Host Michael Taft continues his conversation with with Andrew Holecek about the transformative practice of Dark Retreat; the reasons behind the recent surge of interest in darkness practices; its relationship to the feminine principle and as an antidote to runaway patriarchy; the three “tracks” or “schools” of dark retreat in Tibetan Vajrayana: Kalachakra, Nyingma, and Bön; the power of darkness for working with fear, fear of death, projections; fear as a sign that you’re close to the truth, and hints for integration post darkness.
Andrew Holecek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions. He is the Resident Contemplative Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, and a research consultant for the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at Northwestern University. His work involves studies on dream yoga and the practice of dark retreat. Dr. Holecek is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the author of nine books, and a concert pianist. He has completed the Tibetan Buddhist three-year retreat and is a frequent subject in scientific studies on meditation and lucid dreaming. His work integrates ancient wisdom traditions with contemporary perspectives, aiming to help individuals navigate spiritual challenges and end-of-life experiences. He is currently writing two books on dark retreat. Holecek holds degrees in classical music, biology, and a doctorate in dental surgery.
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Full Transcript
Michael Taft:
Welcome to Deconstructing Yourself, the podcast for meta-modern mutants interested in meditation, awakening, nondual Shaiva Tantra, deity yoga, jhanas, spinosaurus, predictive processing, psychedelics, nonduality, consciousness hacking, and much, much more. My name is Michael Taft, your host on the podcast, and in this episode, I’m speaking with Andrew Holecek. Andrew Holecek is an interdisciplinary scholar, practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions.
He is the resident contemplative scholar at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, and a research consultant for the Cognitive Neuroscience Program at Northwestern University. His work involves studies on dream yoga and the practice of dark retreat, and he is the author of nine books. In my recent program with Andrew, which was called Talking About Dark Retreat, we decided to continue the conversation at a later time because there was just so much interesting material there.
Well, we ended up doing that, and this episode is part two of Talking About Dark Retreat. So without further ado, I give you Talking About Dark Retreat, Part 2 with Andrew Holecek. Andrew, welcome back once again to the Deconstructing Yourself Podcast.
Andrew Holecek: Michael, so great once again to hang with you. So appreciate the time.
MT: Thanks, and we’re doing this rather quickly after the last one because we did kind of promise to do a part two about the darkness material, which I’m super excited about. And you know, something else, which is in the meantime, since part one has come out, I’ve noticed just a tremendous amount of interest in this topic, not only the podcast we did, but the topic in general, looking on, I don’t know what to call it, but lets say meditation or dharma, Twitter and other places. This darkness stuff is for some reason really hitting a nerve.
And I’m curious if you have any ideas why that might be, and if you’re experiencing that, or am I just making it up?
AH: No, you’re definitely not making it up. It’s one reason that I elected to come out of the closet almost literally in this case and riff on this stuff because it’s definitely getting out there. The interest is really growing, borderline exploding, and I think as more Psychonauts, spelunkers of the mind, necrophiliacs, lovers of the night and darkness like myself, taste this and make dark medicine, you’re going to see more and more of it because of all the extraordinary restorative aspects that we hinted at in our last conversation together, we can circle back to some of those things. And I reflected on this quite a bit. And my conjecture around this, I’m curious how this lands with you, is that there’s something ineffably profound about darkness.
I mentioned last time this notion of it is like a Rorschach practice where we project so many things onto this metaphysical mirror, but for some people repulsive because it represents this kind of death space. They’re afraid of it. For other people, especially some Gen-Xers, Y-ers, I don’t even know what the new generation is called. It’s cool because it’s got this goth quality and that’s magnetizing. But in my experience, and I’ve noticed this in some social situations, there’s something elemental about darkness. There’s some inarticulate archetypal primordial quality to this that is magnetizing because it represents origins.
I mean, I can’t recall if we talked about this last time, but allegedly, we don’t know for sure, but allegedly prior to the big flash of the Big Bang, well, it had to flash out of something, otherwise it wouldn’t be a flash. So we could conjecture that that came out of a primordial bedrock of darkness. In the Book of Genesis, darkness precedes light.
In many, many world mythologies, manifest reality arises out of darkness. We were conceived in darkness, more likely, spent nine months in it and then came into the world. We’re going to return to darkness. If you look at your mind, out of the background radiation of the elemental mind arises the light, the luminous display of thoughts, emotions and everything else that arises.
So I think Michael, it has to do with this kind of maybe even genetic level, resonance with just what darkness represents. It represents depth and interiority and intimacy, and all the things, by the way, that I think are sadly missing in this age, and I’ve been thinking a little bit more about this. We can come back to this later because it’s a topic I just want to put it on the table, how darkness, this dark medicine can serve as a magnificent potential remedy or counterbalancing measure to things like AI. So I’ll pause because that’s a different track, but I think it has to do something like that.
There’s something so ineffably deep, intimate, profound archetypal about this, that is magnetizing for people.
MT: It does make sense, and we could go in a Jungian direction and say how our culture is strongly overbalanced in the mental, rational, conscious, light forces, the solar forces. Here is almost like not just a symbol or representation, but an actual experience, almost like a physical experience of the primordial, the chaos, the darkness, the lunar, the feminine, all that. Right there, it’s not a symbol, you’re in it. The other thing that it reminds me of, culturally, and this is maybe a counterpoint almost to what I was just saying, its got the hardcoreness that people like of like the Wim Hof thing and the ice baths and all that kind of like extreme sports sort of feel of some parts of the spiritual journey, right?
AH: For sure, yeah. The non-negotiable, uncompromising nature of it is like a challenge for people. It’s like, you know, what can I do with this? But you suggested something here that’s worth pinging around. I want to put an exclamation point on something you said. I think another reason people are interested in this practice is because there’s an underlying intuition about loss of the feminine.
MT: Yes.
AH: And this warrants just a tiny riff. You know, in Buddhist tradition, light is masculine and darkness is feminine. And so when we step into the darkness, and this is actually my feeling when I go into it, I feel like I’m entering a primordial embrace of the feminine. And in fact, in Buddhist languaging, this was a massive experience for me on one particular retreat a number of years ago, I actually felt I was stepping into the dark and being held by the primordial mother. You know, this term prajnaparamita, the mother of all, what is the mother of the awakened mind?
MT: Yes.
AH: Who is the mother of your awakened mind? And so it was one of the most beautiful feelings of meeting the deities. You know, they talk about, you go into the dark to meet the gods and the deities, and this is another rich topic we can talk about. Well, what does that really mean? Well, for me, meeting this and being embraced by the feminine, and feeling the warm, loving embrace of the darkness was amazing. And also briefly, this gets really kind of sexy in the Tantric, truest sense, is this a Tantric meditation, Dark Retreat, and there are a number of unique characteristics of Tantra. And one of these is that in Tantra, the female penetrates the male. And so when you’re in the dark, and darkness represents this feminine quality, and you open to it, you surrender to it, you allow the darkness to penetrate you, to saturate you, that’s where all the restoration, the curative aspects take place. And then you’re balancing this equation of otherwise runaway patriarchal energy, because, have you noticed, there’s a little bit too much artificial light, literally.
