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Andrew Holocek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions. He’s a profound teacher and his new book feels quite revelatory; it’s called Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation.
Andrew has been meditating for about 50 years and doing dark practice for about 30. As I tell him at the start of our conversation, I’m a terrible meditator, but I’m obsessed with darkness.
Today, Andrew explains how he uses darkness as a tool for essentially living a life of greater clarity, depth, and meaning. He explains a bit of the ancient tradition of dark therapy, and the nuts and bolts of how to dip your toe into dark practice at home, starting with just…closing your eyes for a moment. If the idea of being in the dark freaks you out, Andrew also gets that, and I think you’ll find his perspective on fear interesting, and even soothing.
Andrew also puts into context why more people have started turning to dark practice and dark therapy, which I found really resonant. As he explains, we’re living in a pretty light-addicted age, with a lot of masculine energy, and we’re all a bit addicted to light. But we’re also getting kinda blinded and lost in the light. And, perhaps, darkness is offering us a way to swing the pendulum back, and to see and feel things that we haven’t before.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
I’m excited. So here’s my grand disclaimer, Andrew. I’m a terrible meditator. I fantasize about dipping my toe someday even in a basic meditation retreat, not even vipassana or something more advanced. So I will never be spending 49 days in the darkness or 4.9 hours outside of going to sleep, but I am obsessed with darkness.
There you are. Yeah. And I had no idea, even though I typically am quite tuned into what the cool kids are doing, but I had no idea that dark retreat is a trending concept. What’s going on?
ANDREW:
Yeah, exactly. What’s going on? Yeah. Well, there’s lots to say about what’s going on, which we can definitely talk about. And also maybe if you want, we can explore meditation and your relationship to it and why you think you can’t meditate. Because parenthetically, when I talk to people as a, I guess, meditation instructor, usually, in fact, I’d say 99% of the time when people say they’re having problems with meditation, it’s not meditation they’re having a problem with. It’s their definition they’re having an issue with. So if you reframe what meditation really is, then people go, “Oh, okay. I get it. “ So we can talk a litle bit about that if you’d like. But yeah, in terms of the darkness thing, it’s kind of hip these days. It’s in the zeitgeist. It’s kind of goth. It’s cool. Kids are into it. The spectrum from teenagers all the way up to the octogenarians and those preparing for the end of life.
It’s getting a lot of airtime these days. And I can say just briefly why I think it’s happening
And we can get into the weeds. I’ve actually reflected on this quite a bit because I’m writing and we’re doing all these studies right now, which is kind of cool. And so here’s a principle that really helped me wrap my mind around, whoa, I can maybe see why this is happening. So this following term, I love this term. It’s almost melodic. It’s an anchiodromia. This is a cool term. It comes from Heraklis. He’s the philosopher of Flo, the guy that said you can’t step into the same river twice. But he was also a very sensitive non-dual thinker philosopher. And so the word literally means running into the opposite. Carl Jung, of course, what a surprise, jumped on it and used it for psychological integration and whatnot. But the fundamental principle here that’s also echoed in the Daoist yin yang thing is that if you take something to an extreme, it will either flip into its opposite spontaneously or through some type of revolution.
And it’s all in a gesture of reequilibrating in the spirit of homeostasis, in the spirit of balance. And so I’ve been reflecting on this like you quite a bit. Why is this stuff really coming out in a big way now? And I think it could be the following, that we’re living in a ridiculously light addicted age. In fact, I like to argue that the principle signature of the Kaliyuga, the dark age, is in fact too much light runaway light, which parenthetically, by the way, is masculine. This is so cool. So the whole in wisdom traditions, light is considered masculine and darkness is considered feminine. And so have you noticed maybe there’s a little bit too much patriarchal energy these days. Maybe there’s a little bit too much runaway infatuation with light. And so we live in a light centric, wake-centric culture all in the service of egocentricity because ego is only fully online and operational in the waking state.
And so I think what’s happening is that there’s an underlying intuition in the zeitgeist that things are really, really out of balance. And one way to reequilibrate is to actually swing the pendulum back from this runaway infatuation. We really are, even at the deepest metaphysical levels, this principle goes really deep. We’re all addicted to light. We’re all light junkies in the deepest possible way. And so because we’re so lost in the light, blinded by the light that I think the pendulum is swinging back and there’s a deep intimation. It may be inarticulate for a number of people why so many people are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the darkness or whoever represents. Well, one of the reasons I think people are attracted to it is because it in fact represents this balancing principle, represents depth, internality, and it’s also primordial. You can make light, but you can’t make darkness.
And so I think people are intuiting that they’re just out of touch. They’ve lost who they really are in the light. We’re blinded by the light. And so something about going into the dark, I can speak from decades of experience, it’s profoundly balancing healing restorative on so many different levels. And I think this principle of anatodromia running into the opposite is something that may be underlying this really interesting interest passion that’s happening in the Western world right now. So something like that, that’s what comes to mind.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, I mean, it makes perfect sense. And you write about this a lot, not only the light pollution in our landscapes and the way that we’re disrupting the reality that historically we’ve spent half our days typically shrouded in darkness, unadulterated darkness, but that also even in sort of the psychospiritual circles there is this obsession with light. “I’m a light worker, I’m a light holder, blah, blah, blah. “This very dualistic construct where this darkness bad, light good, and I don’t think people realize the way that they’ve weirdly been conscripted into this demonization of the feminine interiority. And as you say, we are children of darkness. We come from the womb and we return to the tomb. So it is an inescapable part of our identity.
