https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=RR8XoCnMsUE
All right, and so Drew Straker in the chat says, can you talk a bit about divine darkness? Is it something that has analogues, different levels of reality? Does it have something to do with the waters above? And so yes, it does have something to do with the waters above. They’re not the waters above, but your insight is right, is that there is in some ways a kind of divine darkness, a kind of darkness which is around all beings. And so in some ways it is the, you could call it the kenosis of the being, the way in which the being empties itself, that is its darkness. And so the darkness appears as there’s a darkness below and there’s a darkness above, and they’re not the same, although there’s a relationship between the two, which is difficult to grasp, and we have to be careful with grasping that relationship, because it has in some ways been the cause of so much error and so much heresy in the past, which is confusing the relationship, mixing up the distinction between the lower darkness and the higher darkness, and also not understanding how they connect has been such a stumbling stone for all the esotericists out there. So you can understand it as a kind of dark glory, maybe is the best way to understand it. There’s a relationship between the way in which you empty yourself going down, right, as you kind of move towards non-being, going down, you know, your qualities, the qualities of being diminish until they vanish, until they cease to exist, and that is its own darkness, like it’s its own darkness because it’s the place where its qualities cease to exist, you know, as they diminish, you could say. So it’s not a, there’s nothing, I know it sounds very weird and esoteric, but it’s not weird, it’s like there’s a chair and then the chair, there’s a scale of the chair and there are qualities of the chair, but you can, you move away from those qualities. At some point you have things which are almost a chair, not quite a chair, a broken chair, residues of a chair, remainders of a chair, then at some points it’s just no longer a chair. And so when it’s no longer a chair, when you no longer see the chair from something that was the chair, you have something like its death or its darkness because it has basically evacuated itself into non-being, but that is also true to the manner in which it participates in higher identities. So there’s a manner in which all beings give themselves up also and evacuate their being up towards higher identities and that could be something like a higher form of darkness, right, a kind of ecstatic darkness you could call it, and that ecstatic darkness, that is the way in which the chair disappears into its functionality, right, it’s like a good way to… Heidegger had some insights about this, it’s like if you… How can I say this? It’s like to some extent the manner in which the chair becomes mostly the chair is when it’s forgotten, is when you stop thinking about the chair. When you’re sitting on a chair and you stop thinking about the fact that you’re sitting on a chair and that you are engaging with someone and you’re talking or you’re eating or whatever and the chair disappears into the conversation, then it is its darkness, it’s its higher darkness, right, it’s the way in which it’s given itself up into higher participations, it’s the way in which it has been forgotten you could say, but forgotten not in a bad way, forgotten in the way as in fully kind of subsumed into its higher participation. So that is… and it doesn’t mean that it stops existing, but it exists in full submission you could say and in the kind of humble, kind of humility that is its higher glory you could say. So that is true of everything and understanding that is… And you could say, and this is the weirdest thing about that, is that when a chair achieves that, when the chair disappears into its higher participation, it is actually being most… it is being the most chair that it can be, is when it vanishes, when it moves into its own darkness, its own higher darkness. And that is also true of us and it can help you understand why the paradox of Christianity and the paradox of humility in Christianity, which is that, you know, as the saint becomes humble and actually diminishes himself and gets taken up ecstatically into the life of God, vanishes into God you could say, but if it’s proper it means that it would also be the highest form of himself and that the person will become the most itself at the same time, which is, like I said, which seems paradoxical, but once you kind of understand it you can see that that’s actually how reality works. So yeah. All right. Yeah, so Matt Hylam in the chat says, you can’t ever reach the top. That’s the right way to understand it. It’s like the top, the top of you and the top of all beings is the manner in which it gives itself up higher. And so it’s actually an extinction. It’s a kind of death that is at the top of the mountain. And that’s the mystery, right? That’s the mystery of, and it’s also life. Like it’s not, it’s not, we have to be careful. It’s not a kind of nihilism. It’s also the tree of life, but it has, you kind of, it kind of has to go through a tree of death, you could say. It appears as a giving up of itself. So anyways, like this is the kind of thing that people will clip and say that I’m just saying gibberish, but hopefully, hopefully that people in this conversation here in the Q&A have heard enough of what I’m saying to see where I’m going with this. So Gohar M says the chair had an ego death. Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s a good way of understanding it. Despite the often popular culture discussion about ego death there.