There’s a little bit too much runaway patriarchy, literally. And so to me, I think another deep resonance here is, I say this with quite a bit of qualification, and everything’s in quotation marks. But I think if one relates to dark medicine properly, I think it can be viewed as a kind of radical spiritual feminism, only in the sense that it balances this crazy runaway masculine energy with way too much light. So I think that’s something definitely to put an exclamation point on, that draws people.
MT: Yeah, and of course, that would apply to both men and women. But our culture is so solar and so intense, we’re so egoic and focused on mental achievement and the mind and all that, the mind in the sense of the cognition as being the primary function and I would say that this feeling of even talking about Dark Retreat brings up this whole other thing, right? This whole letting go and maybe even the challenge of encountering this primordial, what I like to call chaos, even though it’s a different meaning of the word chaos, not confusion, but that sense of potential rather than actual or manifested.
So what do you think about the other part of this though that almost counterbalances that feminine quality, which is the extreme sport quality of it, which I also sense in some of the interest.
AH: Before I get to that, I just want to say one tiny important thing, emphasizing what you just said, that whether we know it or not, we live in a solar-centric reality where there’s a lot more solar deities than there are lunar deities. We live in a sight-centric culture, which is the most dominant sense faculty, the most dualistic sense faculty, where I can’t remember where the exact data is, something like one-third of brain processing power goes to working with sense of sight, which is the most dualistic superficial sense. We’re a wake culture, where ironically, it was the three main states of consciousness according to Hinduism and Buddhism, waking, dreaming, and deep dream of sleep. Well, I was just reading some material last night from Nondual Shaiva Tantra that the waking state is the most contracted, the most out of touch state.
MT: That’s right.
AH: The state with the least potential for psychospiritual evolution. We have it completely bass-ackwards as we actually fall asleep, and where are we falling? We’re falling into darkness. We’re falling awake if we maintain lucidity. In other words, the waking state is a more real dimension. What did Thoreau say? In dreams, we are our truest life alike. Then if you maintain lucidity in the deep dreamless state, that’s when you’re the most awake. Ramana Maharshi famously said here, that which does not exist in deep dreamless sleep is not real.
That’s the other thing that’s about this. We have a sight-centric culture, awake-centric culture, and a light-centric or photo-centric culture. Because of this, all of these, really in the service of the mother of all centricities, which is what?
Ego-centricity. This is another part of the balancing thing. As we go into the dark, sight is taken away, light is taken away, wake, in the normal sense, is taken away. When you get rid of these three centricities on the surface of ego-centricity, well, what does that do to the ego? It basically starts to deconstruct egoic structure, like we talked about last time. This is another little, not little, I think, major point about what darkness has to offer.
And to come back to your question, for sure, going into the dark is kind of an extreme sport, as a way to test yourself against new metrics and all that. That, I think, is also one of the reasons that people are interested in it. We talked about this last time. Some of the articles in sports magazines about people going into dark retreat is the next extreme, meditation, extreme sport, that kind of thing. And, like I said last time, boy, that is the absolute worst way to go into the dark, because then the only thing that’s going to come out is just a stronger ego.
MT: Well, this is the thing, it’s the ego’s way of trying to encounter the darkness, right? Instead of surrendering to it, it’s to conquer it or whatever.
AH: Exactly. And good luck with that. It’s a little bit like trying to conquer high-dose psychedelics. Get back to me on how well that works, right?
MT: Exactly. Especially if you think you’re conquering it, try a little bit more.
AH: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s the beauty of this practice, just like with high-dose psychedelics, just like honestly, just like with death, you have to surrender. And that’s what it invites at first, if you catch on to it.
And then just like death, non-negotiable, non-compromising, that is eventually what it demands. And that’s why it is referred to as a forceful method of liberation, because it is non-negotiable and non-compromising. And so if you come in with this more feminine, this is interesting, a preliminary data, this is all anecdotal because we don’t have it yet. But women tend to do better than men in the dark. They tend to resonate with it more, they tend to surrender to it more, they allow themselves to open up more, because as many women come out saying, I never felt so safe in my life as when I was in the dark.
And paraphrasing a little bit, it’s like no one could see me, how I look didn’t matter, appearances don’t matter. The major aspect of Dark Retreat is all the things that wake centricity, sight centricity, light centricity focus on, appearance–its gone. Appearances don’t matter in the dark. And so think about what this does for people who deal with body dysmorphias, and people who are aging and people who have issues with physicality. You go into the dark and you realize these outer superficial dimensions of my being, they don’t matter in here, right? And so it’s a wonderful way to balance the book, so to speak, to what really matters.
At the end of the day, we use this phrase, right? At the end of the day, to know what, what really counts, what matters at the end, what’s important, what’s really substantive. Well, what happens at the end of the day, Michael? It gets dark. And so darkness itself represents this quality of importance and essentiality, substance, and I think that’s another reason people are magnetized. So I’ve kind of skidded around, but I do think it’s important.
MT: So interesting. So to me, those are some of the reasons, but I just want to see if there are any others that you’re finding out there that I haven’t noticed.
AH: Why are people magnetized?
MT: Yes. Yes.
AH: Well, I think there’s others. One it’s just so f-ing bizarre. I mean, it’s just so different. And yeah, I can’t recall everything I mentioned in our last conversation, but in the rare instances, I do bring this up in public. I’m doing it more obviously, but I didn’t use to. It’s a conversational stopper because it’s just so bloody different. And so I think that for people it is magnetizing. It’s outrageous. It puts people way out of their comfort zone. It takes them to the edge. It’s mysterious. It’s ineffable.
And so you start to put all these ingredients together and you start to see why there’s this developing interest. And then especially when people are now coming out and posting on YouTube and Twitter and whatnot, I’ve listened to a number of these myself. It’s really drawing a lot of traffic from people coming out with these kinds of testimonials.
But I’m curious, Michael, from your own side, for instance, when you first heard about it, or where your thinking has gone along these lines, I mean, what are your thoughts here?
MT: Well, besides the balancing out the solar, masculine, egoic quality of our culture, which is probably the most that has ever been in any culture, so it’s a big deal, and also, again, the extreme sport quality, I think that it’s also just, I’ll say this in a positive way, but also in kind of, lets say, not so positive way, its the next thing.
AH: Yeah.
MT: It’s the new thing. So for a while there, it was all about Jhana and then several different movements in the hardcore Dharma field, and then for a while, nonduality became the big buzzword, and then Jhana came back, and then now it’s dark. So in terms of the consumerist marketing world of dharmic teachings, it’s the latest thing, right?