ANDREW:
Yeah, very much so. I mean, many mythological traditions and religions and whatnot in the beginning, light, but light has to emerge out of some primordial matrix of darkness. So darkness, there’s this kind of genus faced thing about darkness on one level it’s considered demonic and devilish and virtually synonymous with anxiety, fear and death and whatnot. But that’s I think a facile enculturation that like you’re suggesting that darkness also represents originality. I mean, substance depth. This is where everything arises, whether a thought arising from the background of the mind and returning to it, us being conceived in darkness, spending nine months in it and then coming out into the light. So yeah, the restorative properties of the dark and what it can bring about in terms of creativity, healing, transformation, there’s I think an intuitive calling to that. And then interestingly enough, more and more artist types are going in.
The word is getting out. It’s a really hotbed for creativity. We can talk about why it’s profoundly transformational in terms of identity structure. I mean, there’s just a vast array of things that one can explore when you’re playing around with the darkness, whether it’s at home or whether it’s in formal dark retreat.
ELISE:
Yeah. So I want to talk about that because I did feel inspired. I was like, “ Well, I’m going to at least buy the mask. I had one and it kind of deteriorated. And so I need to get another one. It deteriorated in part because I wasn’t using it. But before we get into that, and you write about this, but about if you think about darkness within the world of Carl Jung, who you mentioned and everything that’s in the shadow and it holds everything that we don’t want to look at or don’t want to see or that we’re scared of. We’re definitely going to talk a lot about fear today, but that when we bring that to the light, when we take the things out of the hepty trash bag of shadow, one, it loses its scary dimension that we realize all the treasure that’s locked away in there.
And you write about in the context of coming from people who understood how to read dreams and how to go into the unconscious for prophecy or to understand who they were or what was happening. Yeah.
ANDREW:
Absolutely positively. And this is also worth throwing into the mix. You can think of the conscious mind as more masculine in nature and you can relate to the unconscious mind is definitely more feminine in qualities. And so many scientists will tell you now that minimum 95% of what we do is dictated by these unconscious processes. And so dropping into the dark, you mentioned young and deaf psychology and shadow work, this is an extraordinary opportunity. I think young would be just so delighted to realize that you can do the deepest possible shadow work cleaning up by going into the deepest of all shadows, which is ultimate complete darkness. And what I mean by this is when you’re in the dark, this is a wonderful juxtaposition of literal and metaphorical. You literally can’t project in your normal ways, right? You can’t throw crap around in the dark like you would in the day.
If you do, you’re going to get smacked with it. And so what happens in the dark that’s so interesting, and this took me quite a few years to figure out in terms of shadow work and projection, is that the weight when people go into the dark very often, not always, but very often, the vast majority of people, they struggle with it. They have a fight, flight, freeze response. They contract and defense against the darkness because they see it as a threat. And then when they’re in the dark, and I can attest from my own experience, it feels heavy, suffocating, oppressive, a little bit like a tomb, right? But what happens that’s so bloody interesting is that fundamentally the darkness is neutral. It’s just a metaphysical mirror. It’s neutral. And so what happens when you’re feeling that load in the dark, where is that heaviness coming from?
Where’s the suffocation and the oppression coming from in the dark? It’s not coming from the dark, it’s coming from you. So what I’m alluding to here is that the weight that you’re feeling of the darkness is directly proportional to everything you’ve projected onto it. That’s what creates the weight. And so what you can see in the dark that’s just magnificent and integral speak is called the path of cleaning up, which is owning up to our projections. You’re in there long enough, and I’ll never forget this moment in a retreat quite a long time ago where I stepped into it and I said, “Oh, geez, here I am again, kind of driving. Do I really want to do this? “ And the darkness in this particular retreat had dramatically changed. It was no longer suffocating, crushing, oppressive and heavy. It was loving, beneficent, kind. And it was like, WTF, what’s going on here?
Has the darkness changed? No, I had. And so I discovered then that the darkness was lightening up because I was lightning up. I was owning up to my projections. I was taking responsibility for these projections. And that, by the way, is dramatically revealed in the dark when you drop into the unconscious mind and you see all these projective vectors. This is the more revelatory experience of, oh my gosh, I’m cleaning up, I’m lightening up in the dark because the darkness in a very real way is considered a forceful method of liberation, by the way, in the Tibetan tradition. It’s kind of forcing me to own up to all my crap, to all the stuff that I’m constantly throwing out into the world. Like Carl Jung, I’ll end you with this quote because this is one of my favorite of all his quotes when he says, “Projection turns the world into a replica of one’s unknown face.” This is just a jaw dropping statement.
And so when you’re in there, you come face to face with all that and you have this amazing capacity to clean up, to lighten up, to own up to all these projections. So this alone is a marvelous reason for going into the dark that I wish somebody would’ve told me about 30 years ago that would’ve really helped me understand why is this so hard? The darkness isn’t hard I am. And so I get softer, the darkness gets softer. And so it’s a magnificent opportunity to ... Magnifying this, it’s not only a metaphysical mirror, it’s a metaphysical magnifying mirror. You get to see things you’ve never seen, you get to feel things you’ve never felt before in the dark because you can no longer run away from yourself. You can no longer distract from yourself. And that again is another reason it gets concentrated because you can’t use your usual distracting avoidance strategies.
