I just had an email exchange with a friend, which brought out a basic similarity between the restful use of darkness and Natural Hygiene. It points to a hygienic use of darkness for the recovery and maintenance of the psyche.
Natural Hygiene is an American school of health dating from about 1830. Its popularity then is the reason that, today, we take for granted the benefits of pure food, fresh air, bathing, and exercise. Natural Hygiene holds that health comes from healthy living, not substances, treatment, or physicians (of any kind).
Natural Hygiene is based on “Life’s Great Law:” that there is life. Life lives, meaning it is inherently self-generating, self-preserving, and self-healing in every respect, at every scale, from the cells to the organism as a whole. This implies that: only the organism performs vital action, including healing; and all energy employed in this action originates with the organism.
Thus, no drug, herb, or food; no practice, treatment, person, or device heals. All attempts to do so further damage and drain the body’s ability to heal itself, whatever benefit might appear in the short term. Whether well or ill, one’s conscious role is discover and provide the normal conditions of life. The autonomic (involuntary) processes of the organism handle the rest.
Herbert Shelton, the great modernizer of Natural Hygiene, described the practice of Natural Hygiene as, “the employment of materials, agents, and influences that have a normal relationship to life, in the preservation and restoration of health according to well-defined laws and demonstrated principles of nature.” A drug, for example, is toxic by definition. An organism does not relate with toxins but expels them. Fasting, by contrast, is merely an extension of the time between meals so the body can rest from most metabolic processes, eliminate deeply stored waste, and repair tissues. Natural Hygiene is so little known today because the American Medical Association all but destroyed it in the late 1800′s by criminalizing its professional practice closing its colleges, laying claim to its already-accepted teachings—and the improvements to public health that resulted—, and smearing the rest.
(Incidentally, as a genuinely hygienic psychology—currently non-existent and substituted for by repressiven moralizing typical of the 19th century—darkness retreating would also represent a major contribution to Natural Hygienic theory and practice. For an unmatched introduction to the basic ideas of Natural Hygiene, read The Science and Fine Art of Natural Hygiene by Herbert Shelton.)
In our exchange, my friend talked about Family Constellations. This is an intense weekend training in self-discovery whose methods he said might be useful to darkness retreating. In response to my idea of the civilized ”management” of universal suffering in strifeless, he wrote:
About ”management” and weekend workshops, I cannot help but think of Family Constellations. I think Constellations, when done by less-skilled facilitators might fall, to some degree, into the ”life is suffering/strife: learn to live with it” category. But M. (the [facilitator] I like best to work with) seems not to suffer from such a blindness to subtle reality as the rest of us, which—along with some other skills—allows him to offer that awareness to the rest of us in powerfully serving our healing. Such awareness can lead to strifeless modalities of healing and restoration, I submit.
I replied that, unfortunately, Family Constellations is probably only minimally useful to darkness. Like various other forms of transpersonal psychology, it lies somewhere between management and discipline, two of civilization’s three standard approaches to inordinate suffering. The degree of knowledge and skill it requires makes it full of strife.
Myself, I have invested a great deal of energy over the last decade in tantric Hinduism. It makes me want tantra to be a critical element in this process. That it may very well not be is difficult for me to swallow.
Family Constellations and methods like it have been both wonderful and useful to many of us in our quest for well-being. But I no longer believe any method will get us over the hump, even with really aware facilitators. I also do not think it is enough to have the presence of someone else with access to dreamtime, even if an energetic transmission from him takes place.
I have received such hits of nourishment from wise people before. They feel great. But ultimately, spiritual hunger—longing—is only a symptom of an underlying injury which prevents us from metabolizing already plentiful spiritual food in the first place. Thus, healing of this underlying illness is what must occur for lasting satisfaction. Healing is not accomplished by the consumption of any kind of food, nor by the will of self or others, but in repose by the quiet, autonomic processes of life.
This is the conjecture, anyway. It is hygienic in nature. It is not primarily about hyper-secretion in the brain of DMT, remembering of dreamtime, accessing higher states, or practicing meditation techniques. It is about the profound absence of stimulation which provides for an unusual degree of healing to occur. It is thus a fundamentally different approach. It is grounded totally in normal organic processes, such as those of the involuntary nervous system, which occur beneath the level of consciousness (or what passes for it).
The ego’s grip within is overwhelming. And civilization has taught us well: in various ways, we have all come to think that somehow, someday, we would finally do something about our quandary. The conjecture asserts that we cannot do anything about it directly. We are utterly enslaved in our fixation and denial. It is not a pleasant thought. But it is potentially more fruitful because it can elicit a radically hopeful response in what is left of one’s conscience to finally support the organism in the act of self-healing. Attitude affects recovery.
