Thu, 10 Aug 2006
Dark Night
Susan asks about the dark night of the soul:
I've wondered for many years about the so-called "dark night of the soul" that one reads a great deal about in Christian writings, but of which there is almost nothing in the equivalent Buddhist material. Why not? Don't Buddhists experience anything like this? Are the meditative practices and processes of development so different in the two forms of spirituality that what is a major and perhaps essential phase in one is entirely absent in the other? It seems so at times.
My opinion on this is that Buddhists have similar experiences. They just receive greater prominence in Christianity because of the emphasis that St. John of the Cross places on them. The goal of Buddhism is to see things as they are. But before you do that, you have to give up your attachment to them. There's a gap between the giving up and the realization and this is sometimes painful. This gap is the "dark night". I don't think there's anything mysterious about it.
Here's side by side pictures of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Karmapas at age twenty one. The resemblance is amazing. And maha-kala.com looks to be a very good overview of the whole of Buddhism. I'll have to check it out more closely later.
I was critical of the old fashioned html code on the new KTD web site. I looked a little closer and saw this "bug" was actually a "feature" of the tool thay used to build the site: Fireworks/Dreamweaver. So if I cast aspersions on Naomi's and Jack's coding style, I apologize. That's why I shy away from these tools and write my html code by hand. The tools never keep up with the latest developments. But I can see their appeal to graphic designers.