You can no longer dilute the content of your experience. That’s what makes it so bloody transformational and also a bit challenging because you just go in the way anymore.
ELISE:
Well, I want to talk about the brass tacks of it. So you’ve done a three-year retreat?
ANDREW:
Yeah, I’ve been practicing for, I hate to say it this over 50 years. Yeah. So I did a three-year retreat a number of years ago and then I started doing dark practice actually be 30 years ago. It was July. I started teaching, learning it within the context of Tibetan Buddhism. That’s really where it’s been an established practice for almost thousands of years is fundamentally a way to prepare for the end of life. It is deep doctrinal footing in the Greeks. You’ll find it in the pre-Socratics, Parmenides. You’ll find it in the neoplateness, iamblicus. You’ll find it in the Egyptian sleep temple rituals. The Taoists talk about it. I mean, there’s definitely traditions, lineages of dark practice going back throughout the world for thousands of years.
ELISE:
I know you end the book with fear, but maybe we can talk about it next because I think even people who are listening to this and thinking, okay, wait, what? It’s one thing to be quiet with yourself and sit on a pillow. It’s another thing to go into the dark. And as you say, you can start with 4.9 seconds, maybe try 4.9 minutes. You don’t do 49 days to start or ever maybe. But even just thinking about it, and I think this is probably ... I do think I’m a walking meditator to be fair, Andrew, but I certainly recognize that stillness kicks up not only resistance but fear. And so I would imagine for many people that fear is supercharged by the dark. So what is that fear? Just the ego kicking and screaming?
ANDREW:
Yeah, this is so great. This is a big one. Yeah. So there’s a deep underlying intuition that when you rest in such complete silence and stillness, you’re going to die. It represents the death space. It really does. And my dear friend, this guy you have to have him on. He’s a rockstar neuroscientist. I love him. His name is Ruben Lalkenan. He’s amazing. Here’s dear difference. You got to get mine. And he has this great line, resting in the present moment is annihilation. And this is pure neurological stuff. And so absolutely positively that what this again is what darkness reveals, this is the most amazing. There’s so many ironies and paradoxes in this dark retreat thing. And Suzuki Roshi said once beautifully, right? If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.
And so what happens in the dark is, yeah, you can no longer get away from yourself. You’re forced into the present moment. Everything, the walls close in on you, this sounds so great. It’s like, oh yeah, I can’t wait. I want to sign up for this. The past closes in on you. The future closes in on you. There are times in there when it feels like the walls are closing in on you, the roof is collapsing and you’re going, “Oh yeah, this sounds great. I can’t wait to sign up.” Well, returning very briefly, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about the fear thing to this principle of an anchiodromia, when you’re squeezed into the present moment to such an extent, you go into something to such an extent, it flips into its opposite. When you’re squeezed into the present moment to such an extent in any deep meditation, but in particular in the dark, it flips into infinite expansion and openness.
And this is really helpful to understand in terms of what’s happening when you’re in there, all the stuff closing in, closing in, and then eventually it just completely opens up and everything just releases and all these ecstatic things take place. But before that takes place, for sure, fear. And this is because your egoic structure is being starved fundamentally. Ego lives on distraction. Ego lives on motion. Distraction literally means to pull apart. And when you’re always pulling apart and distracting, that’s what keeps egoic structure alive, which is why in this day and age with all these artificial light sources, these weapons of mass distraction, this is one reason they’re so popular because they actually feed egoic structure. Ego lives on this type of relentless movement. And so when you enter a sensory deprivation chamber like this, or again, just any deep meditative thing, all that is put under house arrest.
Everything is put on hold. Basically when everything is held to such an extent, it’s like this coffin thing, like I alluded to, this tomb, then ego can no longer move. It feels like it’s starving. And then eventually you feel like you’re just going to either go crazy or die in there. Ego moves. We move as if our life depends on it because it does. And so when you go into deep meditation or you go into the dark and you can’t move, the ego knows move it or lose it. That level of negation, sensation holding is going to fundamentally lead. You’re going to drop through the fake news of ego arch structure and you’re going to open to what lies below that egoic structure. And so therefore fear, this is a really important thing. I mean, my dear friend Pema Children, she’s made a career out of this.
You really want to grow in this short and precious life. Don’t just follow your bliss. They’ll just get you blissed out or can. You really want to grow, you follow your fear because fear is the affective expression of ignorance. That’s what you’re really going after. But ignorance is hard to target because it’s so insidious, it’s so ubiquitous. Fear is its affective expression. And so you can use fear actually as a sign, as a marker, as an indicator. So when you’re feeling really deep fear, deep inner work, it’s actually a really good sign. It means you’re getting really close to the truth. And so if you actually have the right view, that’s what I’m trying to establish here and you then are interested in perhaps exploring the nature of this thing called fear because if we don’t establish a relationship to it, we’re going to spend our lives living from it.
And you can make a very solid case that your entire life becomes a really protracted, extended, sophisticated avoidance strategy to avoid the harsh truths of what’s lying deep within you. And so we keep moving, literally distracting unto death when we can no longer move and no longer distract. So I’ll pause because there’s so much to say.
ELISE:
There’s so much.
