Darkness Retreat: I Spent 10 Days In Pitch Black

So the dark is interesting and scary as fuck to me.

So maybe I can.

Maybe I can dance with that fear.

Yeah.

Because we're either running to darkness and stillness or we're running away from it. It's one of the two. Or I guess it's three. We're ignoring that it even exists.

Right?

It could be one of those three.

Yeah.

So there's. There's something within you. And my buddy Pavel Stujlik, he's done multiple dark retreats. Super inspiring. I think. I think our friend Aubrey's done a retreat. I think he was inspired by you, actually.

Hey, we went to the. After my interview with he because of.

Your story went too. So that's amazing. So look what. Look what your choices are doing. They're creating this ripple for other people to do inner work. It's beautiful.

And I'm honored and privileged to help other people on that journey. Yeah.

So then what was the purpose of you wanting to go to the dark? What were you running towards? Or were you running away from something?

What.

What was it?

Yeah, the. The. The first time it was. I had. I was married for nine years. Went through without going too deep into it. My ex wife got kind of of caught up in a cult and our marriage ended and I broke my sobriety when that happened. It's my fault, not anybody else's obviously, because we had a great marriage for a long time and it ended in a kind of pretty unique way. Weird way, right?

She got sucked into a cult. Yeah, like in LA or something.

It was this Indian organization, this whole thing. And again, without going too deep, y'.

All need to watch out for cults. No, they're real.

There are. There are. And they do a lot of dark, terrible things.

And when you trust you're in a cult, trust that you're in a cult and get out.

Exactly. And there was a whole journey in and of itself that I wanted to do is mostly her journey, not to speak about. But I broke my sobriety and I. And I do everything pretty hard. So when I broke, I broke very, very hard. And I didn't like that about myself. So I knew at this point I'd already written Fear of Honor. I'd done a lot of hard things physically, but something was clearly missing and I wanted to go deeper within to find some answers. So I was originally going to go to the silent retreats. Are you familiar with the Vipassanas?

I've done the Vipassana. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Okay.

The goinka method.

Awesome.

2016.

Awesome.

Freaking hard.

I bet yeah, that's what I was going to do. I didn't know darkness retreats were a thing. And while researching, I stumbled into the concept of a darkness retreat. And I was called more to that because the draw to me was in the darkness, you're shutting off one of the primary ways in which we engage with the world, our visual sense. So even in the simplest way, I can look at that and see it's a white wall. But consciousness has somewhere external to latch onto. In darkness, you have nowhere external to latch onto, so you're forced to go within. And when you go within, you're going to open doors within yourself that have never been open before. And that's a very daunting journey because what comes out of those doors, you don't know. It's not all going to be sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. They're going to also come out as dragons and demons.

You might see the monster in the closet.

That's you. Exactly. And you're going to have to face it. And I wanted to go deeper to see what would be revealed. And one of the other cool things in the darkness is, is that when you're in that level of darkness for an extended period of time, they say your brain releases dmt, so you actually start seeing lights. The brightest white light I've ever seen in my entire life was in a dark room. It was so bright, I was. I was covering my eyes like this. I was felt, it was blinding. I was literally touching my eyelids. I couldn't tell if it was open or closed. I was going like this, shielding myself from this blindingly white bright light.

You feel like that was dmt.

That's what they, that's what they say from my understanding. And it's as real as the lights that I'm.

I wonder what the purpose of that is.

And again, there might be a scientific explanation, but one of the things I've also learned over my own evolution, coming back to the duality, is there's the scientific and the spiritual, the practical and the mystical. Yeah, whatever term you want to use.

Yeah.

When Fearvana, for example, when I wrote Fearvana, everything was backed by science. Everything had to be explained, not only for others, but even to myself. I need to have an explanation, you have an understanding to it. Over my own evolution, I've started to embrace the mystical more. There's some things that, without explanation. I like that I don't need to explain it even to myself, even others. There's just a knowingness. Right. Call it surrender to God, to the universe. To consciousness, to the magic of the. Of the world. To the mysticism. Exactly. And so there, I'm sure there's some scientific explanation of lights, but to me, the, the lights reveal what you need to hear from God or whatever you want to call. But like, then you'll see shapes in the lights, you know, and shapes like in, in the darkness. The second time I had what I perceived to be a conversation with God that left me bawling in tears. And in this conversation there was voices, but there was also lights taking shape.

