a hurricane, and of how its inner, motionless and perfectly calm centre is precisely us. It is one thing to hear it and imagine it, another to actually experience it and let the mind understand it. I saw the mind as a cluster of personalities of various natures and characters, I saw how, as it gains wisdom, this mind grows richer and purer at the same time, I saw cosmic “plantations” full of hundreds of thousands of searching eyes rising towards a bluish glow, I saw a ceiling softly lit by a bluish floor, I saw for instance 5 disparate thoughts within 2 seconds and not one of them was mine, I saw the choice that we all have before death, and I relived what V. Megre wrote in his book The Rites of Love, when in it a man was dying who had lived a life full of unfulfilled Love:
“I will not think of my new birth; to them I give my mind for creation. I give it for their happiness and delight. Be incarnated, meet one another, live through the centuries, Radomir, Lyubomila, I am your companion, not your enemy.” On the grass lay the Vedruss, not groaning. Weakened, but still he managed to press the figurine of his beloved woman to his chest. “Let good be done,” he whispered, as if delirious, to his beloved…
I also felt very clearly that when a person wants to be a parent, they should first be very clearly aware of their responsibility and of the necessity to heal and clear away as many of their own pains, blocks and troubles as possible, so that none of it is passed on to their children. And when they do see their own shortcomings in their children, not to despair, but to look within themselves for answers and ways to bring everything into harmony.
After the 5th night, the answer to the 3rd question landed “in my hands” – whether I should seek Her out and confide everything I carry within me. In my notebook I then wrote only “I will not break the Last promise”; the sadness and longing returned, but now in a different, reconciled form. A scene came to mind from the series Goro the White Dog, which I used to watch as a little boy: a girl in a moving car blew a whistle twice, and he knew what it meant and that he had to obey. But I had long known that, regardless of what I mean to her, I would go on grinding and polishing that little stone until it became a diamond that one day I will lay at Her feet.
A dark retreat opens you up
Friends, I could share much more with you, but even if thousands of pages were filled with thousands of experiences, it would still be the mind that was the narrator, and as such it would, willy-nilly, lead away from Reality. Perhaps I will tell you only this much more: the darkness is a friend and will try to help you open up to everything you have within you. If you carry in your mind something you would rather forget (and from which you can never run away), the darkness will help you process it and distinguish what is illusion and what is Reality; forbidden thoughts, desires and passions will want to come to the surface at all costs. You may have deep respect for the free will of a Beloved being and, aware of the power of human thoughts and wishes, you may suppress your dreams, but it won’t work forever. And it is the darkness that will open your eyes.
And one very last thing, or rather the last note from my notebook: “The truth is always right under our noses; only our eyes don’t see it.” That is why we should look with our Hearts.
With love
David