I want to go back. Fear is the affect of expression of ignorance. Is that what you said? And so when you’re saying ignorance, let me make sure I understand here. We’re talking about, again, going to this idea of shadow, you can’t know what you don’t know, right? And is that what you mean? There’s this terror that comes from an inability to touch the truth.
ANDREW:
Exactly. We’re always afraid of what we don’t know. I mean, even when we’re anxious. Pick up any colloquial example, right? Fear of a public speaking, fear of a job interview, fear of a date. We’re fear of end of life. We’re always afraid of what we don’t know. But like Marie Curie put it so beautifully, nothing in life is to be feared. It’s only to be understood.
The more you understand, the less you fear. And so by working with this thing called fear, yes, we’re targeting what we really want to get after and transform is ignorance. Now, this is not just colloquial over the counter ignorance. This is just like the ignorance that you’re alluding to. Ignorance as to the nature of reality, ignorance as to the nature of mind. This is a primordial ignorance. So this is what we really want to target and eventually transform into wisdom. But it’s like official living in water. We’re so ensconced in this milieu. It’s so close to it. It’s so much the fabric that we’re living in that, like you said, we don’t see that we don’t see. We don’t know that we don’t know. And so when you’re in the dark, one of the things that the darkness does that’s just so magnificent is it provides mixing metaphors.
It provides an exquisite contrast medium. When you’re in the dark and you can no longer move, you can no longer run the contrast medium of darkness actually allows you to see and feel things you’ve never seen and felt before because you can no longer distract yourself from these feelings and these things. And one of the most principles of these feelings is in fact fear. And so yeah, when you’re in there and you start to drop in, you start to get in there, I’m sure many of your listeners, maybe even you yourself, like when you take a really powerful psychedelic and people are freaked out, they’re afraid of it, you do really deep inner work, people are afraid of it because they don’t know. Again, the Marie Kari thing, they don’t know. They don’t understand what this fabric of fear is about. It’s actually its evolutionary role.
This is important to throw into the mix right at the outset. We need fear. We wouldn’t be here. Yeah,
ELISE:
Totally. It keeps us
ANDREW:
Alive.
It keeps us alive. We wouldn’t be here talking about the nature of fear if we didn’t have fear, but this evolutionary driver fear becomes a devolutionary retardant if we don’t understand what it is about. And so I’ll say one last thing a little bit deeper in and then we can talk about it. And this is important because again, anybody doing deeper work, when you’re no longer window shopping, you’re going to come up against this fabric. In a certain way, this is what you’re paying for. But here’s the way I’ve looked at it from an evolutionary point of view. Fear protects form. Ego is exclusive identification with form. And so as you’re going from Ego to ego lessness on the psychospiritual path from form to formlessness on the psychospiritual path, how is that related to developmental ego structure? It’s a death threat. And so therefore, when you start to go all the way down there, this is the most important thing.
And this is the contrast medium I’m talking about. The darkness provides and invites this incredible contrast medium of openness. Fundamentally, what happens in the dark is you open, like Rumi put it so beautifully, into wider, wider rings of being. The mind falls into itself in the darkness, opening, opening, opening. And what happens is, and if you understand this, this is a big deal, you’re going to fall all the way down into the bedrock of the relative self-sense. And then what’s going to happen down there is you’re opening, opening, opening you to come down to this primordial contraction. So this contrast medium of openness in the dark, this is huge. The contrast medium of openness in the dark allows you to better see just how contracted you are and that we contract all the time. It’s another expression of this distraction thing. Every time you distract, you are contracting.
And with every contraction, you’re giving birth to a girlic structure. And so what happens here, and this is not just dark retreat, this is really deep in our meditation, this is psychedelic work. You’re going to open, open, open. You’re going to go all the way down. You’re going to drop into the primordial contraction. And then as that starts to dissolve, there’s going to be this almost violent contraction of fear. And if I invite you and listeners to just for just a second, pause for just a second, do a little introceptive inquiry and touch into what do you feel somatically, viscerally when you feel really intense fear? What do you feel? An almost violent contraction. I mean, I won’t do it because I don’t want to scare you, but sometimes what I do is I’ll just bark out really loud just to startle somebody and almost everybody jumps and when you pay attention to that, you’re going to feel this really intense contraction.
Well, that very intense contraction is what egoic structure actually is. And that intense contraction is what lies at the base of the relative self sense. And everything we do is basically, again, this avoidance strategy to avoid this really uncomfortable feeling. We spend our lives trying to dilute it. In the dark, you can’t do that anymore. Just like in death, you can’t do it anymore. You kind of have to face it, that’s what you’re asking for. But if you understand this process, this phenomenology, oh, lordy is this a big deal Because then it helps you see that, oh my gosh, I spent my entire life distracting from these primordial really uncomfortable feelings. And if I can bring them into the light of conscious awareness in the dark, establish a relationship to them, befriend them, realize their value, then I can transcend but include these feelings. And now you’re really putting the accelerator on for evolution.
And so this is the greatest thing about the dark. You go into the dark, it’s pitch black, you can’t do anything, you’re hitting the brakes, everything’s put on hold and it is a profound act of cessation negation that everything comes through a screeching hole in the dark. This ironically is the most profound catalyst and accelerator for human development. So I’ve thrown a lot of noodles on the wall for last minute.
ELISE:
No, I’m still thinking about the contraction and how easy it is to evoke that and how hard it is to just be with that hard stuff.
