Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are?
That’s one idea behind dark retreats*, an experience that’s about as close to a complete sensory deprivation chamber as you can get. Participants spend extended periods in total darkness, stripping away the inputs and distractions of everyday life.
Andrew Holecek, an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions, believes in the transformative power of dark retreats.
Holecek says in today’s society, we’ve become “light junkies,” addicted to the constant distraction of phones, tablets, emails, texts, and everything else competing for our attention. But beneath it all, many feel a sense of emptiness, as if something’s missing and whatever we have is never enough.
“We're so pulled apart from who we are, we've lost touch,” Holecek says. “Who you think you are is defined by what you do. Who you really are is revealed when you finally stop doing. The very structure of the self is radically threatened when it's sent into the dark.”
The shock of doing nothing
Holecek compares entering the darkness to a cold plunge for the psyche. The shock comes from suddenly doing nothing.
At first, it can be intensely boring, even painful. People aren’t able to distract themselves in the usual ways, and about 90% of people contract into a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, Holecek says.
But as they spend more time in the darkness, something begins to shift. They begin to relax, slow down, and surrender. Then, Holecek says, the mind starts to fall into itself.
“In the dark, the mind becomes reality because there's nothing else,” he says.
What emerges in the dark
In isolation, the mind may begin to surface experiences and psychological information that have gone unprocessed.
“We like to say this is where all the spiders and snakes hang out,” Holecek says. “You receive all this undigested, unprocessed, unmetabolized psychic material, reflections from childhood experiences. It's going to come up to be, in fact, digested and metabolized in the dark.”
The process isn’t easy. People may begin to see who they are and who they aren’t in both exquisite and painful ways. They begin expanding the walls of their Perception Box — the invisible mental box through which each of us experiences the world — Holecek explains. Eventually, he says, the process can go deeper still, reaching what he calls the “primordial contraction.”
“The primordial contraction feels like me,” Holecek says. “It feels like the very sense of self, the very thing that I take as a given. Then, you're going to open it, and that's where the gold is. You're forced to make this radical introduction to who you really are.”
When nothing becomes everything
Entering this environment, Holecek says, can bring about a dissolution of self-structure and identity. People can “drop below the surface structures” of their personal storylines.
“The really good news here is nothing really means everything — empty of self means full of others,” Holecek says. In the dark, “it's not just your eyes that dilate. Your mind dilates. Your heart dilates. Your body dilates. Everything opens. This is the ultimate expansion of all your Perception Boxes.”
Of course, no one can stay in the dark forever, and returning to everyday life presents its own challenges, but time spent there can change people’s ability to navigate them. Holecek says people begin to notice the walls of their Perception Boxes contracting again and serving as defense mechanisms against the sensory assault of the conventional world.
“It's the most beautiful and revelatory thing,” Holecek says. “You realize, ‘Oh my gosh, I don't need to grasp. I don't need to contract. I can stay open.’”
The question then is how to hold onto that openness once the lights come back on. How do you digest and metabolize the experience and incorporate it into everyday life? How do you transform the state into a trait?
“That's the journey,” he says.
*Dark retreats can be powerful, intense and disorienting experiences, and they're not for everyone. This piece is intended to inform and explore, not to provide medical, psychological or mental health advice.
We interviewed Andrew Holecek for Perception Box, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Watch Holecek’s interview above, and visit Perception Box to see more in this series.