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Preface

Nepal 1968. Hippy era. A horse caravan negotiates its way over winding, narrow, moonlit mountain pathways towards the Tibetan border; the destination is Lo Mustang, a tiny, independent kingdom within the nation of Nepal. A friend, who is a lama, and myself, aged eighteen, long hair, beads around our necks, in Indian clothes and full of naive dreams, are part of a group of kampas: Tibetan guerrillas, who organize their resistance against the Chinese occupation from Nepalese territory.

After a march lasting several weeks, we arrive in Lo Mustang. This tiny kingdom of Lo Mustang is completely unknown in the West at this time; never had a Western person set foot there until that day. I am stared at and touched with a great sense of curiosity. Cymbal and drum sounds emanate from inside a house and when I inquire about their origin, I am guided to a dark cellar, to meet a man who has lived here for a long time, in complete darkness. His aspiration is the dissolution of the limiting I-consciousness.

This was to be my first encounter with Yangtik, or Dark Therapy, as I refer to it today. I learned that Yangtik was the final phase to conclude the monks’ training in some Buddhist training centers. Since my stay in this region is both dangerous and illegal, I look for accommodation with a local farmer, ensure that my environment is completely darkened and begin my first dark therapy experience: seven weeks in complete solitude with yoga, meditation, and a daily debriefing with a lama.

Nothing dramatic happens in the first few days. I sleep or doze alternately; thoughts race through my head. I live through entrenched thought patterns. At other times, I am ‘gone’ for a time; feeling protected one moment, then suddenly very alone. The next moment I am bored, dreamlike thoughts floating by. I perceive symbolic, threedimensional, hyper-real images or film-like projections on the walls. I experience deep states of self-knowing and, in the background, there is a simultaneous, imperceptible process of an inner emptying underway. I am becoming more purified; only beingness, eternal Now; beingness focused on a single point, a kind of energy pulsating, feeling alternately hot and cold.

The central process in the dark is characterized by an increase in clarity of consciousness. In general, my consciousness tends to be obscured and burdened with mental activities. During this emptying, there is a simultaneous sharpening in experiencing the soul’s processes taking place. In Tibet, it is said that the clarity of consciousness is enhanced seven-fold in the dark.

Darkness for me causes emptiness: that is, the absence of thoughts and feelings. In the more advanced stages, this expresses itself as the experience of en-light-enment: hence, light and emptiness are essentially two words for the same thing.

In this state, I experience the world as true, beautiful, and good. My body goes to sleep but my spirit stays awake. As a result, clarity develops, in both the waking and the dreaming state. The clarity from the waking state carries over into the dreaming state; the dream becomes something like a daydream. I experience my dreams with greater clarity.

Soon, beings that originate in my imagination begin to appear and can initially only be seen with closed eyes, but increasingly, they can also be clearly seen with open eyes.

They flap like clothes and shape-shift quickly into other types of beings and scenes. Soon, stabilization in the flow of images ensues and I am able to hold on to an internal image for a longer time.

Repeatedly, I experience flashes of beingness; recognize the meaning and essence of all Beingness. I learn that a being is only able to live if it manages to capture an unconscious snapshot of the pure state of Beingness every few seconds. In everyday human life, states of beingness have been reduced to short flashes of being that surface imperceptibly between two individual moments. In the same way that we require deep sleep states for our brains to recover, we are equally in need of experiencing flashes of beingness in order to recover from the chronic battles of everyday existence.

Later on, this pure beingness-state tears, as though through a curtain, and for a few seconds, I experience the indescribable, primordial nature of the world. After this happens, all knowledge and wisdom of the human world are annihilated and appear merely as in a vague dream.

After a period in the darkness, I get a sense of being able to see. Initially, it looks like the nebulous illumination akin to the light of dawn. There is an occasional bluish hue of light emerging. My perception has become refined and can now appreciate pure energy, which is distinct from the clear inner light of the spirit. The latter started to appear after about four weeks, after my losing all concepts of things, and after no longer experiencing myself as an individual I, except on rare occasions. This light is everything; everything is this light - it is within me and everywhere around me.

When I step out into daylight after forty-nine days, I experience the sunlight as the spiritual light; nature exposes the entire world, in the shape of every leaf and rock, as a miniature cosmos. A world in which every thing is everything. After a few days, I take my bundle and look into the eyes of my lama, the eternal wanderer through the Himalayas, before we wordlessly continue on our individual paths. We have never met again. What has remained? Well, the nature of Spirit has stayed within me!