And so that’s kind of the not-so-positive way of saying it, but to touch upon that again in a little more gentle of a manner. For people who’ve done a lot of meditation or people who’ve done a lot, it’s interesting, right? In my own case, again, my long meditation history, but part of it in there was working with Shinzin a lot for decades, Shinzin Young, and then what happened is I was using on my own a technique of his where you’re really working with very closely in a close vipassana way with the arising of mental imagery.
And that led to some very significant breakthroughs for me, both in doing dream yoga stuff which you and I talked about in the past, but also in understanding or directly seeing or clear seeing the construction of everything in awareness, all experience as a construction. And I was so naïve in certain ways. I sort of thought I’d invented it, you know, like I didn’t realize that’s a whole way of working. So for me, this thing about the centrality of this deep, deep, deep clarity about the construction of the perceptual experience of being a person is obviously foundational, fundamental, and it seems to be the thing that darkness practice is going directly for.
AH: That is so spot on. Yeah, that is so spot on. Like for instance, I mean, here’s an analog. When people do arguably the ultimate kind of absorption practice, Nirodha Samapati or Nirodha Samapati, which is like a post Jhana stage, you know, sometimes called the ninth Jhana, where consciousness itself is even turned off. Well, one of the main reasons people do this is that when the mind comes back online, and this is highly analogous to what happens in the dark, is you’re coming out of such an incredible dimension of cessation, that when things start to come back into manifestation, and you’re approaching this from this point of complete cessation, you start to see things you’ve never seen before. For instance, like the 12 links of dependent origination, you know, the intellectual content of enlightenment, with arguably what the Buddha discovered that composed his awakening.
This was made available to him and others who attain these levels of deep cessation, because the mind slows down and stops to such an extent that when it comes back into gear, you start to see how the movie is stitched back together. You start to see how everything is super glued back together. And this is an amazing aspect of dark medicine as well.
This is the reconstruction part, because you go in, I mentioned this before, it really is like entering the death space. It’s the main reason I continue to do it in the context of bardo yoga. But what I discovered very delightfully is that, yes, it’s not merely just entering the painful bardo of dying, which is the first of the three death bardos where one is fundamentally forced to let go.
That’s, by the way, what makes it painful is the letting go. But then when you come out, you’re stepping into the karmic bardo of becoming. And this is why it’s the penultimate bardo practice, because when you step out of the dark, you start to see how the habit patterns kick back in.
And habit is just a Western translation for karma. And so you literally see, I mean, the most intimate, profound ways. To me, one of the absolute most fascinating parts of the Dark Retreat is what happens when I come out. It’s just breathtaking. You see how everything comes back online, how I see the engine starting and how my perceptual world is stitched back together. Because literally, it’s not just epistemological levels of deconstruction, but it’s perceptual levels of deconstruction that take place in the dark. So I come out, I really don’t see the world the same way. It takes me a while to stitch my world back together. It’s not always particularly comfortable.
It’s actually a little bit like I don’t do LSD anymore for just this reason, because I do not enjoy the process of coming back into form. But it’s somewhat analogous to that, but more enjoyable in the sense that I can titrate it and I can control it more. But I throw that into the works.
There was one thing you said, again, and I want to just come back. It’s the next new thing. Of course, it’s not a new thing. It’s been around for thousands of years. It’s an old thing that’s just being recycled. The last thing I wanted to say, just parenthetically to why people go in, I’m hearing this a lot these days, is darkness also represents deep restoration, deep rest. The capacity to go in there and just really recover on a purely biophysical level. That should not be dismissed by the way. Something about going in there and sleeping for 14, 16 hours a day for the first couple of days, there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Because that’s another part of the equation that gets balanced when you’re in the dark. You don’t realize how sleep deprived you are. You don’t realize how your body is craving this level of deep restoration. This is another thing that’s also from a purely physiological level, is I think another very compelling reason why people are magnetized to this. But I just wanted to tuck that in as a parenthetical interjection.
MT: Yeah, there’s so many threads to pull out there. But I do want to say that makes perfect sense, the deep restoration point. But of course, it’s a little bit at odds with the challenging, uncomfortable, outrageous, difficult nature of Dark Retreat. And I assume that has to do with how long you’re in there.
AH: Exactly, exactly.
MT: So I’m, of course, very intrigued by Dark Retreat’s analogous function, where you start with Nirodha Samapatti or other practice like that, where it gives you the opportunity to watch the brain start to reconstruct its model of the world, right? And my question there might be either super easy to answer or maybe quite difficult. I’m not sure. But how long do you have to be in there before you get a really deep, clear taste of that?
AH: Boy, it really depends, Michael. I am so amazed at the variety of experiences here. I mean, some people come in, go in, I should say, and literally within a couple of hours, they’ll sign up for a four night, three day thing. Literally within a couple of hours, they’ll just say, this is not for me. And they’re out of there. High five to them. It’s not a defeat. It could be the most intelligent thing you do when you just say, you know, this medicine is just not for me. Not a problem at all. It’s one of many, many different techniques. And for some people, it just doesn’t resonate.
MT: And is that typically like this is too hard?
AH: Yes, it’s too hard. And there are some patterns developing, usually men, usually type As, overachievers. Again, they tend to self select. A lot of people kind of get screened out before they even get in. But some do get past this kind of self selecting barrier. Interestingly enough, some people that have a hard time, and this has been a surprise, are meditators. You’d be surprised. People who come in, tantric practitioners, 20, 30 years of doing high-falutin, psycho-spiritual technologies. And what we’ve discovered here, and we don’t have the data on this, but I’ve talked to a ton of people, plus the directors of the few centers that are there, they’re dear friends, I talk to them all the time.
Sometimes what happens is people that come in with all these techniques and whatnot, they feel that they can somehow outsmart or out-contextualize the darkness. And it’s the most amazing thing. Again, if you don’t surrender, open, allow yourself to be penetrated, I don’t want to be too dramatic here, but the darkness can pulverize you, right?
And so we’ve noticed that some of the people that actually have the hardest time are people who are meditators. Now, I have to throw in right into the mix here is that these are people who are not doing the very specific practices like cutting through meditations, trekchö, kadak, crossing over meditations, togal, and the like. So there are very specific types of meditations that are designed specifically for Dark Retreat. I’m not talking about those types of practices, because people who have that prep and go in, they tend to do really well.
I’m talking about the other group that have done all these different techniques, a whole bunch of other different practices. Some of which are even considered a contract. They go in, they feel like an outsmart, uncontextualize the darkness and it just doesn’t work. So those people, they never surrender. They defend, they contract, they don’t open.
They’ll get through three, four, five days, but there’s not a whole lot of transformation going on because they’re not allowing the medicine to get in. They’re not swallowing it, so to speak.
MT: So they’re tightening up.
AH: They’re tightening up. Instead of expanding, they’re contracting and the whole thing just backfires. You’ll come out worse than when you went in. But I’ve seen other people, and this is just the most amazing thing. Yeah, there are some metrics and some characteristics for people who do tend to succeed, by the way. But what that actually means is something we can talk about. What is actual success here? Sometimes your failures, so to speak, can be amazing successes because they show you where you’re stuck. So on one level, just like with the nocturnal meditations, there’s no failure with this practice because even if you come out, if you’re open to it, your failure, quote unquote, will simply show you where you’re stuck.