ANDREW:
Let me just say one thing real quick. You can campaign on this stuff. You can get elected on this stuff because there’s a sense, when you think about these levels of contraction that fear brings about, on one level, it’s actually quite comforting. It’s actually pathologically reassuring because what it does is that contraction freezes, reifies space. This is what creates the sense of self another. This is what creates our entire dualistic relationship to reality. And so if you understand the ubiquitous play of this narrative of fear, you realize how it is literally ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. And if you can understand it, befriend it, relate to it, boy, then you transform fear into fearlessness, contraction into openness, and welcome to rapid psychospiritual development.
ELISE:
Yeah. Oh, and we definitely need that. I want to talk, you mentioned in the book that scientifically you don’t quite understand how the brain has been rewired by this experience, just that it is more malleable potentially. And there’s emergent science and psychedelics that that’s exactly what happens, that there’s this training or this opportunity for a few weeks after. It’s why integration is more important than the journey itself for retraining habits and patterns. It’s why Ibogaine is so powerful as an antidote to opioid addiction in particular, right? Plugging the craving, but also giving people an opportunity, a real on- ramp to do something different. So do you think it’s the same exact mechanism that’s happening that’s akin to a drug-free psychedelic experience?
ANDREW:
100%. 100%. So this is cool. This is another ... Boy, these are great topics. So this is one reason so many scientists, and again, we have five studies going on right now. This is why so many scientists are really, really into studying this dark stuff. And one is I’d say three of the researchers I’m working with are really we’re leading experts in psychedelic research. And so the parallels they tell me over and over, the parallels here are just like my Gen C people say, Redick.
ELISE:
Radic.
ANDREW:
Exactly.
And so Dark Retreat at the early levels, dark retreat is a psycholytic process. A process of loosening, lysis means to loosen to break up. You go into the dark initially, all this stuff is going to break, loose, it’s going to come up. And let me tie this into the meditation thing that we started with a half hour ago. Some people, a lot of people ask, “Well, okay, what is this dark retreat thing really all about? “ Well, NBA superstar Rudy Goldbert has a wonderful summary statement. He did three days, four nights, came out and said, “Dark retreat is meditation times a thousand.” I think it’s slightly hyperbolic, but not a lot. It’s just really intense, concentrated inner work. And so the reason I say that is if you can join that with Trump orimate’s outrageous brilliant statement, that meditation isn’t a sedative. It’s a laxative.
I love that one. And if dark routine is a meditation times a thousand, well, you’re laxating. I mean, you are purging in the dark and this again is a lot like psychedelics. You’re purging. Now it may not be literal, you may not be throwing up and whatnot, but you’re psychically purging for sure. So the first part of the dark practice is definitely psycholytic. It’s a stool softener. This shit’s going to come up. You’re in there, you’re opening up. My favorite definition of meditation, habituation to openness. You go into the dark, you’re almost forced to open. It’s the only way to survive. I’m being slightly exaggerating, but not a lot. And so you open, open, open, all this stuff breaks loose. It comes up magnificent. It has to come up. And this is, again, why it ties in so deeply with the true deeper end of its psychedelic, because psychedelic literally means mind manifesting.
That’s what the word means. And so when you’re in the dark, it is totally psycholytic on the front end, deeper end, psychedelic mind manifesting because all this stuff, it’s a sober psychedelic. You become the metacic. You don’t need any exogenous agents. And in fact, one of the studies we’re going to be working with for sure is when you’re in there long enough, no doubt endogenous DMT is released. That’s where it gets pretty trippy and colorful and lights and colors and all that. That’s a kind of a cool thing that happens. But the most important thing that happens is through greater degrees of openness and openness and openness, all this stuff is going to come up. All these unconscious processes, all this undigested material, even all the way down to these primorial traumas that are born from these primority of contractions. And what trauma is. It’s a chronic contraction.
Even those contractions are going to break loose and come up. And so this is super helpful to understand because it can be a little bit of a crapshow in there at first, but this is what you’re paying for. You’re paying for all this lysis. You’re paying for all this stuff to come up. And so to come back to your issue of what happens is called critical learning periods. Sensory deprivation’s been studied in animals, but not to the extent that we’re doing with formal doc retreat, but there’s no doubt whatsoever that when people come out of the dark, they’re in a highly, not even neuroplastic space. It’s just like psychedelics. Psychedelics have been shown when you finish a trip, your brain is in a highly neuroplastic space, which means it’s really highly conducive to reshaping, to remolding. You’re in a really porous, permeable, malleable space when you come out of the dark.
And this is a magnificent opportunity for growth and transformation and for rewiring and restructuring, literally changing the way you perceive, changing the way you see. And so it’s not merely what’s called neuroplasticity, but the deeper end of it is called metaplasticity is like the very essence of what happens when the brain becomes so fluid and so malleable and therefore so available for transformation, literally to transform, to change shape. So this is another really important thing to understand in terms of, okay, you want me to do what? Whether it’s an hour in the dark or an afternoon. Well, maybe if you understand, and again, there’s so much more to say here, you understand, oh, this is what happens when I’m doing the dark retreat. This is what can take place in terms of divination and creativity and insight and healing and everything. Okay, now I’m starting to get it.
And then bingo, are you going to go in there? And like I say in the introduction to my book, this is the most transformative thing I have ever done. This is including 30,000 hours of practice.
