“Looking toward the light” might just mean looking right into the darkness

I have been thinking a lot about the idea that to live a spiritual life, an evolved life, an enlightened life, we should just focus on what’s positive, just look for the good in everything, just stay connected to the light.

I recall many, many years ago now, talking to a friend who was an energy worker and him saying to me, “That’s the problem with you yoga people, you only want to focus on the light,” and have even seen that sentiment in print in some popular yoga magazines: “Yoga is about looking for the good in everything.” (Focus on the positive)

I have always known that was not true, but I also tend to identify as a very sensitive person, a person very focused on what’s just and fair, and someone who has been prone to anxiety, and all of those traits have at times made me question whether maybe I should spend more time “focusing on the light.”

But, as I grow up, and know myself, and the world around me a little better, I keep coming back to the sense that only looking for the good in everything is also a way that we limit ourselves and others from our own true expression of what we feel deeply. In fact, even Krishna, when he reveals himself to Arjuna as God in the climax of the Bhagavad Gita, says “I am the gambling of the cheats and the splendor of the splendid. I am the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the virtue of the virtuous.” What Krishna seems to be saying is that God is everywhere, and everything, not just in things that are “light” and “good” and “positive.” In our own daily lives, and in particular in our experience and expression of emotion, I understand that as an invitation to accept the totality of our human experience, rather than only allowing “good feelings.”

In our weekly Practicing in the Curve conversations, we have been working with the Asato Ma mantra. In the second line, we see what could be translated as “Lead me from darkness to light.” In our group, we got to talk about how perhaps the “darkness” is actually the negation of our the wholeness of our humanity and that the “light” refers here not to just “good things” but to all things, all experiences, all emotions.

Let me give a couple of recent examples.

I expressed in the last newsletter how, in the recent “Death Cafe” I hosted at La Ermita, there was a high proportion of conversation around the ideas that “Well, death just happens, it’s part of life” and “People just need to accept it,” “or “so and so is not accepting this death and that is why they are suffering.”

Couldn’t it be instead that death IS just a part of life AND it is really, really, really hard when you are the one facing it, or the one who has lost someone you love deeply?

Couldn’t it be that someone HAS accepted their own death or the death of someone they love and they are ALSO really, really sad or scared? Does one have to negate the other?

I don’t think so. And I think when we do that, rather than showing ourselves to be more enlightened, more “yogic,” we are showing ourselves to be out of touch with - and likely very uncomfortable with - the reality of human suffering and our inability to just make it go away.

I have seen this also recently in a difficult personal situation where our band lost one of its most central members without warning. One moment she our band co-director, and the next she sent us all a message saying she wanted nothing more to do with the band, the band culture, the band leadership, or any of us, and went on to “defriend” and block us all from social media.

When the band got together, everyone was confused, and some people were really sad. To some of us she was more than a bandmate, she was also a trusted friend. All kinds of feelings came up from sadness, to anger, to abandonment to examining our own feelings about the band and culture.

And yet, again, the majority response was “Don’t be sad, she is just on her own journey.” Or “Don’t be so in your head, instead be in your heart, and wish her well,” or “We know she is a strong woman, so this must be a good thing for her, just be happy.”  As someone who did count her as a friend, none of those sat well with me. Couldn’t I accept that she was on her own journey and be sad too? Couldn’t I be in my head and my heart, wishing her well, and also missing her and feeling confused? Did I have to concede that she had made the best choice? Could I imagine that and still be worried for her, given that it was such a sudden and drastic change of heart?

Even in talking to one of my closest friends, someone not in the band, I was told, “Wow, you are having a really big reaction, she must have really had some kind of hold on you.” Huh? Did there have to be some underlying, unresolved interpersonal hook in order for me to have a “big” reaction? And is crying about a loss really all that “big?"

And on and on.

One of the things I miss about my Samarya community and that I am challenged with here in my new home is what feels to me like this preponderance of magical thinking, where everything is good, we’re all just vibrating high, the days are sunny, the sunsets are beautiful, and nothing is really that bad.

Because sometimes things really are that bad. Yes, we can make it through. Yes, we can find another way. Yes we can heal and learn and integrate the difficult experiences and emotions, but can’t we just have them first? Isn’t that part of the totality of life, the totality of the human experience? Wouldn’t that be the fully enlightened mind?

I often repeat the simple story about the coiled up rope to describe the difference in the types of mind according to yoga and vedanta - manas, chitta and buddhi.

I have always told it more or less like this, as it has been told to me many times by my teachers:

You walk into a dark room and in your field of awareness, you see something in a lump in the corner, something apparently coiled. That awareness without subjectivity is “manas."

You immediately start to think about what it could be - a snake! A coiled up poisonous snake! Your mind starts running with that image. That amped up response is “chitta."

Then you flip on a light switch. You can see clearly now, and you see that what you thought was a snake is just a piece of old rope. Now you have true awareness. That objectivity is “buddhi.”

But as I was sharing it recently in this context, a student pointed out to me that the chitta could just as likely be things like, “Wow! It’s a hidden treasure, filled with gold and riches and my life is going to be forever changed in all kinds of wonderful, positive ways!!!!”

And yet, when we turn the light on, either way, it’s still just a coiled up rope.

In other words, chitta is that “movement of the mind” that keeps us from seeing what is real, chitta is part of the darkness that keeps us from seeing the light - whether those movements are “positive” or “negative.”

The enlightened mind then, or what we could call bodhichitta, is the mind that sees what is real - and what is real is all of it. Not just the good, not just the bad, just what is.

Death, losing friends, difficult life situations of any kind are hard, and we should be able to see them as that, to feel them as they touch us, to respond in the ways our hearts respond. That does not mean that we lose hope, that we don’t accept things, that we don’t see the opportunity or change that can come from those hard experiences. It simply means that we are truly, fully human. That maybe we are becoming more enlightened by our ability to accept ALL of it.

Maybe in the asato ma chant when in the first line we say, lead us from the unreal to the real, we can think, at least in part, that what we are moving away from is “spiritual bypass” or “toxic positivity” to the reality of the wholeness of the experience, and our own and others responses to hard times.

We can live this spiritual life together, meaning we can see and honor each other for the processes that we are in, for our own unique expressions of emotion, and in a sense of deep mutual trust that as we move into and through the fullness of our own humanity, that we will indeed come to another place where we feel hopeful and accepting, that our emotional responses do not mean we are not accepting things, or doing well, or moving on, or seeing what is also good.

I see you.

We are all in this together.