But I’ll come back to that. So other people that come in—and this is what’s just amazing—beginners, beginner mind people, some people who have little to no meditation, which you would think like, oh man, there’s no way they should go in there. Well, we’ve noticed a lot of people coming in, I mean, almost off the street, that have amazing experiences.
And my friends call these the sleeping Buddhas. You know, they just go in there, and they just have a curious, beginners, open mind. That’s the magic sauce for this retreat. And they come out having life-changing experiences within a couple of days. And so as we collect the data, again, this is all anecdotal. We don’t have it officially documented yet, but even anecdotally, we’re starting to notice some patterns, and eventually we’ll have the kind of hard statistical data here, which I think will be helpful.
But the varieties here, Michael, are all over the map. Some people come in, they come out really just amazingly transformed within a short period of time. Others go in and they just get hammered, and they go, this is not for me.
And so understanding this is important because everybody’s journey is really different. There are some overarching characteristics and patterns, like I mentioned in our last conversation about the descent of the mind, as it falls into itself. At this point, I can’t even say it surprises me anymore because I’ve been surprised so many times. And I’ve listened to hundreds of conversations, recorded some of these in person with people who have done this. It just never ceases to amaze me how different the journey can be. It’s a little bit like, I mean, you know, Mick Jagger and Rolling Stones, they were on to something, you know.
You may not always get what you want, but you will get what you need. And if you have that approach, and this is the way I go in, I mean, I’ve been doing this a heck of a long time, I never go in there thinking, oh, I’ve got this down, you know, I’m just going to like rock it. I never go in with that attitude. I always pause, I bow before I go into my cave or into my cabin, and I say something to the effect of like, what do you have to teach me this time? Because if I do that, every single time I go in, it’s a new wonderful journey. And what Lakar Rinpoche said so beautifully, you know, expectation is premeditated disappointment.
I love it. So drop the expectations, go in with the beginner’s mind, allow the darkness to defeat you, as Rilke put it in his beautiful poem, and that’s, to me, where the real magic starts with this practice. So it’s highly variable, highly idiosyncratic, and that’s what adds to the mystery behind it. That’s what makes it so magical.
MT: Now, of course, nobody owns Darkness Retreat, but as you say, people have been experiencing darkness in various ways and various cultures, obviously, forever. But I’m curious, in the Vajrayana tradition, are there big centers of Darkness Retreat? And if so, what are they? And furthermore, are there particular Bodhisattvas that are associated with Darkness Retreat? The way you brought up Prajnaparamita made me think of this.
AH: Oh, what a great question. Well, let’s start with the first one. And I’m not entirely sure what you mean when you say centers. Are you talking about physical centers?
MT: No, I mean more like schools.
AH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. So a little bit like what I think we hit it on in our first chat, there are these three main tracks in the Tibetan approach here, which is the one I’m the most familiar with.
There are others, you know, Mantak Chia and the Daoist tradition. But in the arena that I’m the most familiar with, the Tibetan approach, there’s these three tracks. The Kalachakra track, which has a very wonderful and quite specific way of looking at Dark Retreat through what I call the complete completion stage practices of the six limbs. The first stage is literally called Pratyahara, connected to Ashtanga Yoga, I think fifth of those, which is what? Sensory withdrawal.
MT: Yes.
AH: And I’m going to want to say just a tiny bit about this because this ties into what I mentioned earlier and then I’ll get back to the other two. This is why it’s helpful, by the way, to study these different strands because they have slightly different approaches to it. And so the Kalashakra strand, especially the first of the yogas of Pratyahara, is about sense withdrawal. And what happens here that is just so beautiful, it’s so compelling, is all external sensory distraction stimulation are taken away and one is basically forced into the most nondualistic of all our sense faculties, which is what, touch. Dark Retreat literally and metaphorically puts you in contact with and in touch with the deepest dimensions of your being, and therefore the deepest dimensions of reality, by returning you to the foundational dimension of contact and touch, by pulling away all of the sensory faculties that distract us. And so when all the sense faculties are withdrawn, this is my languaging, but its resonant with the Kalashakra, is one almost enters a remedial school where the sense faculties are reeducated and retrained.
And this is really compelling data you may be interested in terms of your own work with this podcast. Let me just say a little bit about this. When congenitally blind people have their sight restored through surgery and whatnot, it’s really interesting literature to read. Do you think they see the same world that we do when the bandages are taken off and for the first time in their life they can see?
MT: Yeah, not at all.
AH: The restoration of sight is more the work of the pedagogue, the educator, than the surgeon. And so it literally, in fact, some of these people really struggle and they prefer to go back into the dark. Some of them suicide. Some of them just say, I can’t deal with this. I prefer to be blind. And so this in itself, in terms of deconstructing that we talked about earlier, is really interesting that we are not metaphorically, we are literally trained to see the world this way.
We have this ridiculously fallacious notion that we passively represent reality. Speaking to the choir here, you know this. We don’t represent anything. Representationalism is really an outdated way of looking at things. This world is co-enacted, it’s enacted, it’s created, it’s brought forth through our participation. There is no independent world out there that we represent.
So when the sight is restored for a congenitally blind person, they literally have to be trained to see the world that we see. And so we don’t realize the degree of our indoctrination, our inculcation, how hypnotized, how toxified we become on all these levels, until we go into an environment like intensive sensory deprivation, where our senses, really, they’re withdrawn and they’re reeducated. And then when everything is taken away, and again, this is why I mentioned coming out is so bloody interesting for me. It’s almost my favorite part of Retreat now, becoming a very, very astute micro-phenomenologist. You know, phenomenology for listeners is basically the study of experience, of perception. Micro-phenomenology is just what it sounds like.
It’s the capacity of a trained practitioner, meditator, yoga, yogic person, whatever, to develop a really high granular ability to resolve reality at finer, finer levels. And studies have shown that, you know, the average untrained mind resolves perception at about 250 milliseconds, you know, which is about, millisecond is a thousand milliseconds. Meditators can resolve reality at least 10 times faster than that. So what this means, meditators literally, not metaphorically, see more, feel more, hear more, taste more. They literally see the world in a new way. So a long-winded way to say, you go into the dark, through the Kalachakra, to re-educate the senses, to withdraw them, then you come back out, and this is not a metaphor, you see the world in a different way. You literally perceive the world in a different way. That in itself is amazing. So that’s the Kalachakra Center.
MT: Just a quick question. Is simply observing it, it being the re-creation of the world in the mind, the re-education, or does this Kalachakra track have a teaching about that?
