Take a walk on the Dark Side.

As we approach the Autumn Equinox next week it also marks the time that we enter the dark half of the year.  Looking at the dark or shadow side of ourselves can be scary but we can not walk in the light until we have walked in the dark.  Remember the Equinox is about light and dark being equal, balanced so now is a good time to start looking within to find that balance.

Shamanic and Native American Celebrations and Traditions

Shamanism has always embraced and understood the true nature of darkness.  Shamans work with the darkness.  Journeys are usually done with a blindfold. In some cultures shamans were even deliberately blinded, to help them develop their other senses.  Some of our earliest evidence for people practicing shamanism comes from cave paintings, some of which are over 35,000 years old.  These paintings are deep inside caves, where people have deliberately sought out places of total and utter darkness.  In many tribal societies, shamanic rituals and ceremonies are always performed after sunset, and throughout the night.  For shamans, the darkness, by shutting off our outer visual sense, actually allows us to 'see' the reality that lies

beneath surface perception. 

The physicist David Bohm said that there are two levels of reality.

The surface reality we live in most of the time he called 'explicate' reality. Behind the explicate Bohm says lies a deeper reality which he called the 'implicate', where all things are connected together.  Shamans have known this for tens of thousands of years. Shamans the world over have similar terms; it is a central concept of shamanism.  Light, and external sight, tends to keep us focused in this, surface reality.  Letting go of light and external sight helps us to let go into the deeper, implicate, reality. 

Potentially the darkness is a place of great richness and riches.  Entering it draws us into introspection and contemplation.  If we work with it, it brings us a stillness of mind and an opening up of our other senses.  We can open up to what we would otherwise have overlooked and not noticed, and we can 'see' the truth below the surface of things.  

Famously of course, the psychologist Carl Jung said: 'Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness.  One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.'  So shamanism has always embraced and worked with the darkness.

This is not to say at all that shamanism values the dark more than the light.  In fact shamanism (unlike the western religions) stays clear of making any such judgments, and sees all as having its place and part in the wheel. 

On a psychological level, embracing the darkness means embracing our shadow; the bits of our self that we deny or have locked away, and which lie unresolved and un-integrated.  Most people think they can ignore the shadow side.  Many religions and new age beliefs support this, and encourage people to focus only on the light.  In fact, we can never be whole by doing that.  Instead, the shadow becomes stronger the more we deny it.  At worst, we even project it out onto other people (hence the sky religions' willingness to judge and persecute others).  To quote Jung again: 'Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face' (Aion, 1955). And so many people are uneasy with the dark, as in it lies their own un-owned issues, and so they find the decent into the winter darkness hard as it brings them into closer contact with their own unresolved issues and emotions.

★   Ange   ★