Claiming the Dark

An excerpt from, The Light Inside the Dark :


To learn how to live means claiming more of the territory of life, even, or especially, the darkness. When we begin our inward journey, we think it will be a continuous ascent. But we find that however well we try, we fall into pain, into the excruciating awareness that if we are human we love, and if we love we are vulnerable. The darkness presses hard on us- turbulent, autonomous, full of obsession and loss. It seems greater than we are and has a mule-like resistance to common sense. As Jung remarked, everything unconscious remains fate.

If at this time we cling to the spirit, we will think that the fall itself is the problem. Spiritual traditions have a strong tendency to see things this way. The classical solution, then, known in monasteries around the world, is to detach and so cease to suffer. But it is more likely that we pay too little attention to our pain, that we are too eager to clamber back to the cool, pure heights and their certainties. Here, in this human life we share, another kind of spirituality might serve us better: one that sees it is our very losses that save us, by bringing the aspiring spirit downwards and initiating us into soul. This is why the way up- into the true life- begins with the way down.

This revelation of the intimate closeness of beauty and suffering may unbalance our previous idea of order. It tells us that, like Rilke in front of the archaic torso of Apollo, we must change our lives. We must learn to attend more acutely, to grope through the labyrinth, holding the twine of spiritual practice as we head into the dark. Through patient observation, then, we find that it is our thoughts and feelings that make us happy or sad, that the quality of our attention changes the colors of the day. This discovery of the reality and then the consolation of the inner life is our one solution to the problem of suffering, which is also the problem of living up to the underlying, and equally pervading, happiness of life.

Something to ponder, yes?