AH: Yes, it does. Yeah, so you will, just by merely observing the process through a kind of a witness awareness, that in itself is profoundly revelatory and restorative, just by being able to witness deconstruction and construction of normal sensory perception. That is amazing. But what the Kalachakra does through the remaining, and again, we don’t need to go too far into the other five, through the other yogas and through the teachings that are central to the Kalachakra strand, then it fundamentally kind of leads the witness, so to speak, its my languaging, for how the teachings then support the experience of seeing the world in a highly de-reified, illusory way. And so the fruition of the Kalachakra approach, this gets a little bit geeky, I should say technical from a Buddhist point of view, but its key is to see the world when one comes out, not in the usual way of just perceiving passive form. The result is to see the world as empty form, where, and this is really, really beautiful, because in Dark Retreat, darkness is homologous to emptiness.
It’s just amazingly beautiful, and emptiness also is feminine. And so, in terms of what happens when you go into the dark, you return to this reduction base, and then out of this background of emptiness, then arises the shine, the luminosity, and this is introducing segue into the Nyingma approach, because we’ll go there in just a second, because that’s their contribution. But the Kalachakra is to come out and then see the world not as form, but as empty form.
And for people who are students of the Buddhist tradition, this is the fruition of the Prajnaparamita. This is the fruition of all the second-turning teachings encapsulated, of course, in the Heart Sutra, right? Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is no other form, form is no other than emptiness. Well, when you realize these two, the union, the intercourse of form and emptiness, that’s another way to talk about getting the balancing, you know, to go back half an hour when we were talking about the feminine and masculine aspects. Well, this is represented iconographically with the archetypal deities in Tibetan Buddhism, Samantabhadra and Samantabhadri.
Samantabhadri, feminine, represents emptiness, Samantabhadra, masculine, represents luminosity, light. Well, when these two are in intercourse and they are in union, the Yabhyam deities, mother-father deities, that’s the awakened state, that’s the recognition of empty form. What happens, they go to divorce court, what creates samsara is Samantabhadri, Samantabhadra go to divorce court, Samantabhadri jumps off the lap of samantabhadra, so to speak, and then you get this process based on called schismogenesis, where light then divorces, runs away, and fundamentally, what is the basis of samsara here? There’s nothing more than reified, runaway, broken light. We’re basically stuck in a world of frozen, reified light. This is just beyond profound.
So, you go into the dark to bring them back into the union. And then when the balance is there, when they come back, they kiss and make up, they mate again, they’re back in intercourse, they’re back in union. The result is you see the world as empty form. This is one way from a second turning perspective to talk about what awakening actually is. And so, I’ll pause for just a second, Michael, because I’m going to take a little bit different track when we go to the Nyingma look at this, because it’s a little bit different.
MT: Let’s go there.
AH: Okay. This is great. I didn’t think we were going to go this deep.
MT: I’m loving it. Yeah.
AH: And so the Nyingma thing, oh my gosh, this is so cool. So the Nyingma approach through the practice of Togal. So this is Togal Dundrup, which is the crossing over into spontaneous presence. And so in this track of Dark Retreat, I was also trained pretty rigorously in this track. What one does when one is in the dark, this is arguably even bigger than the Kalachakra. This is probably the main epicenter, because this goes back all the way to, as you know, Guru Rinpoche, Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet, its core to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Padmasambhava wrote.
And so arguably this is the main track. And so what one does here is, when one goes into the dark, and you’re in this background dimension of emptiness, and this is what’s also really amazing, Michael, is a number of people who have no training in this. They haven’t practiced Togal, they never even heard of it, they don’t know anything about these lights. Well, I’m saying this because it happens. You’re in there, and all of a sudden, these lights start to appear. And it is like, talk about sober psychedelics, right? It’s like, wait a second, what is going on here? Like, where’s this like coming from, for instance? And then even most interestingly, and this is just a mind-bending set of revelations, where’s this like coming from? And who is seeing it? In other words, who is seeing what? And so this gets really deep.
This is the great contribution of the Nyingma approach, where you then have this incredible opportunity to work with the foundations of both epistemology and ontology. In other words, ontology, the study of being, what the heck is that? And epistemology, who or what is knowing that? And so both these foundational aspects of understanding reality, ontology and epistemology, are explored in tremendous first-person contact in the dark. And so I throw this into the mix. Normally, I wouldn’t be talking so much about this because it’s starting to get into the kind of tantric, slightly x-rated aspect. But I do mention it because a lot of people go in who have no understanding and familiarity of this stuff at all. And because these are natural qualities of the mind, this stuff starts to arise. And so parenthetically, let me throw this into the mix.
Probably 20 years ago or so when I was working with a Bon , so that’s the third track, I was working with a Bon master on Dark Retreat. And I asked him once, I said, Rinpoche, I said, you know, all this stuff comes up by doing all these postures and gazes and breath work, and that’s the stuff I’m not gonna talk about. And I said, Rinpoche, isn’t it true that even if you didn’t do that, this stuff could and eventually would come up? And he said, yes. And so I say this because people go in, this stuff starts to happen. And even some of the guides who have no understanding of this, they quite know what to do with it.
So this is what you do with it. You understand that this is literally the expression of the clear, light mind. So this is, I talked last time about the reduction base of innate wholeness. Well, one way to talk about this, there’s so many ways to talk about it. Last time I used the term Jhana. You can talk about this also as the reduction base of the clear, light mind, where clear basically refers to the empty nature of the mind. Light refers to the luminous nature of the mind. And when you go into the dark, it is the most profound laboratory of the mind, where you can see both the clarity aspect and the luminosity aspect. The absolute reduction of the purest mind is available for you to explore.
So I’ll pause there because there’s again so much to say here. I want to make sure I’m not having roadkill. This is the great contribution of the Nyingma track, working with the lights. What do you do with these lights? How do you relate to them? What are they?
MT: And of course, what you’re saying, as you mentioned, resonates or is even a big part of Togal practice. But just because you’ve done this and you’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve done this, can you give a little phenomenological report of what this is like to experience?
AH: Okay, I will say, yeah, two years ago, there was no way I would go into these waters, but I think it’s time. So these lights can come from two different sources. I say this because this will help answer your question, what is it like to experience them? Well, these can arise from a number of different ways. And one thing that needs to be sussed out is the difference between what are called entopic visions and these visions of the clear light mind. And such entopic visions, it’s actually not that difficult.
If you were to go close your eyes for a number of hours, in fact, before you wake up in the morning, if you remember to do this or if you if you step into a dark room for a couple of hours, you only have to very gently—and I say very gently, so you don’t hurt yourself—press at the kind of the corner of the upper bridge of your nose, right along the border of your skull, the bridge of your nose and your eyes. So you’re kind of pressing your fingers in this kind of triangle space there. If you do that, you can notice a tremendous explosion of light.
Well, what’s happening there, and it can happen in a number of other ways, also in the Dark Retreat. These can be just purely physiological and entopic visions. And this can be the result of leukocytes moving through the capillaries of the eyes.
I’ve talked to ophthalmologists about it. There’s a condition called Charles-Bonnet syndrome. There’s a whole class.
