Enlightenment about the Dark as a Blessing and a Sacred Space to Nurture Our Spiritual Lives
By Anna Rohleder
February 23, 2021
What do you call an enlightenment about the dark?
Something shifted for me around the winter solstice
last year, that time in late December when the days are shortest and the nights
are longest, to make me perceive darkness in a new way: To see its beauty. To
feel its healing capacity. And to sense its preciousness and fragility. Like so
many other inhabitants of the pre-industrial world, from wild animals to
rainforests and glaciers to silence itself, it is a treasure whose value we may
only recognise once it is lost.
As I began to reflect on the dark, it seemed to me
that we have a cultural prejudice against it. Everyday speech equates darkness
with confusion and ignorance at best and evil at worst. Both collective and
personal fears are associated with the dark. A newspaper in America recently
adopted the phrase, “Democracy dies in darkness” as its motto, implicitly
claiming the role of enlightening the public.
In the religious domain, light is associated not just
with the truth of facts but with the capital-T truths of morality and
metaphysics. Almost always there is a sense of light as something exalted and
lofty. Maybe because the original source of light that we knew as human beings
came from the heavens — the sun, the moon and the stars — we still look up to
the light, literally and figuratively, as a superior force.
And yet. There is something strange about making light
“good” and the dark “bad”. It is a distortion, one that splits life and our
psyches asunder. When we make darkness bad, we burden the beings and qualities
that inhabit the dark with the projections of our own shadows. Bats, owls,
wolves and other nocturnal creatures become “scary”, and people kill them. The
soil of the Earth, which is the living, breathing ground of our very being,
becomes “dirt” that is drugged, poisoned and scattered to the winds. Even night
itself has become nearly extinct as an experience, becoming merely another
“time of day” thanks to our electrical power grids, our glowing screens and
other machines that are always on, always lighting up.
There is a passage in the Masnavi where Maulana Rumi
seems to anticipate the light-fuelled addictions of our time. He says:
If night never came, people would waste themselves
pursuing all they desire.
They would give their own bodies to be consumed for
the sake of their desires and greed.
But night appears, a treasure of Mercy, to save them
from desires for a short while.
(Masnavi III: 3728–30; from Love is a Stranger,
translated by Kabir Helminski)
Part of the shock of my own “dark revolution” was
realising that I too have been a light junkie for most of my life: preoccupied
with productivity in my worldly affairs and uncomfortable with the qualities of
darkness within. The velvety depths. The fertile mysteries. This is difficult
territory for my ego, or nafs, which depends on maps and schedules, and has
always been anxious to see what lies ahead. But I am coming to understand
something about this compulsion to switch on the lights and always be “on” oneself.
I think it is not just an unconscious expression of our cultural impatience and
restlessness. In my case at least, it is rooted in a longstanding sense of not
being safe, and having to continually scan the environment for danger.
Since those of us who are sighted rely so much on our
vision to understand the world, the darkness represents the unknown. My Nafs
fears what it can’t see, and collectively we seem to fear what lies outside the
searchlight of human consciousness. And yet — while we may not know what is in
darkness, we do know the dark itself. It is where we begin and end each day. It
is where we begin and end our lives.
As the ground of mystery we spring from, the dark
offers special opportunities for spiritual practice. The value of Tahajjud,
or night prayers, is attested to in the Qur’an as well as numerous Hadith. In
Surah Muzammil, we hear:
Keep awake [in prayer] at night, all but a small part
of one half thereof – or make it a little less than that, or add to it [at
will]; and [during that time]recite the Qur’an calmly and distinctly, with thy
mind attuned to its meaning.
(Qur’an 73:2–4)
There is also this verse from Surah Hud:
And observe the prayer at the two ends of the day and
in the nearness of the night, for good deeds remove evil deeds: this is a
reminder to those who remember.
(Qur’an 11:114)
Among Prophet Muhammad’s (peace and blessings be upon
him) best-known and most commented habits was the practice of praying at night.
In one Hadith reported by Bukhari & Muslim:
The Messenger of God said, “If people knew what lies
in abandonment (of desires) they would race toward it, and if they knew what
blessing lies in the prayers of the night and morning they would come to them,
even if they had to crawl to do so.” (From The Book of Hadith, copyright 2007
The Book Foundation)
In the Prophet’s time, and even into the era of our
immediate ancestors, it was normal to wake in the middle of the night. It was
part of the pattern of bimodal sleep, or sleeping in two parts, whereby people
went to bed soon after sundown, slept for a few hours, and then woke for a few
hours; “waking” meant to rest in a kind of meditative state between sleep and
full alertness. Then people slept again until morning. This was how human
beings inhabited the dark for thousands of years: as a multi-layered experience
of dreams, meditation and rest.
But with the advent of electric light and industrial
time schedules, the pattern changed. Our daytime activities began to encroach
on more of the hours once protected by darkness. At some point, sleep turned
into a standard 8-hour shift, the part of the workday when we are supposed to
turn off our bodies and charge our batteries like any other device.
And now, here we are, just as Maulana warned: with
night reduced to the bare modicum of “down time” and the dark effectively
banished, we are burning up our own bodies, and the body of the Earth, in the
pursuit of our incandescent desires.
But we have a choice about how to use our will. As
automatic as it may be to switch on a light, it can be a practice of presence
to decide to stay in the dark, and with the dark, instead.
For myself, I am finding an unexpected sense of
serenity and ease by keeping the lights off. When I awaken at 2 or 3 in the
morning now, I no longer force myself back to sleep. I do my best not to look
at my phone. Rather, I pick up my tesbih and pray with the beads. There’s
something so comforting about holding them in the dark, almost as though they
are holding my hand as well. And after a round or two, I find myself drifting
into sleep easily and naturally.
It may seem like a small thing, but for me it has
changed a great deal about how I feel about my own days and nights. It has also
made me reflect that perhaps there is a healing value for all of us in reclaiming
the dark, as part of the wholeness that is our birth right.
What if we could reframe the dark as a blessing and a
sacred space to nurture our spiritual lives? What treasures might we find in
that cave, what roses might grow in that soil?
Original Headline: In the nearness of the night
Source: The Patheos