ELISE:
And in the typical MAPS psychedelic MDMA protocol, you’re with a therapist and they’re listening to you and they’re taking notes. Obviously when you’re doing dark retreat, you’re essentially alone apart from someone maybe bringing you food, but you bring sticky notes and you bring a voice recorder because I was like, how would I take notes? How would I capture? So you’re sort of therapizing yourself?
ANDREW:
Well, yes. So a couple things here. Yeah. Dr. Retreat is absolutely positively therapeutic even though it’s not over therapy. Now let me say this because there’s a recent institute that it’s called the Darkness Therapy Institute recently opened. I have a connection with some of the scientists and one of the founders there. This is big in the Czech Republic in Germany. It’s called Darkness Therapy. So it hasn’t gained much of a foothold in the West, but mark my words, this is going to really take off because yes, in addition to the type of thing that I have been kind of trained to do, I go in, I do my solo thing, somebody will deliver food once a day or if I’m in there, most of the time now I can just do it all by myself, believe it or not, in the dark. It’s kind of- I know
ELISE:
You’re like access to a microwave. I was like, “What are you talking about, Andrew You’re zapping food in the dark.
ANDREW:
Yeah, it’s actually pretty easy. The whole thing can actually be very, very fun and playful. But yeah, the therapeutic end of it, again, the lytic aspect, the therapeutic end of it is a big deal. And so this darkness therapy stuff that I was so glad to hear, this Institute taking root, this is magnificent because it then allows not merely a guide to be on site, but an actual therapist to be there with you. It’s almost like a ... Well, I mean, one level could be like an exposure or desensitization technique, but the idea is just like with meditation as a catalyst, dark retreat being a catalyst for standard meditative protocols, it is absolutely positively a catalyst for therapeutic transformation. And so they’re doing their own set of studies on this, which is amazing. And I guarantee as the data centers coming out around this, both the soft science and the hard science, you’re going to see, I think the Western scientific substantiation for some of these outrageous claims, but why is this practice so wildly transformative?
Why does everything happen with such rapidity in there? And so we have models, we’re working with it. I’ve done it for so long that I have a pretty clear idea of what might be going on, but now we’re going to be tackling it.
ELISE:
Well, this is exciting. I mean, and having done sort of the MDMA protocol, you do wear a mask so you are in darkness talking. That’s sort of the only way to access that deeper unconscious and you take it off to go to the bathroom, whereas you are going to the bathroom in the dark. But one of my anxieties about psychedelics, and I understand why everyone wants to study this, it’s legal, it’s free and available in everyone’s bed with a mask or you have a dedicated sort of blacked out room.
ANDREW:
Yeah. Yeah, right right here behind current curtain number A, I have my little- Little
ELISE:
Dark
ANDREW:
Studio. Yeah, one brief thing, you can also playfully, you can also microdose in the blink of an eye, right?
ELISE:
Just close your eyes.
ANDREW:
Close your eyes and there’s the dosage. So anyway, I cut you off.
ELISE:
No, and maybe my anxiety about this is overstated, but I feel like when we look at what’s happening in the world and the people in charge and what’s happening in the tech industry and having some proximity to those people over the years and understanding the, I guess you could call it devotion to psychedelics, whether aided or not and the Messiah complexes, to quote Wilbur, the waking up without the growing up. And is that a risk or has that been your experience with dark retreat as well or is it not as intense? Yes,
ANDREW:
It can be.
ELISE:
Okay.
ANDREW:
No, no, it can’t be just as intense. You can become a total state junkie, right? Because when you’re working, you mentioned Wilbur’s integral approach of waking up versus growing up, or I would say in conjunction with growing up, this is dealing with both the spiritual and psychological lens of it. When you’re working with a spiritual end, you’re working primarily with states of consciousness and what psychedelics can do, in fact do do and what meditation can do is it can definitely introduce altered states of consciousness. I would say parenthetically that what it does, these agents, whether it’s dark retreat or psychedelics, I would actually say they point out natural states. This is the altered state.
This is the altered state. You see this world dualistically, solid lasting and independent, you’re tripping. This is the altered state. So these medicines, these agents give you glimpses of the natural state. And so the vector of waking up is in fact about introducing you to these more open states of consciousness. There’s that term again. And one of the issues there whenever that happens is these states of mind can be very delicious. I mean, they’re like metaphysical valium, spiritual cocaine. These are really delicious states of mind. Now in and of it themselves, that’s not inherently problematic. In fact, you can be aspirational, inspirational for continuing onto the path. I want to stabilize this. I want to enhance it, but there’s a very near enemy of aspiration is grasping and contracting onto that space. So if one isn’t careful, whether it’s the dark or anything, deep meditation, psychedelics is the issue of becoming a state junkie.
You just keep coming back to get your hit. And so I think the most important thing is to understand what brings about these states of consciousness, these so- called beautiful altered states of consciousness. Again, this is something you can do for yourself just with a very brief inquiry. I invite listeners, do this, can close your eyes, pause for a minute, and bring to mind two or three experiences in your life to which you would append the label mystical
Spiritual. Was it in fact a psychedelic experience? Was it in fact a deep meditation experience? Was it in fact a walking nature? So bring to mind two or three experiences to which you would depend a label mystical, spiritual. And now look briefly underneath, is there a common underlying factor, ingredient, denominator behind all these states? I argue that there is and it’s openness. Every one of these states of ecstasy is brought about by the cessation of the contraction. So every state of ecstasy and the state of ecstasy is directly proportional to the preceding state of agony. So in other words, if you’re really contracted, there’s this narrative. Again, if you’re really contracted and you’re having a sense of experience of opening, you can think you’re enlightened. It’s that ecstatic.