Oliver Sacks writes about this a little bit, these really interesting neurological conditions, where people just start to see these flashing and topic lights. These are physiological in nature, and you can tell the difference when these arise, Michael. And so this is in response to your question. Because even though there’s a quality, and sometimes for entertainment value, I have to confess when I’m in the dark and I get a little bored. It’s like, okay, let’s go to the movies for a few minutes, you know? And full confession, sometimes I will do this. And it’s like, especially if you’re on there for weeks on end, it can be pretty spectacular. But this experience is, yes, spectacular. It’s like 4th of July fireworks. But there’s no underlying affect of deep ineffable awe and mystery. And this is the way I have been able to centrifuge. I’d be curious to talk to some of my colleagues around this with their own experiences.
I’ve had these experiences because I can, first of all, initiate them in the ways I mentioned. People will have them in the dark. These are entopic visions.
They’re just coming from the physiology of the eyes. The deep expressions of luminosity and light, these are different because when these appear, there’s an underlying affect that takes place. And this is just me. You asked what the phenomenology is. Of wonder and awe and ineffability and just like, wow, I, you know, in fact, there’s no I, honestly, Michael. One of the reasons this is such a spectacular experience is because very often, what makes it so spectacular is at that instant, there is no I, as in me. Actually, you could say double entendre, both. There’s no I and that degree of openness allows for the lights to arise for one thing. And then when they do appear, they’re just wondrous.
Again, ineffable, you see me struggling here a little bit. It’s hard to put into words. But you just know in the Gnostic sense that this is a deeper, more foundational dimension of light.
This is a light that has a quality of sacredness and divinity and purity and beauty. It’s the experience of the . And in fact, honestly, it’s only when I come out that I retrofit even this languaging. These are posthumous commentaries based on an experience that are usually associated with the dissolution of the self-structure altogether. So I’ll pause there for a little bit, but this is important for people who go in. And this is amazing.
People go in, one, two days in. I’ve had friends go in, they go, man, only freaking light started to appear. What are these things? So this is one way to centrifuge out the entopic visions from clear expressions of the clear light mind.
MT: Now, the way you set that up, you said that there’s kind of the physical version, which is in topic, but you didn’t have a name that I heard anyway for the second type.
AH: Yes. Well, this again is one of the visions that are described in the Togal tradition. The first stage, the first one for these four stages, is called Manifest Dharamata. In Shambhala language, this is an experience of the dawning of the light of the great Eastern Sun. And so, I would suspect, but I can’t say with authority, that this would be connected to things like Ayin in the Jewish tradition. So, I can’t speak with authority along those lines. It’s also in Buddhist language could be connected to the light of Vajrasattva, you know, the archetypal primordial deity, Sambhogakaya. Because, well, you know this again, getting into some Buddhist language here, but if the darkness represents emptiness, emptiness is deeply, deeply correlated, if not synonymous with Dharmakaya. And so, out of that Dharmakaya, then what arises? What? Sambhogakaya. You know, body of bliss, light of the mind.
And so, this is the way you feel that bliss. Thats why its called body of bliss, Sambhogakaya. So, when that arises, you feel it somatically in your soma as this incredible showering of peaceful, blissful light. So, those are three of the names that are used. Dharmakaya, sometimes the light of Vajrasattva, and then the light of the Sambhogakaya, the light of the mind.
MT: And now, just to somewhat annoyingly try to put some wiggly equal signs in here, do you feel like these lights relate to the kind of light one might see in an illuminated Jhana?
AH: Yes, it’s possible. I don’t do that practice. I was not trained in Jhana meditations. In fact, parenthetically, they’re looked at slightly askance in some schools, and I was trained in some of the schools where those absorption states are slightly frowned upon. Not because they’re not unbelievably transformative and patho-transformative dimensions of mine, not in the slightest, but because they could be meditative cocaine, and you can get really stuck in these things. I was not trained in those, so I have to speak with a little caution here, Michael. But I would think, without doing these Jnana state meditations, that they could be connected to that. I can’t speak with authority here.
MT: Good. Okay. It’s just a curiosity question anyway. Now, way back, we had three tracks, and we’ve covered the Kalachakra track and the Nyingma track, but now you’ve alluded to the Bon track.
AH: Yeah. This is the one that I probably have the least familiarity with, even though I did study it with a number of teachers. It is very, very resonant and confluent with the Nyingma approach more than the Kalachakra. And so, especially Bon Dzogchen as it is taught by Tenzo Wangyal Rinpoche, the parallels between this and the classic Nyingma tradition are extraordinary. But there are a number of other texts where some of the meditations, visualizations that bring about this are clearly different. So some of the methods, I think, to the best of my understanding, the state, the fruitional expression of these lights is highly analogous, if not isomorphic or the same.
But the way of getting there is a little bit different. They have a more complex set of visualizations that are associated with it. And again, I haven’t studied this literature exhaustively because first of all, there’s not that much out there. But what is out there, I have read. And the Bon approach, the visualizations and the practices that I’ve read about are definitely more complex than the practices that I study in the Nyingma tradition. But one thing that’s worth saying with both of these, with both Nyingma and Bon, is there is also Togal tradition, the Togal practice. It’s not purely Dark Retreat. Another main thread of working with these lights that anybody can do is through skygazing practices. There’s a time practice of skygazing and working with physical lights, looking carefully at the corners of the sun kind of thing.
So, there’s a very powerful way of working with Togal visions using light practices. And those are actually quite helpful because if you’re looking up against a blue sky, that kind of contrast medium itself will start to reveal these types of movements. And therefore, that can help grease the skids for you when you actually do step into the dark, where you have a deeper, longer period of time for doing this. So, I work with both, you know. I mean, I have a beautiful house where I look out over the mountains, and I live in Colorado where the sky is often very, very clear. So, I will often sit on my deck and do sky gazing practice. First of all, it’s an incredibly relaxing, beautiful experience. Anybody can do this. Anybody who’s listening. And then just simply keep your eyes open, rest, and simply just notice what might appear. And you might start to notice a few very interesting things, or not. Well, something like that, Michael?
MT: Yes. Thank you for covering those three tracks. I know that was a particularly kind of deep riff in a very specific way, but I think it’s super interesting and I appreciate that you’re willing to do that. Now, another piece that I find, of course, very fascinating and challenging, but also might apply to Dark Retreat specifically, but also more generally to every other thing in the overall realm of human growth and expansion and deepening, is what you keep referring to the challenge of darkness retreat, and what we might even just reductively call the fear, the fear that comes up and what that fear is about and how to work with that. So I’m wondering if you could talk about the fear quality here.
AH: Yeah. Well, it’s a big deal. On one level, just at the outset, Joseph Campbell said something very compelling. It’s one of his famous bumper stickers, Maxims right, Follow Your Bliss, which in a certain way you could almost say is like follow your light. I am not dismissing that at all. But again, it’s a question of balance. If you just follow your bliss, you’re going to get blissed out. Welcome to the new age. If you just follow the light, you’re going to get sunburned. To me, Michael, and again, I invite listeners to look for themselves, look into themselves. Because in my experience, if you really want to grow in this short and precious life, follow your fear. Follow your fear.
