Dark Room
Light Room
Dark Room
Light Room
Dark room
Light room
Ad nauseam
This oscillation between the two primary “realities” we inhabit is undulation.
The “positive” feelings we experience in the light room invariably result in a preference for the light room and the associations we have with light room conditions: sunny skies, pain-free mind and body, expansive moods, a peaceful environment, a spacious schedule, political stability, things going our way.
The “negative” feelings of the dark room—melancholy, despair, worry, a sense of malaise, unease, restlessness, dejection, despondency, dread, misery, joylessness—produce an aversion to dark room phenomena—bleak weather, physical pain, a negative outlook, dark moods, hostile or challenging environments, instability, conflict, things not going our way.
Contrary to belief, how we feel isn’t a function of conditions. It isn’t sunshine that produces a sense of well-being. It is entirely possible to feel low when the weather is perfection!
Screwtape: Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life — his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down.
As Screwtape helpfully points out, an undulation is not the result of changing conditions but the consequence of changing self-perception.
When a human incarnation is identified with its eternal and unchanging nature (Awareness/Self) its experience is one of contentment. Light room. When a human incarnation is identified with its animal nature, with its apparent existence (ego/self) in the temporal dimension, its experience is one of an oscillation between highs and lows. Dark room.
Undulation isn’t the oscillation between light and dark, highs and lows, crests and troughs.
Undulation is the oscillation between identification with self/Self.
Ramana Maharshi:
The world is perceived as an apparent objective reality when the mind is externalized, thereby abandoning its identity with the Self. When the world is thus perceived the true nature of the Self is not revealed; conversely, when the Self is realized the world ceases to be objective reality.
Even with this clarification, which locates the “problem” of undulation accurately, it is possible to view self/Self as a duality.
It isn’t!
This is what The Enemy knows and Screwtape doesn’t.
Katagiri Roshi:
BUDDHA’S TEACHING constantly tells us how sublime human life is and how great our human capacity is. In Buddhism, this great capacity is called light. Each and every one of us has this light. When you look at your life and see how selfish and egoistic human beings are, you don’t believe you have a great sublime capacity. But you don’t discover your great capacity by evaluating and judging your
human value. If you are thinking in that way, you have already shut yourself off from that light.
Don’t judge yourself as selfish or egoistic only. You are something more. So whatever you think about your life, first accept yourself as a person who has a great capacity.
Have you ever wondered why Awareness Practice begins with going beyond self-hate? Now you “know”!
Disidentification from the “ego-self” and centering in the light of Conscious Compassionate Awareness are the basic processes of Zen Awareness Practice.
Disidentification and centering are also how we navigate undulations.
- Rather than regarding an undulation as something wrong, we accept they occur. We do this by extending compassion to the suffering incarnation. What is the Mentor other than our sublime capacity?
- We learn to stay conscious in the midst of the experience of the trough/crest. Said differently, we turn on the light switch.
- Recollecting that “something wrong” is the experience of Awareness being obscured returns attention to Awareness. In other words, there is awareness of being more than simply egocentricity.
It is true that getting past “something wrong, not enough” is harder when we are in the downside of an undulation. Ironically, we are told (and some of us know this through experience) that a dry spell provides the most fertile conditions for spiritual advancement.
Screwtape: Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Practicing, especially during a total eclipse of the Light by ego, reinforces awareness of our nature as intrinsic purity, unaffected by undulation. For what else prompts us to look for Light in total darkness?
Rumi:
If everything around seems dark,
look again,
you may be the light.
For always reflecting the radiance of our Being, we bow in gratitude to the Guide. And on 4.18, in celebration of the International Day of No self-hate, and because gratitude wants to give, we practice basking in the glow of the Light of Conscious Compassionate Awareness.
Gasshō
ashwini