And so the issue is understanding the phenomenology, the process. What’s going on here? I’m just opening. What’s my favorite definition of meditation? Habituation and openness. So if I understand the phenomenology that dark retreat, these medicines, these are like pointing out transmissions. They’re pointing out particular wonderful states of open mind. Well, instead of then becoming a state junkie and a dark junkie and a literal, most people psychedelics are not addicting in this regard. Why not work to stabilize the state, the spiritual, mystical experience by practicing openness now? Everything then becomes spiritual. Your entire life becomes a psychedelic experience. Your entire life becomes ecstasy if you work with the underlying phenomenology, which is one of openness. And so for me, this is the key. This is what these medicines can point out. I like darkness because instead of, I mean, even Abigain, that’s one that I haven’t done 24 hours maybe, 36 maybe.
I mean, you can be in the dark for days and weeks. And so this is when you get to see this stuff in really extended periods of time over and over and over again. And it’s kind of a game changer, at least it have been for me. I don’t need ... In fact, I was going to say I share some stories about psychedelics in the dark. I’ve never done a psychedelic journey in the dark. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t recommend it at all, but there’s some super interesting parallels again between both of these. But to me, and then I’ll pause, the underlying kind of message here is the openness that brings about these ecstatic states. That’s the message. And then why not practice openness? Everything becomes spiritual. Everything becomes festival if you just to it.
ELISE:
No, I think that’s a beautiful outcome and I’m sure there’s my own projections on this, but you mentioned this idea of people being, “I’m enlightened.” And as Wilbur would say, you can have an enlightened Nazi. So that’s what I worry about sometimes is this, I’m special, I’m enlightened, I’ve seen it. And even the way that I think that sometimes that’s described as this all doesn’t matter. And it’s like, well, this is people’s livelihoods and we do live in this material world. And I don’t know.
ANDREW:
When you say this, you mean normal life kind of thing?
ELISE:
Yes. Yes.
ANDREW:
Oh, I think it very much does matter. And this is super important because otherwise you fall on a classic spiritual bypass pathologies,
ELISE:
Right? Yeah.
ANDREW:
Totally. For me, what I do here is I work with, I like what William Blake talks about when he talks about double vision, capacity to keep one eye on these so- called mystical experiences, the heavenly dimensions, and then one eye on earth until eventually you realize there’s no difference between them or with the darkness of the light, one eye and the dark, one eye on the light. And so you work and you integrate in your honors from integral approaches, you honor both those eyes, you honor.
ELISE:
So let’s talk briefly. I know we’re almost at time about the brass hack. So essentially there are some retreat centers that offer this around the world, but it’s kind of rare. So do most people do it in their own house?
ANDREW:
Yeah. I mean, most people, this is a pretty small population.
ELISE:
The
ANDREW:
Millions
ELISE:
Of people
ANDREW:
Shutting themselves
ELISE:
Up in closets. Yeah.
ANDREW:
We’re going to change that. Yeah, these centers are popping up all over. I have connection to a bunch of them, but not all of them. And it’s exciting. Speaking of brass texts, the best way to work with this is, and this is kind of what I’m riffing and writing it out and doing some studies on, we’re languaging it as gray retweet, gray, which is a way to weave in and out. Because even if you’re going in for one, two, three days for a lot of people, there’s just like, no way. There’s just no way I’m going to do that. So you mentioned earlier, if you’re closing your eyes, you can do that. But at a certain point, getting one of the masks that you talked about that you wore through, there’s three or four of them now, Monte Mahalos, mindful masks. These are great because you can open your eyes up underneath them. This is the way to start. They’re not expensive. They’re like 30 bucks. I have no stock on this stuff. And it’s a way to just titrate to drip it, to get familiar with it. The very definition of meditation in the Tibetan language, by the way, to Gom, G-O-M, to become familiar with. So you become familiar with the darkness in your own terms.
And then what happens if you put the mask on, you mentioned 4.9 seconds. I play with this 49-day model and then 4.9 minutes. The idea is a graduated titrated approach where you can work with a dosage. So coming back to the psychedelic thing, one of the biggest issues with healthy psychedelics and the darkest dosage because in the dark, just like with psychedelics, you can overdose on yourself. How big a dose of yourself can you handle when you can no longer run away from yourself? And so therefore, again, it’s so profoundly revelatory. You’re in there, you’re going, “Oh my gosh, I spent my whole life running away from myself. Really?” Well, you drip it, you put the mask on, you go, “Oh, this is kind of cool. I can do this for 10 minutes a day.”
And you start to feel the restorative aspects. “Wow, this is kind of cool. It makes me slow down. It makes me feel a little bit more, brings me into this more intimate sense of touch. This is what’s so beautiful about the dark. It invites intimacy. It invites touch. Is it boycotts our most superficial dualistic sense of sight? And so by putting the mask on and becoming familiar with it, working with it, playing with it, you might comment at some point, I’m in my mask for a couple hours and you go, no, okay, now I might be interested in exploring a dark retreat. Literally, millions of people can do this at home. And in fact, I would totally recommend it because it’s super easy. It’s unbelievably safe. I mean, how can that hurt you?