Not in a spiritual thrill-seeking sense, and this again is one of the near enemies of Dark Retreat. There’s a bit of a thrill-seeking thing here, right? Oh man, I can’t think of anything more scary. I’m going into this haunted house. So the reason I did my three-year retreat 30 years ago or so is at that point, I couldn’t think of anything more challenging, anxiety-inducing than having to face my mind so intensely for so long. It turned out to be the most transformative thing I’ve ever done.
I started doing dark practice not too long after that because, at that point, it intimidated me. I was afraid of it. And the reason this is important, Michael, is because what we’re really going after here with deep inner-psycho-spiritual work is ignorance. We’re trying to transform ignorance into wisdom. And ignorance by definition is challenging. It’s intractable. It’s hard to pinpoint. You know this term in Buddhism. It’s called klesha, which refers to emotional upheaval. And we often talk about when someone’s having a klesha attack, a meltdown of either passion or anger or aggression, right? The three root poisons. Yes, I can identify that pretty easily, but I have never been able to identify this with myself or with others to be able to actually say, you know, I’m having a raging ignorance attack, right? Why is that? Well, it’s because we’re always under attack. It’s so close to us.
It’s so part of our nature that we literally don’t see that we don’t see. And so when I look at the dimensions of life, it’s one reason I’ve been so passionate about the study of death. I’ve been studying the death and dying process for decades because I wanted to understand the nature of this thing called fear. Like, what am I really afraid of here? And so I mentioned this last time that one of the really magnificent qualities of Dark Retreat is its extraordinary capacity to work with projections. Like I mentioned, worth reinstating, when you’re in the dark and you’re feeling suffocated, crushed, really, really having a hard time.
This took me years to figure out and I wish to hell somebody would have told me this. You’re feeling the weight of your own projections. All the crap that you’ve thrown into the dark, you can’t throw it away anymore in the dark, it comes home to roost and you feel it with this weight. This is part of understanding the challenges of the dark, and this is also what you’re paying for. You’re paying for this. The reason I mentioned this is since we can’t really go after ignorance directly because it’s so insidious, it’s so much the waters in which we swim, what we can do is go after its affective expression, which is what? Fear.
We’re afraid of what we don’t know. Whether it’s I don’t know how this date is going to turn out, I don’t know how this job is going to turn out, I don’t know how whatever is going to turn out, we’re always afraid of what we don’t know. My life has been, if I really want to grow in this life and I want to transform ignorance into wisdom, the best thing I can do is follow my fear because fear is the affective expression of ignorance, and fear is also the bedrock of the relative self-sense. This is huge. This is what we talked about last time, is the difference between Jhana and Vijñana. And so I’m going to get to that in just one brief second, but let me just say one last thing about this projection thing, which has been enormous for me, that ties in both to death and to darkness.
And you’ll see why this is so bloody important. You’ll also see how big this topic is. One of the things that I’ve discovered around death, you’ll see how this ties in, is that I’ve discovered death to be my fear of death, to be a secondary inauthentic fear. And so I mentioned earlier that we project the crap out of darkness. That’s one reason people are anxious about going in. We project the crap out of it. Or more accurately, we project all our crap into it, right? That’s what makes the darkness so heavy, so challenging. We project all our crap into it.
Well, what are we more adversely affected than darkness? What do we project even more than darkness? There’s a maxim in the psychological traditions that’s really worth sharing here. If something affects you more than it informs you, you’re dealing with a projection. This is amazing. Well, what affects us more than death? Like hardly anything. So why are we so adversely affected by death? Because we project the crap out of it. In fact, we project all our crap into it. So then what happens is, and this is what ties into fear, our fear of death is an absolutely totally inauthentic secondary fear. Here’s where I’m going with this and how it ties into darkness.
Our real fear is we’re already dead. In other words, our real fear, the authentic fear, is the fear of the truth of emptiness, of our inherent lack of true nature, of existence. We’re already dead. We’re already empty of true nature. And so what we do, check this out, we have to thank Freud for this and my dear friend David Loy, who writes about this beautifully in his book, Lack and Transcendence. What we do is amazing, and then I’ll pause because there’s a lot here. We deny, we repress, and we project. And what can we project? How much farther away can we project than the end of life?
And so what happens with that is exactly what happens in the dark. We deny, repress, project, everything we don’t want to face into the convenient refuse heap of the darkness at the end of life. Darkness then becomes this incredibly compelling refuse heap that is fundamentally the deepest metaphysical mirror, where all are unwanted.
I love the play on words here, right? What we refuse in conscious experience, we transform into the refuse heap. And so we deny, repress, project all the way out to the end of life, and hence we have so much fear, both of death and then of darkness.
And so when you go into the dark, as a way to prepare for death, you’re going in to work with this fear, to own up to all these projections. And so when you feel all this, this is a really good sign. When you’re feeling the fear, you’re starting to own up, you’re starting to do the shadow work. And so when you go in, you have this extraordinarily precious opportunity that is not easy to work with your fear to transform your ignorance. And so the last thing here, and then I’ll pause because there’s so much to say. Just in context from our last conversation, this fear is the bedrock of the relative self sense.
And so when you drop into the dark and the mind falls into itself and you really go down, well guess what’s waiting for you? That which you’ve thrown into the center of your central self, which is this fear, the fear of emptiness, the fear of your ego-less nature. And so when you’re dropping into the dark and you know that this is what’s going to happen, and you know this is what you’re paying for, anxiety and fear then become a really good sign that you’re getting closer to the truth.
And if you have this map, just like I mentioned last time, falling through these dimensions, you feel the fear, you’re given techniques for how to relate to it. That’s for our next conversation, all the ways to deal with that. You then allow yourself to feel it completely, feel it, to heal it, bring it into your system, establish a relationship to it. The fear then collapses into fearlessness. You don’t get rid of your fear, you don’t become fearless by getting rid of your fear, you become fearless by going into and through it. And this is the game changer, because then when you’re facing the fear in the dark, you allow yourself to feel it completely, you understand exactly what it is.
We’re afraid of what we don’t know. And if we know what this fear is about, that understanding allows us to transform it through the mere act of understanding, and then we can allow ourselves to die into and through it. So I threw a ton of noodles on the wall here, Michael, but this is a little bit of a dump on how much darkness can help us work with this root fear. Because if we don’t do this, everything in our lives becomes a very sophisticated avoidance strategy. So again, I keep saying I’m going to stop, but you realize I can’t stop. So I do this exercise that is so great.
So if we are all in a room together, I would recommend that you stand up, hold your hand out in front of you, hold your right hand out in front of you, and imagine that you got something really, really heavy in this hand, right? So right arm straight out in front, you’re holding something really, really heavy out here. And then I do this in my programs all the time. It’s so fascinating. And then I invite people to say, okay, all your unwanted experience, everything is here, all your fear, everything, is as far away from yourself as you can get it, right? Really heavy as far as you can get. And then I say, now step forward. I want you to step forward. Every single person walks in a straight line.