Many years later, and after two further retreats in darkness in Kinnauer (Northern India) and Tibet, a journalist asked me if he would be able to undergo a dark therapy under my supervision. I told him that the retreats in darkness were no therapy and that, also, I had no space in my house for him. As he was a friend, I set up a room for him anyway and so the first dark therapy retreat effectively began. Later, I gave up my work as a psychotherapist, bought a larger house and began to take in people to do dark therapy retreats. This was how Saskia John found her way to me: the woman presenting, in the form of this book, her account of the extensive experiences she had in the course of her dark retreats.

Saskia has been here several times and her last stay goes back several years. She narrated her impressions while in darkness during her retreat and we recorded all that she said on to tape. This material which flowed out of her in a constant daily stream, and which we had debriefings about every evening, sheds a light on a new psychology, at least in the sense that it allows some insights into some hitherto little-explored territories of our souls. It has taken Saskia a certain amount of time to prepare her experiences for publication but now the oeuvre is out. Anyone wishing to open up any hidden back doors to their spirit will find, in these very personal experiences, a golden thread through the labyrinth that is their soul.

For a long time, Saskia experienced a good dose of embarrassment at the notion of revealing some of her more intimate soul states, but at the end of the day, the truth is simply true – and all darkness ultimately leads towards the light, whichever way.

Holger Kalweit

January 2011

Introduction

Iwas born in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), in the year that they built the Berlin Wall. Both my parents were war children, and both were teachers. I grew up surrounded by walls that defined a world of materialism, obedience, atheism and an atmosphere of ‘do as you are told.’

My path was always predetermined, and I pursued the anticipated stages diligently, one after the other, as was expected of me: completing secondary school, an apprenticeship, qualifying for university entrance, enrolling for tertiary studies, getting married, having children, carrying on my profession. Up until the time that the Wall came down, I worked as a veterinarian, and as far as I was concerned, my world was an ordered one. I never questioned that world.

The year the wall came down did not just have a profoundly transformative effect on Germany and on the world, it also became the year that marked a major turning point in my personal life, as I began to turn my gaze towards my inner life. Little did I know at that time how greatly my life would eventually become transformed in the years to come.

As you can see, the theme of the ‘wall’ has accompanied me since the time of my birth - perhaps it is for this reason that I have invested so much energy in allowing any walls within myself to also fall, as well as expanding my internal boundaries at the same time.

All my aspirations focus on the inner values of life: towards prosperity on an inner level, individual sovereignty, compassion and unconditional love. I experience a profound longing for freedom and awakening; an impulse that has at times urged me to explore some things in life that others may choose not to.

Throughout many years, I have been exploring the inner universe of my soul, through experiences such as meditation, Tai Chi, traveling, personal development workshops, therapy sessions and two retreats in darkness, and have ended up with a treasure trove of my own experiential knowledge.

In my own explorations, I have found confirmation for many of the wisdoms imparted by different elders, as well as those that I have come across in the corresponding literature. In the process, I have put to rest any serious doubts regarding the realness of my experiences and ultimately, have found my personal truth.

This exploration of the psychical landscape continues to involve deep-level learning, accompanied by processes of letting go, of inner growth and an expansion of consciousness that have been ongoing for a long time. They are part of a cleansing process on an inner level that, for me, has been at times an extremely difficult and painful one. It has involved the surrender of my former comfort zones and required me to trust in something that was completely unknown to me.

In the process of these explorations, I have received deep insights into the psychical universe, into the way the human psyche functions: the interrelated nature between spirit, soul and the physical body and its effects on physical health. This in turn has opened up new possibilities for me from a healing practitioner’s perspective, as I am able to see things with greater clarity and within a larger context.

For now, let me go back to the year when my life turned yet again in a different direction - the year of the millennial turn. In the summer of 2000, I met Gabriele Fröhlich for the first time; an encounter that has often struck me as a case of preordained destiny. The inner work that I undertook with her help so captured me that an intense working relationship developed, that continues to this day. I learned about her model for The Intelligent Heart and its application for my own inner processes, and have been applying it in my therapeutic work with the clients in my practice for some time now.

It became evident to me that the deep-level growth and transformational processes that I had experienced for myself were no exception, but were experienced in similar ways by individuals who were committed to their own inner process for an extended period. While already engaged in my inner work with Gabriele, I also experienced the family constellation concept for the first time, through another teacher. I found my early experiences with that approach, as well as those gained throughout my later training in Systemic-Phenomenological Family Constellation work with Bert and Sophie Hellinger, to be wonderfully enhancing of my work with Gabriele.

