The Other Side of the Light. A Personal Essay / letter to a friend on an experience I had with the dark



I felt the darkness and wanted to fly.



I lay down as I often do to catch forty winks before night school. Sometimes I actually fall asleep for a short time but mainly I enjoy just resting. Yesterday I lay down and began talking to you (attempting to tell you how I am going to forgo this waiting and just chance a trip to see you). I was making my best pitch to you about things I want to do drifting in and out when I realized as I was drifting out that I had just seen the most alluring place. It was black like a night without stars but it had depth.



I was awake and purposefully took note of my body but I felt detached from it. At that moment the only real thought that came to mind is don't do anything, think anything or move anything. I knew that if I did anything, it would make me lose this. I wasn't asleep either I was aware of my surrounding. For a moment the thick blackness faded and I laid still and waited to go back to where it was, on the edge of sleep. I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back and cut my body loose and just float free. Oh someone tell me because I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LET GO.

This darkness wasn't cold or scary; it was pleasant and inviting. It wasn't a flat darkness like when you close your eyelids; it had depth and substance. If someone could only tell me how to dump this body for a while, I could explore. I felt like I was swaying on the edge of something incredibly grand and didn't know how to let go of my perch. I know it is a mind-thing being able to let go but I hope I can learn how. Knowing my luck it was someplace that I was not supposed to be but then who believes that anything is about luck.

I have been reading up on intuition and throughout most of these books they refer to the idea of receiving the message(s) through the 'light' ... Visualize a light, a light emanating from or something of pure light. Everything talks about 'light'. That darkness I experienced was real and intense. I am planning to return to see if I can learn to let go. I believe I have been there before but it was you who took me. Is there anything or anyway I can talk you into taking me there again and showing me how to explore. Or is this something I have to learn on my own?



Why is good always referred to as 'the light?' This morning when I walked out to get into the car it was a black moonless morning not even any residual light from the city. It was so dark that I took each step to the car slowly just incase something had been left in my path that I didn't make note of as I came home the night before. It was gorgeous and safe even though there were 'no lights' except for that of a zillion stars. I am beginning to understand about what you said about the darkness being a friend. It isn't just the dark of night you were referring to; it is that darkness that I saw yesterday when I was resting. It is the darkness which sets you free when confined. It is the darkness through which you can expand your thoughts.

Light is overwhelming and loud. It is generally wonderful, useful and needed too, of this I am sure but you can't hear the whispers you can hear in the dark. You can't feel the minute details like the change in a temperature by a body entering the room. Yes the light is 'all those things' but it is also distracting and controlling in its noise.

If light is all encompassing why is so much of our universe in darkness?

Why do they use bright light in interrogations to wear a person down if light is so uplifting? Why is it some people loose their minds when left in total darkness for an extended period of time? Is it because they have not yet learned what it is like to be alone with themselves? Is it because they can hear their heart beating. What it is like to know only the truth? Is that the knowledge the darkness holds? A knowledge of who we really are inside our very souls, where it counts. Why do we close our eyes when we see something that scares us? Do we feel safer? In darkness our only loss of sense is our sight which is our most prejudicial and deceiving sense of all.

Our world is based on light; our bodies and time all follow the light yet the only sense that seems to rule our times of light is our sight. Without light we are unable to see how much someone weighs, the color of their skin or if they walk with a limp. So is light, only important because of the value we place on our ability to see? We can hear in the darkness and in the light. We can feel, taste and smell in the darkness as well as the light. Is that our reason for fearing the darkness because it strips away the layers we only see and exposes our inner-core, our soul so to speak?

Let Us

Let us meet in the darkness and let me learn you, without the noise of the light.

Let me feel your warmth through the touch of my fingers. Touch the roughness of hands that have worked hard and loved softly, feel the vibration of your anger or the wetness of your tears.

Let me smell your scent when relaxed and the scent of your lust. Fill my olfactory sense with moments to recognize and remember unique only to you.

Let my tongue taste the good and the bittersweet. Let me kiss your neck after a hard day's work so I might fill that sense and know the sweet salty flavor of the strain of your day. Let me taste your lips as we discover nirvana together or savor a kiss before an imaginary moon on the top of a mountain - in the darkness.

Let me hear the stories of your childhood, the dreams of the future and the hardships that you have overcome. Fill my ears with the words of your soul and let all my senses in the dark paint the masterpiece that you are.

How many of us after knowing someone for years cannot recognize his or her scent on a pillow. Even better have you ever felt as though you have been betrayed because you smell someone else on your pillow? Try smelling a friend's pillow - is it their smell or is it unfamiliar to you because you haven't allowed yourself that pleasure of knowing your friend that intimately. Intimately meaning a deep soulful knowing.

The darkness is it doesn't just show the bad or evil but it exposes all - the good too. Darkness exposes our true selves for we cannot hide behind our exterior. It eliminates our ability to incorrectly prejudge someone or something before we have a chance to look inside. The darkness is where the answer lies, it is where the soul can truly speak.



Soul Speak

Beyond our search for love
Beyond our need to seek
If we listen in the darkness
It's with our soul we speak

Comfort and safety are there for us,
When we close our eyes.
The fears we face in the light,
In the darkness we see as lies.

Close your eyes there is no view
Or judgments to be held
Feel free to discover the truth
As only all our senses tell

To have prejudice for a strange man
For the color of his skin
Would be absent in the darkness
So we might call him a friend

To seek out in the darkness that
We would truly wish to know.
Exposes so much more to our senses,
Than what the light may show.

So get to know me in the darkness,
If knowing me is what you seek.
To see me in the darkness,
Is to hear what my soul speaks.

EmmaTenebrae
Feb 2002