Hi friends,
I have been doing dark works..and trying to enter the zone of the dark world..lets understand what is darkness..lets understand the dark world from the point of view of Cosmology..from the point of view of Tantra.. form the point of view of the body..emotions..how does it connect with death and Art..as I am going through my darkness, I would like to share..
So what are we talking about when we say ‘dark’..it simply means the absence of light..or does it?
When you light a lamp or a candle in a pitch dark room, you can see for the first time as the flame appears..but what happens when the wax or the oil gets finished? Darkness prevails.. Darkness is there before and after the light..we have to make an effort to keep the light on..to see..and when it is totally dark.. We feel a chill in the bones..fear..it comes along with darkness..the eyes search for a light..heart beats faster..the body goes through many emotions..we do all our activities in light..even those who work in the night do so with lights..if you put all the lights off and sit in total darkness in your room, you know that in the drawing room, the lights are on..but in the forest, or a field, alone, without a light or even the moon..you feel a little or lot of fear.. I would like to speak of what happens when you look at the darkness..yes we learn in physics that the eyes receive light and when it touches the retina, an image is formed..but when you look at total black, is there an image?
So lets understand darkness or the absence of light a little more..today’s research in cosmology says that if you add up the mass of the all the galaxies, stars and gases..the visible matter.. it accounts for only 4% of the total mass of the Universe and the gravity produced by this mass is not enough to hold the galaxies together..they say that there is dark matter..dark matter is made of particles that do not give out light..so they are not visible..and yet they account for 30% of the mass of the Universe and it is the gravity of the dark matter that keeps the Universe together..and there is dark energy, which accounts for 60% of the universe..this dark energy has a repulsive gravity and this makes the space itself expand..so science is now saying that when you see nothing in the dark space, you are actually looking not at nothing..but something that is completely different..dark matter and dark energies..and they actually control the universe..you can call it the dark world..
Yes, just like you can look with light, you can look into darkness..of late, I have been going deep into this world.. of the dark side..there is a very very deep and ancient science called Tantra that has existed for many thousands of years in many parts of the world..it has got nothing to do with any religion..let me give you a little glimpse into this world..yes, I have been trained at this..my story was different..at the age of four I saw more, much more than what you will see in a lifetime..my master took me to the Himalayas..we stayed in a cave.. he put us through Tantra Sadhana (practice) as a kid..I got to see the dark side..played with the dark energies..when I asked a question or a doubt arose in my mind, my master would not give any elaborate lecture….he would ask me to practise a particular technique..a tantra..and the experience of that practice was the teacher..Buddha spoke of the eightfold path etc..but what he taught his advanced students telepathically was the science of tantra..so we were four kids, who never knew that you had to fear the dark.. I wonder if you can understand this.. unlike in society, where we teach children to be afraid of the dark..fear is ingrained in you when you could not do anything about it..we were taught to explore the dark world..and that is the way of Tantra..
Let me explain a little..Etymologically, the word Tantra can be seen as ‘Tan’ - to expand plus ‘Tra’ - to transcend.. so when we say to expand, it is like you need to hold a rubber band at two ends to expand it..it implies ‘two’ or a polarity.. so in tantra we explore this tension..between male and female or light and darkness..and then the art is to transcend it..which actually is to go after something and explore it..in Tantra sadhana we ask questions like ‘why does water have to flow downward? Why not upward?’..And we find out by doing ‘Hath sadhana’..maybe a few years will go in finding the answer..the power behind it..and it is no more a mystery..it is knowledge..we do not just memorise the concept of gravity in school..we find out ‘Why?’ and the field of experiment is my own body, my life..my own experience..i need to realise the answer..that is the Tantra approach..Tantra looks at the process behind anything..yes there is seeming madness..but what is the process behind it?
Magic is when you do not know the science behind it..i am talking of exploring the science behind the magic of the body..yes i call it an illusion..another word for a magician is an illusionist..in fact it is more accurate..so in tantra, we do not take the body the way it is taken by a layman or even a doctor..it is not so solid..a baby in the womb evolves in a particular way..but when you look at it closely, it is also formed by its own will..we recognise its features based on the genetics of parents etc..but the baby has been formed by its own will too..the thousands of nadis or subtle energy waves come before the organs are formed in the foetus and their effect makes you get your particular body..maybe you are perfect the way you are..actually each one of us is just the way we wished it…then we forget and society comes in..mainly parents and family and school start dictating how we relate to our own looks and personality and we also start feeling discontentment with the way we are..when you grow up, you never realise, you wished for this very body..But I didn’t go through all of this.. I learnt to explore.. I found that the body is not so dense..it is fluid..I can play with it, explore it..