In the course of my inner growth process, I came across an article on Dark Therapy in a professional journal published in 2002, which immediately captured my imagination, and which I was unable to get out of my mind.

I was curious, not knowing what this might entail, and at the same time, the article instilled some fear in me: the thought of spending an extended period in absolute darkness in complete solitude! Hence, it took me almost a year before I worked up the courage to contact Holger Kalweit, the author of the article, and ask him for an appointment.

In the summer of 2003, I went into my first dark retreat adventure, for a period of twelve days. During that time, I recorded the narration of all my experiences to a Dictaphone, in order to process them for myself in an in-depth way later.

At one point during that phase, I went into a deep crisis and at one of Holger’s visits, I just handed him the Dictaphone, in order to alert him to what was going on inside me.

He recognized the value of the recordings and encouraged me to publish my experiences in a book. Initially, I was very enthusiastic about the idea and started transcribing the recorded texts from the cassettes immediately following the dark retreat. While transcribing the text, I often found myself entering into further deep inner processes and gaining valuable insights about myself. I added them to the corresponding transcript sections in italics as I went along.

This process took a total of two years. During that time, I decided to undergo a second dark retreat, this time for a twenty-five-day period. I assumed that I would just be able to follow on from the experiences that I had left off with at the end of my previous dark retreat, and to expand on them in a more in-depth process. I did not even consider the possibility that things might turn out in a completely different way.

Following the completion of my second dark retreat, I again embarked on the transcription of the many newly-recorded cassettes, which took me approximately one year.

While still busily attending to that task, I was repeatedly plagued by fear at the prospect of publishing my experiences, including all my corresponding thoughts and feelings. I felt like I was about to bare myself and expose myself nakedly to the world with my whole being. Besides, so many incidents were associated with a considerable amount of pain, and these I had no desire to share with the world.

I braved the fears and the pain and eventually dissolved them throughout many individual sessions. After another three years, with some interruptions, and another three revisions of both manuscripts, I finally considered them ready for publication.

During the dark retreats, I used Gabriele’s Intelligent Heart model as a frame of reference for the integration of my experiences. Thus, in the summer of 2008, I naturally asked Gabriele for her feedback on both manuscripts, to ensure that I had been applying her model in the correct way concerning any interpretations and explanations of my experiences and dreams. Her feedback motivated me to go through my experiences yet again and to add, from my current perspective, other experiences and insights that followed on from the earlier ones.

In parallel to these developments, I met Thomas Hübl, another spiritual teacher, in spring 2008, and enrolled in his three-year Timeless-Wisdom-Training (TWT) program. The work with Thomas blended seamlessly into my ongoing inner work and further helped to support my entire process in a wonderful way. Part of the second-year course requirement was to carry out a project around something that was close to our heart and would serve as a positive contribution to the world at the same time. I decided on the book project as a way of fulfilling this course requirement. The result was the long version of this book, titled “In the Depths of my Soul – Experiences in Complete Darkness”. It contains almost all transcripts of the recordings from my two retreat experiences and also a chapter by Gabriele Fröhlich with her model on The Intelligent Heart as the frame of reference for the psycho-dynamic evaluation of my dark retreat experiences. In addition, the long version includes a large volume of retrospectively added recognitions, insights and psychodynamic evaluations from an updated perspective. These additions were the results of my repeated reworking of the scripts in the course of several years. In this way, the long version is designed to provide readers with an interest in the more in-depth psychodynamic background, with additional insights on these experiences, from a personal development perspective.

The present short version includes a limited selection of the transcripts of the recordings from my two retreat experiences in complete darkness, of twelve and twenty-four days, respectively. It is intended for readers with an interest in personal development and consciousness related matters.

The accounts comprise both my confrontation with the dark unconscious realm (the ‘shadow’ aspects in C. G. Jung’s terminology), as well as any experiences of a more transpersonal nature.

This is a very personal book. In it, I am exposing many intimate details about my life, and in so doing, I am essentially offering insights into my entire being.

In publishing this book, it is my hope and deep desire that the information imparted here may assist those people who are already well on their path of sincere self-exploration. I would like to offer them some inspirations and opportunities for recognizing some of the involved dangers and the risks of being led astray.

If this book evokes any deep feelings within you, it may be appropriate to check with yourself whether it seems a good time for you to be reading it or if continuing reading is the right thing for you to do at that time. Remember, you always have the choice; it is up to you to decide responsibly.

I sincerely hope that reading this book will provide you with much suspense, many insights and perhaps even some deep-level experiences of your own - or just a lot of fun!

Saskia John

March 2011