End of The Darkness, Appearance of the Light and Ascension

Abstract: The darkness of the mind does not stay much longer. Every polarity of this world is transitional, and they come and go. We observe these transitions with mindfulness. Darkness only needs to be endured and is then followed by the light. After this stage, there are two pathways to the practitioner depending on his maturity; after mastering the meditative absorptions and darkness, the final light appears to him, and his realization is complete. The other type has further to go, where the so called ascension happens through the individual. For both, this is the starting point of the journey: To bring light to others. This post is dedicated to anyone who needs to understand and needs help crossing the darkness of the soul. 

Figure 1. Darkness to the Light: Transmutation of the negative afflictions of the mind

The darkness is required to illuminate light and therefore is inevitable. This phase can be misunderstood (appeared to be) as an outside obstacle, but in reality, it is overcoming our own darkness. This darkness is deep if the adept’s goal is to lead others to the light/enlightenment. The adept may have learned thousands of scriptures, but the real practice and training comes here. Since the meditative light also disappears, there is no point of struggling in cross-legged meditation at this stage. Methods such as vipassana, mindfulness, and self-inquiry can help overcoming the struggles. Yogic routines, physical exercises, and a healthy diet are necessary to regulate your energy channels; if the body-mind and energy system are not aligned, these will become fuels to the adversity of the dark night of the soul.

Mindfulness to Overcome Obstacles

As meditators, we are so addicted and accustomed to the clear light, the bliss of “no mind”. When the light is gone, only the darkness remains; with that, life may be seen as a struggle. To understand this situation better, a hypothetical analysis of the mind is given here. 

Figure 2. The hypothetical divisions of our mind (three layers, i.e. Carl Jung's theories)

The conscious layer of the mind is responsible for sensory perception which we use to make conscious decisions in daily life. The subconscious layer is mostly active in the dream state, during sleep. We spend most of our time in sleep in the subconscious layer. Many of us do not get a quality deep sleep, which is the natural "reset" bestowed upon us by the universe. If we can bring the meditative blissness of clear light during the sleep, it is even better. However this requires certain mastery in meditation. The unconscious layer is the concealed part of our mind as it contains many of mysteries, of ourselves and our past. Revealing this information to an ordinary mind is dangerous and therefore naturally this layer is "sealed" to the conscious layer. However its traits can leak into the the upper layers time to time. Trying to access this information unconsciously (i.e. hypnosis, psychedelics) is not recommended at all and may even change the personality, bringing negative memories, characteristics into the conscious layer. Meditation done under right guidance is a conscious act and therefore it naturally reveals this information with the spiritual growth. This information is usually revealed to illustrate how the Samsara or the never ending reincarnation looks like to the adept. 

    

There is a famous saying; a bodhisattva will always be sent to heaven and hell to transform his mind. Our unconscious layer of the mind is responsible for the dark night of the soul. Unless we come to see the darkness, to see our polarities as our own mind projections, there won’t be any illumination. Sometimes what we encounter is a reflection of our deep addictions. Since the unconscious mind cannot express or communicate its nature in an understandable way to the conscious mind, the reflection comes in weird and wrathful forms. This doesn’t mean that you are under an evil omen; it simply means you need purification to the poisons in your mind. And turning them into wisdom. In Buddhist studies, there are five poisons to be purified: attachment, aversion, ignorance, pride, and jealousy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to renunciate; it means you’re cleaning garbage in the deep corners of your mind, including past-life accumulations. We believe that the traditional tantric Mahakala practice was originally meant to handle this situation and transmute our negative afflictions.  

If you notice violence in your visions (during dreams or meditation), that reflects your anger and the associated past life karmas. 

i.e. During the darkest period (the cleansing stage), anger or fear that triggers during the day time can be reflected as a violent event (killing somebody) in the dream state at night. Then the question comes, why this is not so before the dark night of the soul (lower spiritual levels)? As depicted, the conscious and subconscious layers are on top of the unconscious. When the other two layers are purified by the clear light mind (see Figure 2 right), then the traits in the unconscious layer go up and are more visible to the other two. Hence the influence is significant. During day time, you may also notice the effect of leaking these traits. That is why we use mindfulness to observe them and clean when we are conscious. However in the dream state, we have no control over mindfulness and it is impossible to handle the effect of the "unconscious leaks" on the subconscious. 

i.e. The attachments to the materialistic world collapse in your dreams: You may see certain objects related to your attachments (properties, money etc.) are stolen, destroyed or ruined. In this way, the memories, addictions that you kept to yourself are getting cleansed. This can only be done by bringing these forth to the upper layers as these traits cannot go anywhere else from the unconscious layer. It is always in upward direction and that is why these are witnessed as unpleasant visions by the subconscious and conscious layers of the mind.    