What did God say?

Happy. Yeah. So this experience was magical and mystical, one of the most profound of my life. It was day, night, five in the darkness. On the second time, the ten day darkness retreat. And you can't sleep because what happens is you will start seeing flashing white lights. And it happened to one of my friends who's done this as well. So I don't know why. It seems to be universal. And so imagine trying to sleep with transparent eyelids. You can't. Yeah, because your eyes are closed, but their light's still there. And it was really irritating me. So I was getting very frustrated. I couldn't sleep, I was exhausted. So I just sat up on the bed and I just started meditating and just said, God, I surrender to you. And I don't remember the initial part of the conversation. The first thing I remember, it started in the lights. I saw an arrow pointing up and I hear this voice saying, follow me. So I said, where? Like, where am I supposed to go? Then I saw this kind of white cylindrical shape forming right here. And I said, what am I supposed to see? Said, look deeper, look harder. And said, I can't see anything. And this, this light started like kind of this ray of lights went up like this. And so I'm literally, I'm like meditating, moving my head like this, seeing this ray of light. And I saw a sort of ball of light here with depth to the darkness that was like almost like seeing stars. The. This universe above, right? And I heard this voice say, I am everywhere. And then this light exploded and I saw this bright green life, like green light crystals falling in front of me. And it said, and as I was doing this, my head started turning back here and it just this green light crystals. And it said, I am life. I am in everything. And as it dissipated in front of me, it said, this voice said, I'm with you. Now go. As soon as that happened, for some reason, the intensity of it, I just start bawling. I just start bawling. I'm Bawling and bawling. And I think about my life. I think about the life I've been blessed with, as I mentioned, in Iraq, like, why do I get to survive this? And my mama said, from a young age, you know, she was like, you have a hotline with God. And I've been blessed to live a good life, a great life, you know, And I kept thinking about this and have you ever seen the movie the Green Mile?

Yes, I love it.

That movie touches my soul to come back to movies.

So there's a scene, he breathes the yes, yes, please.

And he says, John Coffey says, right, that one scene, he's talking to Tom Hanks and he says, Tom Hanks is like, do you want me to help you get out of here? And he says, you know, I. No, I'm tired of seeing the pain in the world. It's like in that movie, because he can heal people, but the curse of his ability to heal that gift is that he feels the pain, right? And I was thinking about this scene. It's always touched me deeply, that scene in my own life and looking at it, and I just said, why do I get this God? Why do I get this life? And I heard the voice, as I was like, kind of coming out of it, said, you know, why? And I said, I don't know why, you know, And I feel. And I go, I feel so grateful for it, but I also feel so guilty for it. And then I heard the voice say, that's why. And I just started bawling again and again. This is not a paradigm to say everybody has to operate from. This is what happened to me. And to me, it's as real as any other experience. And to me, after this, I started bawling. I was then journaling it to me crystallized my life. Like the guilt I felt around my friend, this debt that I feel, that I owe, and that actually was really spawned in there, this notion of I owe a debt to life. That paradigm was built in there because I had the guilt before this, but now it was turned into something even more useful in a powerful way. It was like, to me, this God was saying, I'm with you. I'm in everything. I'm here. And you've been blessed with this good life. And the suffering you seek, the struggles you've endured, whether it's life thrown your way or now you seeking it, is a price you pay to access the treasures you've. You've gained. And it's your responsibility to share it. So the pain the guilt, the struggle, the suffering I inevitably experience doing the things that I do. And again, I've been. I'm not unaware that I get to do that. But even the suffering that I've seen in the world, it's like. It's the price you pay for the life that I. The price I pay. Let me put it that way. The price I pay for the life I've been gifted with, and it's a responsibility to share it.

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