The Dark Dream
Monday, August 1st, 2005In a famous novel of the early ‘70s, characters are said to be “on the Dark Dream.”
“Oh, you know, he’s on the Dark Dream.”
The Dark Dream is addiction to knowledge, command, and control. Basically, the Dark Dream is everything that normal Western culture values and compulsively strives for.
The fundamental reason why, as Tantriks, we must wean ourselves from the Dark Dream is this: Reality is simply not open to knowledge, command, and control. Only smallish, smaller, and smallest slices of it may be experienced this way from some limited point of view.
If you want to live in the Real world, all of it, just as it is, you must also be comfortable playing in the surf of unknowable, uncommandable chaos.
The compulsion to know, command, and control is a defensive posture. It is the deepest, most entrenched tension most of us will encounter in our practice. This fundamental defensiveness, and its underlying root fear of nonexistence, is what we’re talking about when we talk about surrender.
But the world is generous. Ma gives us opportunities galore to surrender our defensiveness. Yippee! We have various ways of describing these opportunities: failure, trauma, reactivity, loss, getting our buttons pushed, not getting what we want, what we think we are owed, or what we expect.
Every time we encounter one of these moments, we have a choice: let our fixations mount their familiar, frantic attempt to plug up the leaky containers of our lives, or recognize that bottomless feeling for the opportunity it is and consciously relax into the void.
Moments of high defensiveness and reactivity are skin-close to the free fall of surrender. If you consciously choose to relax right in the midst of high tension, right in the peak moment of fear, anger, resentment, shame, and so on, you will enter directly into the root fear, then the root void, and then, finally, you will rediscover openness and softness. It is definitely a case of the only way out is through.
Have I convinced you to try it? Aw, come on! It’s either that or the Dark Dream.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
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