Darkness
When I was a kid, I was watching professional wrestling on TV one Saturday morning. Jake “the Snake” Roberts was attempting to “help” the Ultimate Warrior understand his opponent-to-be, The Undertaker, through a set of trials - with the idea that understanding him would show Warrior how to beat him. The Undertaker had a dark, supernatural feel to him - the “impervious to pain” type - so going deeper was required for the challenge.
The first trial was to lock Warrior in an air-sealed coffin. Now, it wasn’t the first time Warrior was put in an air-sealed coffin, as the Undertaker previously threw him into one and locked it, as he tried scratching and clawing to no avail…only to have others come to his aid to get it unlocked and “performed CPR on him to revive him”.
This trial, the second go-round with a coffin, was to face his fear of death. I remember really getting into the segment, vividly imagining what it must be like to have a coffin lid shut on me and sealed air-tight while I’m still alive, and all the things that would go through my head as I tried to figure out how to get out. I thought about what it had to feel like to reach the point where there is nothing within your control that can be done. There’s no escape, no tools, no loopholes, no crack of light. It is pure darkness in there. Beyond miraculous help from the outside, there is only the option to come to a place of surrender.
In the trial, the coffin lid is shut and locked, and Warrior can be heard groaning and fighting as Jake gives a monologue about Warrior needing to let go and release the fear. Eventually Warrior goes silent, and when Jake thinks he’s released the fear, he opens up the coffin and Warrior seems shifted into a place inside that puts a look on his face much like that of the Undertaker.
~~~
For something that’s so “TV” and over-the-top, I had an understanding of it even then. Life at that time as a kid had quite a bit of darkness to it.
I was reminded of it in current times, too. Life isn’t the same as it was it childhood, environment and circumstance-wise…but the grander scale of being a human on Earth in general and the experiences on the path often lead us into the darkness. In the Gene Keys, key 11 deals with this in particular (the Purpose sphere in my Golden Path), and with 11 showing up three times in my Human Design chart overall (that 11.5 in Design Sun, with 11.2 P and 11.4 D Neptune), there’s a heavy influence on my experiences.
The Shadow of Gene Key 11 is Obscurity, said to be “an interference frequency between light and the way in which the brain processes, translates and communicates that light.”
Obscuring what you’ve known and seen, even the light.
When there are critical or major events in our lives, they often erode the plans and dreams and desires as they were known. There is a period of darkness, where the shadow of obscurity steps in and turns out the lights. Like the Warrior initially did, our first instinct (thanks to survival mechanisms being mixed with conditioning) is to fight the shadow or run from it. You get told that the way is actually through…and you know on a deeper level that there is truth in that, despite the fear. Yet, conditioning as a human in this system and society has us anticipating what is on the other side of that darkness, that shadow…and when it is truly not known, nor is there a way to see it even as a projection, we tend to revert to what we know. We cling to the past, or to current beliefs, or to the stuck energy inside of us, because even if it makes us anxious or sick or depressed, we at least know it.
What about when that darkness sets in? When the things we laid out as dreams, plans, goals crumble? When there is LITERALLY NOTHING in front of us to step towards or reach for? When we can no longer see the path, or the potential. When we have EXPERIENCED life stripping things away, and there’s a grasping of how setting plans or goals cannot happen in the same way, ever again? It isn’t just the stripping away, either…it’s the revealing of those things for what they are in the stripping away. We were exposed to the intersection point between what’s beyond our control, why shadow isn’t bad, our part in co-creation, and our plans not being “the plan”. Then there are parts of us that that stop struggling to move out of the darkness, because we feel into how it was put there for a reason.
I’ve called it Purgatory. This sensation of being in a place, a liminal space, where you KNOW there’s no going back, and you cannot see where to go next, yet where you are isn’t where you will stay. Personal examples of things that put me in this space: at a certain point in career, I made just enough money to know that it doesn’t matter how much money I ever have or make, it doesn’t bring me deep fulfillment - no matter the product, service, industry or work exchanged for it. It’s the way this system works, and I feel a life beyond this system, but I don’t see the path to it. Then there was the main and truly sole desire of love and family…the foundation of that quite elusive to me, and what was built shifted into what is, which isn’t what was desired.
When you get to the point of actual reduction and release of desires from any material, status, image, and societal perspective…there’s a sense of transcendence, but also that darkness. The obscurity has a more friendly feel to it at this point, though. I mean, yes please, block me from seeing anything that will not take me where my soul wants to go, experience, or be. You would think that there would be certain clarity at this point…for the elimination of distractions, options, choices, etc. would provide the way. Yet in the silence, the dark is still dark. A transition period seems to happen here. You’re given space to let it all rise for integration, too. When the Warrior was locked in the coffin, it was all coming up again.
One of maybe the last questions that comes up in this period is “how long will this last?” As in, “how long will I not see the path? Will I ever experience soulful romance in this life? Will I ever see the light again? Will I ever see a life beyond this system? Will I ever break the generational trauma and curses that still seem to exist? Why do I have to wait? Why doesn’t it come? Why does going after it not work? Why?” Time feels like death when it takes forever, and time feels like death when it’s taken from us.
Who knows when we will reach the point the Warrior did in the coffin the second time, where we no longer fight against the darkness, the presence of death (of anything and everything), where the fear leaves the body in surrender to the plan.
The search for meaning, fulfillment, purpose…even then, even those…surrender.
This shadow is so helpful, if you can be open enough to see it as much. And then, the 11th gift of Idealism…there’s opportunity from this full darkness: “One of the trickiest things about your dream is that you never know what it will become as a emerges into the world of form. You only know the feeling that it stirs deep inside your heart. Your mind conjures visual images around your dreams and ideals, and this is where potential blockages to the flow arise. You must believe in the power of your dream and at the same time you must give up what it looks like.”
David Whyte said in an interview once , “How do you know that you’re on your path? Because it disappears. That’s how you know. How do you know you’re doing something really radical? Because you can’t see where you’re going. That’s how you know…but everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. And so, you are going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self doubt at the same time as you’re setting out on this radical new path…so you need to know how you know where you are, but actually poetry shows how incredibly precise it is in there; it was a story that would be told to a young boy or girl that would ask the question, “what do I do when I’m lost in the forest?” The elder says, “stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called ‘here’, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. Listen. The forest breathes, it whispers, ‘I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again saying HERE. Stand still, the forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.’”