And then as you become more familiar with it, you go, wow, this is kind of cool. And then it may elect like, “ I want to see what the next step might be like. “And then literally, my teacher Kempo Rimbache, this is the way he taught us. Literally he said,” Go into your bathroom and throw a towel underneath the rug or become literally a closet meditator. That’s kind of cool, right? Go into your closet, shut the door and see what that’s like when your whole body is in there. And then maybe, oh, let me go to a retreat center for a day or for two days. “And so this way, if you do it this way, you drip it, you titrate it. It’s so gentle, it’s so graceful, it’s so basically accessible this way, then you can see for yourself like, “ Whoa, there’s something kind of cool here.
I mean, there’s something really potentially restorative about just bathing in this dark space, this wisdom of the darkness. And so that’s definitely the way to play with it because then it’s super easy. It’s super simple.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, there were parts where you were talking about dark retreats specifically, but as a parent and my kids are a little older now, but I was like, oh my God, what I wouldn’t have given to just be in the dark. And I think you were describing it as sort of dropping in and out of sleep, lucid dreaming, but just the deep restoration. It’s so
ANDREW:
Beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I’ll put my mask on. I mean, no kidding. I’ll put my mask on for five minutes or so, 10 minutes during the day just to like, oh, Hello Darkness, my old friend. Oh, there it is again. And the mind just ... Right now it really is like medicine for me. I just go in there and I relax. I open. It’s as if the darkness is absorbing all my stress and anxiety. And at the same time, it’s as if I’m absorbing the medicine of the stillness and the darkness itself. And for me, yeah, it’s been a pretty cool transformative and ongoing journey. I continue to do it. I continue to explore it because the unconscious mind is vast. It’s enormous. It’s so deep. There’s so much to explore. And every time I go in there, it’s like, okay, what is the darkness going to show me this time?
What is it going to teach me next time? And so for me, it’s just this endless, continuous exploration. I just love it.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, I’m inspired. I’m going to babystep my way in. It’s hard for me to turn my mind off. It’s hard for me to feel like I can’t take notes. It’s hard for me.
ANDREW:
Okay. So interjection. You started this an hour ago.
You don’t have to turn your thoughts off. That’s not the point. The issue V. Don’t try to stop the play of your mind. You have kids, right? Thoughts are just the children of your mind. And what thoughts do like kids is they just play. That’s just what thoughts do. The issue is not to stop your thoughts. That’s what I mentioned earlier about most people’s sense of definition. Their definition of meditation is just off. Meditation is about establishing a more open, there’s that word again, kind, insane relationship to the contents of your mind. That’s all it is. And if your mind is like your kids and running all over the place, instead of like, “Oh God, I can’t meditate. Oh crap, maybe, oh wow, this is amazing. Look at what my mind can do. “ And so literally like your kids, don’t fight with your mind, love your mind, love your mind.
If it’s speedy and they’re throwing a tantrum in there, whatever, there’s again, this notion of holding, right? Hold the mind in the cradle of loving kindness in this attention and environment and then you just witness it. You go, “Wow, look at this. You just watch. You just watch.” And so yeah, then it becomes like, whoa, I can meditate because I can basically establish a new open relationship to the contents of my being. That’s all the meditation is. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Don’t even try. Let them play. Just don’t let them seduce you. Don’t go non-lucid. Don’t let them hook you and draw you away. Let them come and let them go. Like Pema Chodron said, “You are the sky. Everything else is weather.” So mixing metaphors, now that your thoughts aren’t just kids, now your thoughts are weather patterns, right? So you’re sitting there, you can do skygeezing practice.
I do this with my morning coffee. I sit out, I look out over the window, I see the mountains, I see the weather, clouds are blowing by, birds are flying through it, lightning, wind, whatever. It’s the same thing with my mind. So you are the sky.
You can weather it. Amazing.
ELISE:
I will find a link to one of the masks that he recommends to drop in the show notes, but there are many. They have little, not foam, but sort of a soft structure around them. So as he mentioned, you can open your eyes under them and darkness is maintained. They’re actually very relaxing and comfortable. I’m just going to read a bit a few paragraphs from The Total Eclipse of the Mind. “The power of dark retreat comes from its ability to erase. This practice is about subtraction, not addition. Darkness itself is the result of negation of light, not addition. It’s defined by absence, not substance. You can make light, but you cannot make darkness. You can make lies, but you can’t make the truth. You can fabricate deception, but you can’t fabricate reality. You can only reveal it. The very structure of darkness suggests its benefits as the primordial eraser.
“Only elemental truth is allowed in the dark, which is precisely where dark retreat takes you. When brought to fruition, dark retreat erases you all together and points out the unerasable. With everything that is happening these days, our crazy schedules, ridiculously busy lives, and endless obligations, do we really need to add anything else to our lives? I take the greatest delight when I can remove things from my packed day and recently I had a dream where an authoritative voice boomed out repeatedly, less is more. Relate to dark practice as the addition of a tool designed for deletion like a snow shovel, sponge, or dust mop. In this regard, dark retreat is the most retro thing you can possibly do. Darkness will restore your identity, return you to the nature of your being, and eventually revert you to the reduction base of reality itself. Well, friends, that sounds like a promise.”
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