Just like the universe out there which is full of the invisible dark matter, so is our body..it has many dimensions not visible to the eye..but it can be perceived..so lets call what we can see, the visible world, as the ‘city of lights’..all that you can see..which is what you call the visible universe..and the body you see is the body that is visible to the eyes..and this ‘city of lights’ actually is like a few lights here and there in a vast sea of the dark world..like when you pass on top of a small town in a jet plane in the night.. you see a few lights in a sea of darkness..now how do you penetrate the dark part..
The way normal science teaches us is that the body is full of dense matter..but it is not..it is more fluid..it has more dark matter..spaces..even your face is not the way it seems to you in a mirror..and there is more of the dark matter and energies around you..and i am not talking about the aura..that is part of the ‘city of lights’..yes there is a lot more to you in the dark world.. I could teach you how to see in your face what you don’t normally see..but there is a block..fear
Fear is the great barrier in Tantra practice..you can’t succeed with fear..but I say, fear is not the problem..it is fear of fear..please understand, it is fear of fear that is the block..we are trained to block fear out..not explore it..if we open up to looking at it..moving with it..something is possible..after all, they first said that the earth is round, then they said that the earth is flat at the poles..now there is some talk about the earth being hollow and like it is said in some legends, there is a whole world at the core of the earth with civilisations living there, with their own sun..maybe or mayn’t be..but lets learn to be a little open..
So we are talking about exploring the dark world..exploring how the entire Universe was created.. and then going beyond it to the source..where everything comes from..what we call the invisible..but it is not..it can be experienced as concretely as we see light..Christians called this heaven..and so let me speak here a little about death..because there arises the question of what happens after death..but a better way to put it is..exactly what is death? See the word ‘death’ itself evokes a little fear.. Death does not happen in an instant..it is a process..yes death too can be demystified..recent research says that the process of death starts quite a while before the life leaves the body..you are very much alive when the actual process begins..yes there are concrete signs how you can tell in advance before someone dies by looking at certain signs in them..and this process is not so smooth..and exactly when the brain stopped is difficult to pin point..In Tantra, we look at the different layers of the body slowly disintegrating over a period of time and the information that is there moves on..maybe to another womb, another body..about this in detail, I will speak some other time..there is too much stuff..so I was saying all this to say, the body is not so ‘dense’..and there is also the dark energy..the other dimensions..
But yes, fear is ingrained so deep..the fear of fear..and so much nonsense has been said about Tantra..some are attracted to if for the wrong reasons while most people are fearful of this too..but it is just the reverse..the true Tantra approach is to love all of creation..trees, animals, mountains, all people..just like Christ did..to celebrate life..marriage in its original form was a sacrament..a celebration of the coming together of the male and female..an opportunity to use this polarity to transcend it..relationship is a powerful means to explore the dark energies..so Tantra promotes love as an antidote to fear..yes, fear can be transmuted into love and compassion..you know, the real meaning of Mudras - they work with the unseen energies and connect you to the cosmos..that is why, when you communicate, you use gestures, which are Mudras..the movement does not come from the brain, the nadis are at action..connecting you to the other person and the entire cosmos..including the dark side..
As an artist, my challenge is to create an accident for my viewer..to show with the play of atoms that give away light..with colour and strokes..to create a drama in the ‘city of lights’ that can somehow hint and point at the dark matter that lies at the core and all around and in huge quantities..and the dark energies whose waves have not been measured yet by science ..yes cosmology talks about this and scientists are trying to prove it..but in my art, I am concerned with how the dark side influences us..affects the human mind and body..I can do this because we grew up with seeing and playing and touching the dark matter and energies..the body to me is not just what the eyes can see and what the microscope can see..it is also what lies beyond light..how to see that..how to show you what i can see as i have seen since i was a four year old kid..how to depict it in paint..how to let the energies play on the canvas..it would seem as a disturbance only because you been taught to buy the illusion of this body that you can see when the lights are on..during day..I work with the night..I want to show you something there beyond light..but I have to show you with the instruments of light..on a canvas or on paper..and so I am coming up soon with my dark work series..I will share my thoughts with you like today so that you can see it a little like how I would like you to see it..
Thank You