Thursday Thealogy: Darkness

“With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea…Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?” –Henry Beston

“True darkness is the…rebuilding process, by which the universe strengthens itself. It is a time when the hidden forces of nature are busy regrouping. When there is darkness, life force is regaining its integrity, so that at the proper season it will reemerge and produce growth and revival.” –Rabbi Steven Fisdel

These quotes both caught my eye in the most recent edition of UU World magazine (as did this super cool glass sculpture). I like the notion of Endarkenment.

I’ve had multiple lucid dreaming experiences that progressed to a point in which I became aware of, “being in the place between dreaming and awake”—i.e. I stopped dreaming and was not awake and yet, I was still conscious at some level and was “somewhere else” (not a dream place, nor a waking state). This place was completely dark. I am aware of my body on the bed and yet, my personal awareness is not dreaming, it just is, in this very, very dark “holding” place. Upon awakening from these experiences, I had to wonder if death is this place too. When I first wrote about these dark experiences, I had another dream. Beginning by being chased by some men through the woods, I became aware that I was dreaming and began to fly—I was then aware of my body in the air and saw a vision of a transparent Goddess figure spreading her arms and becoming absorbed into the larger sky. I felt dissolved and became aware of myself in that dark space again—the place between dreams and wakefulness, where I was both cognizant of my body in bed, but my consciousness was “somewhere else” that was not dreaming, that just was. Total darkness. It is not a scary place.