The Darkness of God

Abstract

This article describes a radical and lasting change of consciousness that has overtaken the author as a result of nearly dying by poisoning in 1983. The initial experience lacked almost all the dramatic features that have attracted popular attention in the many accounts of "near-death experiences" appearing over the past decade such as "out-of-body" travel, passage through a tunnel, review of earlier life, or encounter with apparently supernatural entities. It was more in the nature of a dissolution into a Nirvanic or void-state of undifferentiated aliveness, but it produced a major and apparently permanent awareness-shift far beyond the emotional reorientations that are commonly reported to follow close encounters with death. The change seems to correspond closely with traditional religious descriptions of mystical "awakening" to experiential unity with the essence of all being, from which viewpoint the mystical perception of reality is seen as simple normal consciousness rather than an "altered state," while socalled ordinary consciousness is recognized to be a clouded condition wherein awareness has become bogged down in an illusion of separate selfhood confronting an alien environment. This change of viewpoint represents a complete antithesis to the author's prior religious background, which involved total skepticism of all mystical claims and of near-death experience reports. The overall experience provides independent confirmation to the change of direction that was becoming apparent, unbeknownst to the author, in the main body of research on near-death experiences (NDEs) in the early 1980s. Interest was being focused on the changes of consciousness that undeniably sometimes occur in crisis-situations, as phenomena of great scientific and human interest in their own right, rather than on inevitably contentious arguments about whether or not NDEs provide glimpses of another world beyond the grave. By viewing NDE phenomena in this new perspective, the author is able to suggest a possible psychodynamic mechanism underlying the clouding of everyday consciousness and, on this basis, to propose guidelines for future research towards less drastic means of inducing "awakening." I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you, which shall be the darkness of god. T.S. Eliot