True Power is a quality of spirit – the indestructible core of our being that is deeper than personality and deeper even than soul. Spirit is ever alive and vibrating as the universal life-force in the core of one’s soul, heart and body, and bringing it online as the basis for how one lives takes tremendous courage, daring, tenderness, willingness to be vulnerable, to stand for who we truly are, and to feel.
To bring this depth of our being online as the foundation of our life requires nothing less than the marriage of soul and body, masculine and feminine. It is this marriage that sets up the second birth. We pass through the eye of the needle into identification as spirit - as the Power, Love and ecstatic Creativity of the One.
Spirit is the life-force of the One. It is the breath of the Absolute. It is infinite formlessness and energy that exists before all manifestation, and that penetrates every atom of it from the core. It is what the Ancient Greeks called Chaos. It is the Lion of God roaring and ravishing all of creation. It is the non-being out of which being is born – the black holes out of which spurt the vibrancy of creation, and into which it returns to die. Spirit is the unmanifest out of which the manifest rises. These are the two sides of the non-dual Absolute.
Every creation story of the ancient world had it the same: in the beginning there was infinite darkness, and in that darkness the masculine and feminine principles had not yet polarised. Then, with the impulse of the One to know itself, they differentiate and the raw magnetism of their relating births the universe in the form of Light. The sun god - the soul of the world of which every human soul is a fragment - is born, and breaks forth like a phoenix.
Accessing who we are as spirit requires us to go beyond light. As souls as we are light. As souls we literally are light-beings. And yet as spirit, and at the very core of the soul, just as much in the core of the heart and in the centre of the base chakra, there is a dark nucleus of spirit – a black hole that is a portal for the rush of formless spirit into the manifest world.
This is the dark light. In the words of the Kaballah it is the “Black Fire”. It is why Osiris in Ancient Egypt, who originally represented the spirit aspect of the human being, was called “a dark god”, and “Lord in the perfecting black”.
Often in spirituality people confuse darkness, shadow and evil. They make them one thing when really they are very different.
Darkness is simply that which lies beyond the realm of light (the domain of dualistic consciousness). The sub-conscious of the body is dark to the consciousness of the mind because it can’t see it and illuminate its contents. So also is the super-conscious beyond the soul dark to consciousness in mind. Darkness is simply that which is beyond or unknowable by the light of our awareness, and spirit is unknowable because knowing is a dualistic experience made up of knower and known. In order to access spirit, the knower and the known are crushed on its event horizon into being it.
Shadow is something else. Shadow is repressed or denied psychological material that plays out in unconscious ways. This might be fears, desires, or talents even (shadow isn’t just the stuff perceived to be negative). It could be our disowned inner feminine, the denial of our feelings, or an unwillingness to acknowledge some of our strengths.
And evil? Evil is something that is actively regressive – repressing or pushing against the presence of love and life in any situation. Evil is that which deliberately drives us back into more self-centredness, more materialism, more domination, exploitation and greed. (Bruce Lyon has a great piece on this here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bruce-lyon/darkness-shadow-evil/10152401193815272/?__xts__[0]=68.ARBitzpwdPrwY4sLVIdr8EIEXn-4fZJrcmCSs8ZxjzAe6nO3kNEJ3vFziFOEUgGGVtK-QoL2kSk6fDi4AgQlyyInWO8-sU7ULmMJMpis1Jt3Ko5iB_-Ysu8bRGWRdNv-m8toL15g52nS&__tn__=HH-R.)
Bottom line: darkness, shadow and evil are different. Spirit is darkness, and this darkness is utterly divine.
In the modern day we can use the cosmological symbols of the earth, the sun and the black hole at the centre of our galaxy for the three levels of a human being – their personality, soul and spirit.
Spirit is the true source of power. Spirit is where we know that power isn’t something we have but rather power is what we are – the power of the One. This power is wild. This power is infinite, ecstatic, untamed life-force. This power is Shiva. This power is Shakti in her most raw essence. This power is the black hole destroyer that crushes all that crosses it’s event horizon into unity. This power is the infinitely explosive vitality of God.
The core focus of the Ancient Egyptian Mystery School was this power of spirit and its highest initiation was called the “Black Rite”. Egypt itself was called Kemet, meaning “the black land”. It was also described as the dark pupil in the eye of Osiris, or the dark light at the core of his heart. This is to say that the land was understood as the literal embodiment of the fecund darkness of spirit – at the core of every atom, cell, body and soul – out of which all creation is born.