Darkness Retreat
Pallavi and I walked through the heavy rain to the darkness retreat (at the Rubin Museum on 17th) and were asked to sit in silent darkness for 40 minutes. Absolute pitch darkness—but not complete silence, for you could hear the hvac systems and the outside traffic ripping the standing water. I had not experienced darkness so total since I was thirteen years old, walking at night in the boreal forests of northern Minnesota, also in the pouring rain (it was as if the rain was made out of darkness).
Sitting still in the dark of the auditorium my body began to distort, my head lifting off and pulling away to a great distance from my torso, my hands turned large and upside down and backwards, all knuckle, my legs phased from being to non-being. Violet Rorschach bats flew before my eyes, dwindling into points of light. Time sped up. I banged a table with my hand (on accident) and several persons gasped in alarm. The lights came on; our forty minutes had passed. I was embarrassed for my noise but only for a moment; distraction in meditation sharpens the will to zero.
A peculiar practice of Tibetan Buddhism is to live in silent, solitary darkness for 49 days. (Our guide at the Rubin that day, a Mr. Bujdoss, had done this trip, not once but twice. He said that by day five he thought he had died). This ascetic practice is meant to simulate the bardo realm: that realm between dying and rebirth, where the soul wanders in a psychical labyrinth for 49 days and meets demons and deities, tests and peril—it is possible, depending on your karma, that your soul may be dragged into hell. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (14th c) functions as a kind of Lonely Planet guide to this realm of the dead, meant to be recited by a priest to the corpse of the recently deceased leading them through the labyrinth.
And yet the Book of the Dead may be just as useful in the simulated bardo of the darkness retreat for it does not take many days of prolonged darkness until the mind enters a vivid waking dream filled with all manner of visions and terrors and wandering entities. Allegedly this state is due to the body’s slow release of 5-MeO-DMT and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine: DMT—an endogenous compound integral to consciousness, but that is also the base substance in Ayahuasca. DMT Space (that can be visited by smoking DMT—I’ve been there) is likewise an exceedingly weird realm of impossible vividness—that the mind nevertheless accepts as real—and that is inhabited by mysterious entities—the machine elves of McKenna lore. This “fairy realm” is not exactly a nice place to visit (as my friend Mark likes to say, “we are not in people land any more”); like the bardo realm, it is possible that your mind can be dragged into hell (psychosis).
While I can only speculate, it seems clear—to this reader anyhow—that these three realms: the Bardo realm (as described in reports of near-death experience), the simulated bardo dreamspace of the darkness retreat, and the fairy-realm accessed by DMT, are all one and the same space.
A Wrathful Deity
