In rain during a black night, enter that blackness as the form of forms.
- Prerequisite — befriend darkness first. Sit awake in a dark room: neither sleep nor switch on a light (both are escapes). The primitive cave-fears (carried in the collective unconscious from millions of years of helpless nights) will surface — witness them without reaction and they dissolve on their own. Until the fear is gone the technique is impossible.
- Why blackness is ‘the form of forms’: it is the cosmic womb — every form arises out of darkness and dissolves back into it. Light has a source and so comes and goes; darkness is sourceless, never rises or sets, and so alone is infinite and eternal, and totally relaxing (light is a faint disturbance — you cannot sleep in it). You are a form; the aim is to dissolve into the formless out of which all forms come.
- Stare open-eyed into real outer darkness. Eyes closed give only a mental negative — the afterimage of light, not real darkness; keep the eyes open and let the dark enter them. Tears and soreness come — continue. When the real outer darkness floods in it brings a deep soothing and empties out the inner false (negative) darkness, replacing it with the real. Entry is mutual: you cannot force it, only make yourself available — as you enter it, it enters you.
- Lie as in the mother’s womb. Feel the darkness as warm and enveloping from every side until the sense of a bounded, separate self dissolves into formlessness.
- Carry a patch of darkness within all day. Feel every cell filled with it. Activity slows on its own — the marker: one grows ‘lazy,’ walks slowly and carefully ‘like a pregnant woman’; anger cannot ignite, passion and sexuality fade, sleep deepens until dreams stop, the whole day feels mildly intoxicated. This day-long inner darkness then meets the outer darkness in the night practice.
- Why we fear it, and the payoff: light defines (boundaries, the ego, the distinctions of beautiful/ugly, rich/poor, saint/sinner); darkness erases them all, so the ego cannot persist. The fear of darkness is at root the fear of this self-dissolution — i.e. of death; but to merge with darkness is to become one with death and so deathless (‘darkness is deathless; light is born and dies’). That dissolution is precisely the goal.
- Pitfall (from the Q&A on gazing): two ditches flank any staring practice — (1) eyes fixed but the mind wandering elsewhere, so consciousness and object never meet and nothing is happening; (2) sliding into sleep/auto-hypnosis, the open eyes going ‘stony’ and dead while the mind is absent. The target is a third state — as silent as deep sleep yet as alert as waking thought (Patanjali equates sushupti and samadhi: both are unrippled silence; samadhi adds full alertness). The bridge runs narrow between the two ditches.
- Light or darkness (from the Q&A): both are two degrees of one phenomenon, so either door reaches the same goal. The light path is the easier, more common one; darkness is the harder, more adventurous path, naturally suited to a receptive temperament. Don’t deliberate endlessly — choose the door you feel at ease with, commit to that one method, and drop the rest.