And I go, and nyet, nope, nope, that’s not what’s happening. What’s really happening is imagine you’re holding a pole. It’s that heavy. You think you’re walking forward, but what you’re actually doing is you’re walking in a circle. This then becomes representative of what we do our entire lives. This is what korwa, samsara, literally means, the cyclers.
We think we’re going forward in life when we’re simply circumambulating as an avoidance strategy for this fundamental fear. And so if we don’t understand this, have you noticed in your life how often you repeat things? Have you noticed in your life that you’re never really going forward?
Because you’re not. These heavy, heavy, unprocessed, undigested experiences have not been worked through, and you end up basically circumambulating, walking in a circle when you’re actually thinking going forward in life. And when you go into the dark, all this becomes your direct experience. You have the capacity to integrate, digest, metabolize this fear by establishing a relationship to it. This changes everything.
MT: Well, there’s so much to say there. It’s actually tremendously exciting. And I’ll put out there that maybe there’s a further conversation in this direction. It is. It’s a huge topic and one that I speak to often in my own teaching. And I find it very intriguing, very powerful, very exciting. There’s so much to say there is central. But just to round out our discussion here, I just like to talk about integration. Here we are doing all this heavy stuff. We’re dealing with all this fear. We’re seeing the mind reconstructing itself. We’re going into, we’re dissolving into the darkness and all this. And this is heavy, right? It’s hard. Even if it’s wonderful, it’s also a lot.
And so it reminds me of coming out of any other kind of retreat or coming out of psychedelic experience or coming out of other tremendously transformative things. There’s a need to integrate. So I’m just curious what you would have to say about integrating dark retreat into life.
AH: Yeah, boy, it’s huge. I think one thing right out front, just like with psychedelic experiences, is that when you come out of the dark, and we don’t have data on this yet, but I would be really shocked if what I’m about to say is not the case. You’re in a highly neuroplastic state, just like you are post psychedelics. There is data on that. It just makes sense based on what I was sharing earlier, that when you enter this empty environment, it’s a plasticized environment in the best sense. Its fluid, its malleable, its open. That’s some of the characteristics of what emptiness actually is. When you come out, you’re almost like a neonate. You’re in a highly neuroplastic space.
Therefore, one of the best things to do is to set a very firm twofold intention. One is to be a really intense observer of how quickly habit patterns slash karma, hence this karma will be coming. How it is that when you come out of retreat, you are going to be so quickly reshaped, reformulated by your habit patterns. It’s a little bit like I did when I came out of my three-year retreat. I realized that I had a tremendously precious opportunity for several months to notice the effect of my history to come back in, to pull me back into old particular ways, and so in an effort to work with, I guess you could use the term recidivism, holding my seat. I made a very firm resolve on a retreat to pay particular attention to my experience to notice how habit patterns came in.
Then the second part of the resolve was to set new dimensions of discipline, new dimensions of containment for my experience. But I say this, these are general overarching kinds of attitudes for post-Dark Retreat. Just be intensely curious. Go very slow. Tenzin Wangya Rinpoche has this teaching on the three pills. I love it. Stillness of body, silence of speech, spaciousness of mind, to which I add the fourth pill of slowness. When I come out, my antennae are really on full alert. What I’m doing, Michael, is I’m paying exquisite attention to what I’m feeling. Because you come so open in the dark. Here’s another connection to emptiness, a translation of emptiness for me is openness. I can feel openness. I know what openness feels like more than I know what emptiness feels like. When I’m in the dark, I’m getting really, really open. Like I mentioned last time, everything’s dilating, literally. Eyes are dilating, body is dilating. Every aspect of my being is opening, opening into wider rings of being, as Rumi put it.
When I come out, first of all, I never realized how open I become until I come out. Then I start to notice, I come out very, very slowly. I start to notice the armoring. I start to notice the defensive plates coming back on when I start to drip the light back in. I think I might have mentioned this to you last time. I can’t recall. I would never do this. But if I’m in for like, I would say, 10 days, two weeks, I have little doubt that if for some reason, I was suddenly, the walls fell down and the roof was blown off and I was exposed to broad daylight, I would probably go into shock because I’m that open, I’m that dilated by being in the dark that long. Just like I mentioned at the outset in terms of the contrast medium of darkness and the capacity like in the road to Nirodha-samapatti to come out, I pay exquisite attention to all the somatic dimensions.
I feel it. I feel it. I’m contracting, I’m defending. I’m feeling the assault of light. I’m feeling the assault of my habitual patterns. I’m feeling the assault of my karma. And so, the first ingredient is an attitudinal shift of intense observation, curiosity, inquisitiveness, and somatic awareness. This is really important as well. It’s not just cognitive. In fact, it’s mostly somatic, affective. I notice all the armoring come back on. And when I do that, boy, does it become interesting.
I always take a couple of days to come out minimum. And then when I enter my life, the second aspect of it would be I establish new levels of discipline where I’m going to microdose. Going back into the dark is a way to integrate. Microdosing every time I close my eyes to integrate. And then basically just taking the fundamental principles that darkness has invited, you know, sensitivity, openness, kindness, compassion, all these classic meditative qualities. There’s nothing special there.
And this basically doing my very best to set the resolve, to sustain and to integrate. Yeah, I think those are the central ones, just heightened sense of mindfulness, various forms of contraction as they come back on. Affective, somatic, you know, cognitive, all the ways I tend to close down. Slowing down, being more spacious, being more silent, just like I mentioned the four pills. And then honestly, setting up resolve to go back in. It’s not a one-hit wonder for me.
What makes this a path of dark trekking, just like with any other psycho-spiritual practices, making it a path, going back in. Stabilizing the experiences from previous retreats, seeing what else has to be unfolded and unfurled, and realizing on a very deep level, you know, the journey is the goal, it’s never ending in a certain way. Yeah, something along those lines.
I mean, those classic kinds of integrative patterns that I found very, very helpful. There’s more, but that’s probably enough.
MT: Yeah. Well, thank you for spelling that out at least a little bit. I know that there’s a lot there, and the richness of your experience and sharing the wisdom of that, I really, really appreciate it. It’s quite a gift. So thank you so much for talking with me slash us again today, and being so generous with all that you’ve learned and all that you’re learning. I just can’t tell you how I just always get so tickled when we, if that’s the right word, I just feel tremendous joy speaking with you on these topics. So thank you so much again for sharing.
AH: Thank you for the kind words. I feel the same way with this little somebody else’s thing that takes place here. And I think you can see my deep passion for this practice. Hopefully, it wasn’t too overwhelming to people, but I just have so much enthusiasm for this extraordinary technology that I want to try to do. So I always do like to spend time with you, my friend.
MT: Yeah, all right, thank you so much.
AH: Thank you, Michael.
MT: That’s it for this episode of Deconstructing Yourself.