Where we can go astray: Suppose we see a vision of the death of a very close person. As soon as we wake up at night after witnessing this, with fear, we may rush into contact that person to inform this. We may run into astrologists, tarot card readers, spirit invokers and what not to get insights into this. You would end up doing totally irrelevant things and even may engaged in wrong actions, taking these visions to be real. This is where the attention of a guru is important. Same for other traits. You might be wondering how a meditator can encounter these things? In general belief, we do meditation to overcome our struggles, but in this case struggles appear in the middle of the progression. A gem cannot be polished without friction, no man perfected without trials. Struggle is inevitable when you’re crossing the unconscious mind. All other layers before that have nothing really to teach you! 

Act of Charity and Compassion to Overcome Obstacles

Realizing these are to be reflections of your anger, resentment, and attachments takes time. When these traits get cleansed, certain changes also start to occur in your soul, and perception. You become more compassionate, and the attachments turn into burdens. There is more to this stage than our own darkness. If you have solid meditative absorptions, you will naturally build a strong aura that can withstand outside negativities.

Being a spiritual practitioner can sometimes turn you into a radical person. Or our backgrounds of science, rational mindset can turn us into be so. Hence our connection, sensitivity towards others and society may not be so strong as it was before. Act of kindness, charity and voluntary work are in fact necessary to run a society, to fill the gaps and provide dedicated resources to help the most vulnerable. This should be the view in general. When you engage in such activities during this time, your feel better, your heart becomes more opened and these activities nourish your soul. This can certainly release some blocks around your heart center; therefore shortening the dark night of the soul period. Moreover some negative afflictions in your mind can be cancelled out by these activities. 

What can you do in such a situation if you are alone ?

It does not matter what you see in these visions as long as it has not yet happened to you in reality. Even if the person you saw in the dream is known to you, it does not necessarily mean that person is in a catastrophic event. Illusory information leads to illusory problems. Our monkey minds operate in that way, it looks for situations, links to a maintain the mental continuum. If you see you're hurting somebody in the dream, that is the reflection of your jealousy, hatred and anger towards that person. You are not accumulating any negativity by seeing these visions, so go easy about them (I was afraid at the beginning). In this way, we should treat all these cases as appearances of our own mind and the reflections of our defilments. In this period, our attention should be brought into dharma practices, chanting of sutras (if you're religious) or being one with nature, reading spirituality related books.    

When you are very close to the separation from the physical body, you may experience some pains and associated karmic debts in meditative visions. More appropriate terminology would be "cause and effect". Either you can go crazy about all these or accept and be mindful. All we are going through is just a projection of our mind, an outside manifestation of the progression of the path.

Appearance of Light

On 3rd December 2022, I was meditating with Paul de Waal (from Rotterdam), and this is when the lost clear light appeared in meditation again. This was indeed a sight for sore eyes. Usually the light that disappears at the beginning of the dark night of the soul appears in the same intensity, therefore the return of child and mother clear lights together. With that, confidence arose and the meditation continued smoothly. Light brought clarity and bliss again. This process clears the unconscious taints further and the last clear light appeared as a result. This stage is referred to as father clear light stage where the cleansing process itself reveals the true and pure nature of our mind. 

The purity of the mind cuts through many mental fetters and with that, a boundless freedom to the individual comes in. For true enlightenment, purity of the mind is necessary which comes with the freedom from self-grasping, anger and aversion. Therefore increasing our vibrational frequency alone is not sufficient.

Increasing Vibrational Frequency is Not the Purity !!!

There is nothing wrong of raising your energies, or opening higher chakras in your system. However higher vibrational energy, positivity should always be followed by the purity of our mind. This is why in many spiritual traditions, the purity or clear light mind is often emphasized. There is "nobody" who experiences this clear light; our individuality, identities, labels all dissolve in this meditative state. We are not superior to anybody, not inferior either. Instead we become one with everybody. The meditator only enters into this state and exits from it, nobody could be in that state. With this meditative quality, compassion arise within us. 

As mentioned earlier, when you surpassed the 3rd eye Chakra, the duality in your energy system drops, and this brings you a certain discernment ability. The reason for the non-dualistic nature at the 3rd eye Chakra is that it unites the so called Ida/Pingala nadis at this point. However this non-duality is only felt at your energy levels. The dualistic nature of mind still exists and it only starts to diminish when the clear light mind is experienced. Duality between ourselves and others, samsara and nirvana, thought and no-thought, existence and non-existence, subjective-objective realities and therefore emptiness start to make sense. 

Ascension Process

This process is a special case. After this process, the individual is known as an ascended master in the spiritual world. He has a special task to perform, to uplift the consciousness of the entire human race. Since our normal consciousness and the energy bodies are not really suitable do so, an ascended master from the spirit realm or Sambhogakaya comes down to the adept's physical body. This topic deserves a separate post.