In the creation myths of the Discover Visibly Longer, Fuller,Younger-looking Hair Guaranteed prior to the birth of the human race and, in this darkness, an undifferentiated oneness where all is God and everything is one. You will find no human beings, only God-beings, or rather, facets of God waiting to be born – if a unified consciousness may have aspects at all.
And then something happens. God becomes lonely and longs for someone, a beloved, or becomes curious about his powers and potential as a God. In order to know himself and what he could be capable of, God need to do two things: she must separate himself into at least one other form so he will look back at himself and know very well what it is usually to be God. And, so they can see what he is now, the God of darkness must create light.
God said,’Let there be light ‘, and there is light…Genesis I
Then he realised, I indeed, I’m this creation, for I’ve poured it forth from myself…Upanishads
And so it is that with God’s’illumination’comes separation and the arrival of opposites, parts in conflict with one another. The universal consciousness most of us once knew becomes split into many – a chaos of fragments, a global unknown, a oneness divided.
This notion of separation and the fate of man within it is there in mythology around the world, whose stories talk about the length and ambiguity of God (this original first consciousness) from man (what God has now become).
The Greeks, as an example, regarded human beings because the playthings of the Gods, who have been multiple and often at war with themselves, with mankind a small and insignificant concern. In Christian mythology we also have a God who’s unavailable to us, and so we are given angels, archangels, and even fallen angels to help keep us company instead.
“We come to God in bits, dismembered. We don’t know if the bits can be made to match in the direction they used to”, writes Michael Begg, an Irish philosopher. His prayer is just a simple one: “We ask God to re-member us “.But to do this, we should first remember ourselves by going back to that particular primal darkness and experiencing a global without forms.
RECONNECTION
Man has been searching for reconnection with the infinite and for a meaning alive since his realization of separation. Frequently, when it is serious, this search will require devote darkness – of a physical kind as opposed to the metaphysical “dark night of the soul”, as Carl Jung defined it.
Recognizing the primal union that was within that first darkness, sages and mystics have always used the dark as a car for returning to a state of bliss and understanding. This go back to peace and stillness enables them to break through the concerns and anxieties of these earthly lives, with all its socially-prescribed reality and the conditioning of the entire world outside, so that they might, in some way, attain reconnection by having an undifferentiated consciousness where all is One once again.
Within the Shinto tradition of Japan, as an example, there is a discipline referred to as komori – seclusion – undertaken in the darkness of a cave, a temple, a shrine, or even a room in one’s house, that is specially prepared and purified so it may bring the gift of power and illumination. Japanese texts make frequent mention of sojourns in places such as for example these and in windowless huts, referred to as the komorido, which may be available on various holy mountains where ascetics undertake their dark retreats.
The practice of spending extended periods within caves may also be present in the remote peninsula of Land’s End in Cornwall, where Iron Age communities felt compelled to make subterranean passages, referred to as fogou, a word which translates from the Cornish as’underground chamber’and may derive from ogo, meaning cave. These typically include an extended passage with walls built up in horizontal courses of rough granite stones, some 40-50 feet long, six feet tall and five to six feet in width, constructed in a deliberate curve, and entered via a low restrictive doorway, so the initiate must bow to the darkness on entering.
On one other side of the entire world, among the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, the darkness is also sacred. Indeed, in keeping with other ancient tribes, it is forbidden even to illuminate the darkness, for light is proven to scare the sprits away.
When Malidoma Some – who was born a Dagara tribesman but abducted and raised at a Jesuit Mission – returned 15 years later to his tribe he unearthed that no-one in the village wanted any form of light, and that the villagers were expected to function in the dark. “I was presented with light because I had lost the capacity to cope with darkness”, he writes, but “each time people saw the timid light of the shea-oil lamp in my own room, they’d disappear as a result as if it signaled the current presence of someone using the elements of the cosmos. No child ever stumbled on sit by me during the night”
Somewhere for us all, darkness holds the answers to our being and our destinies – and yet all we want do is close our eyes to reconnect with our source.