Barbara Taylor Brown has a great piece on contrasting “solar spirituality” with “lunar spirituality.”
She says full solar spirituality “deals with darkness by denying its existence or at least depriving it of any meaningful attention,” and “focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith.”
Jung did an exquisite job of pointing out that masculine ideologies tend to be solar and feminine ones, lunar.
When we talk abut “darkness” and then associate darkness with evil, we are referring more often than not to the feminine, the mystery, the uncontrollable elemental forces of woman — and attempting to demonize them out of existence.
The second half of the journey — the advanced half — is to enter the underworld.
This is what is referred to as the daimonic (not demonic), the darkness, the feminine.
The hero enters in order to, as Stefan Zweig writes, “become the daimon’s master instead of the daimon’s thrall.”
It is as Ken Wilbur says:
“The integral sage, the non-dual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as tantric, these sages insist on transcending life by living it.
They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion.
They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste. Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equal gestures of the One and Only Taste.
To inhabit lust and watch it play;
to enter ideas and follow their brilliance;
to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to
a glory that time forgot to name.
Body and mind and spirit, all contained,
equally contained, in the ever-present
awareness that grounds the entire display.”
Fear of the dark
is fear of woman.
The light is a wonderful primer
for beginners. But it is in the
darkness that the bodhisattva
earns her chops, including the
capacity to withstand the world’s
collective fear of the dark.