In the relationship between food and nerve energy lies another example of the hygienic perspective. Eating does not actually innervate, or give nerve energy to, the body. Otherwise we could just eat to wake up. It actually takes nerve energy to eat and digest food. Food provides sugar, which refuels everything from large muscle movement to thinking to cell operation. But electrical potential of the nerves can only be restored during sleep. Life is the owner of the causal power to act. Life is the doer.
Pathologically disidentified from life, we are as yet powerless. We who still stumble choatically try to control life rather than serve it. So we are not going to handle our quandary. As we imagine ourselves to be, we are not going to get it done or have anything to do with its getting done. We are not going to figure it out. We are fit to be tied.
The best we can do is fully admit to our helplessness and to surrender to the only forces that could ever untie the knot. It is the Gordian Knot. But the knot actually needs to be untied. Alexander did not really handle it with his sword, and neither will we with our plans or efforts or skills. Only the small, silent, slow tendrils of the organism’s own intelligence can untie such a tangle.
The only effort involved is supportive: to maintain the conditions of healing. This ain’t a tall order. Stay in the darkroom. Lie down as much as possible. Let the body take over and handle its injury. Eat a little. Exercise a little. Bathe occasionally. Eliminate. Meditate when so moved. Lie back down. Stare at the backs of your eyelids and let sleep come.
It will anyway. Darkness ensures it. A nervous system flooded with melatonin, the pineal gland’s response to darkness, is pretty compelled to sleep. And sleep deeply: you are positively knocked out. You have very few dreams. In 48 hours you will catch up on all the sleep you have ever lost. I am not speaking metaphorically. It is difficult to conceive or believe until it happens with you.
To me, it felt like falling through a trapdoor. I felt five or six more such trapdoors awaited me before I would see the other side of my personal struggle, my lifelong dilemma. In the meantime, there were times I felt I was crawling in my skin. So the whole thing was alternately very pleasant and very unpleasant. It is no worse than what we go through anyway. It is just that it is accelerated, intensified, and there are no distractions. And there is a chance of never reliving the horror again.
How do you prepare for darkness? The same way you prepare for weeks in a hospital bed in traction. Ie, it is too late. You are already prepared. Now just read the retreat manual. Mostly, it is a logistical issue.
Many traditions use darkness: Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, Ayurveda, Native Americans, Welsh Shamanism. South American tribes use ayahuasca with DMT/DMT precursors in it. I know little about them. But they do not seem to emphasize the passive rest or healing possible in darkness. They emphasize the active practice of darkness, the cool spiritual things that happen as a result, and the particular things one learns or attains in advancing on the Path. It is all so very fascinating and so very adult. And that is fine. But we have all eternity for practice. As EJ Gold says, there is no top end to the Work. But this organism, this chance at life does not have forever.
This emphasis is very important because it defines the appropriate attitude toward the retreat. The mind becomes extremely powerful when it is resting and purifying. I learned in fasting that the how one approaches a retreat has a great effect on what happens in it. If one’s attitude is really to passively let the healing forces of the organism do everything (in conjunction with the benevolence of the universe), the effect will be much different than if one has the doer-attitude of a practicioner. I know no one who has gone into darkness with the hygienic perspective. It seems promising, to say the least.
The other thing that a hygienic darkness retreat is not is therapy. Therapy is something that is done to the organism—a treatment—with the idea that the therapy is going to effect some change, that the actors in the situation are the therapist and the therapy. The body is a passive reactor. This totally defies the hygienic approach. In hygiene, the will, the very thing that is damaged and needs a break, is passive and the organism is active. It is true that something must be done. Just not by me. Only the organism has the power to act directly to repair its damage and correct its malfunction. Only the organism is alive to have the power. Rather than taking over, the will becomes the servant of the organism, and therefore of life itself.
In the hygienic use of darkness, non-effort, rest, and the other requirements of the automatically self-healing nature of the organism are emphasized. This is because no treatment, substance, or a practice can substitute for organic function or the healing thereof. Anyway, I am still an injured infant, not a healthy, capable adult. ”Spiritual” things may happen, but it is not important, really. We are not trying for a vision of god here. We are trying to get out of a dreary pediatric hospital.
Anyway, who do we think we’re kidding? Spiritual? We are like the guy an Adam Sandler character referred to by saying, ”He can’t find his ass with both hands… and his ass!” When we absorb a minimum of the wisdom of the body, we may become qualified to explore spiritual things on their own terms, not as thinly disguised ego enhancements.
Or maybe, in the restoration of psychic integrity, the arbitrary distinction between autonomic self-healing and the grace of god will collapse.