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Reflections
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In the introduction to "Dark Spirit", 'Darkness' is not a metaphor, not a symbol of despair, nor a placeholder for the unknown. It is more primordial than that: a pointer to what is present before presence is even named. This darkness is not the opposite of light, nor a background to it—it is the collapse of all opposites, all reference points, all meaning-structures. In this essay, I explore how this radical notion of darkness converges with the uncompromising expression of Radical Non-duality, a message that speaks of the end of separation, the end of becoming, and the disappearance of the one who could ever approach the truth.
Darkness, as articulated in "Dark Spirit," is not simply the absence of perception—it is the absence of the perceiver. It is the unraveling of the internal narrator, the observer, the one who positions themselves outside experience in order to analyze or navigate it. This is not a state to be reached or a mystical realm to be entered. It is the basic fact that the apparent self, the one who seems to exist in relation to anything else, is a fiction born of language, memory, and attention.
Radical Non-duality says precisely the same thing, but with different terms: there is no individual, no timeline, no path. What appears to be a journey is already the destination. What seems to be a story of unfolding is a phantom projected by no one. "There is no one and nothing happening."
In the works of Tony Parsons, Jim Newman, and others in this lineage, Radical Non-duality does not offer techniques, practices, or philosophies. It offers nothing, because nothing is required. The seeker's impulse to move toward truth is revealed as the very veil that obscures it. There is no spiritual progress because there is no separate one to progress. What is longed for is what already appears—as the screen, the breath, the bird outside, the ache in the chest. And it is nothing.
Darkness is another face of this same mystery. Not a threat, but the falling away of orientation. It is not a void, but the end of needing to know. It is not a depth to be reached, but the absence of distance. In this darkness, Radical Non-duality resonates not as a message, but as the echo of the absence that never needed a voice.
It's true: on first encounter, Darkness seems to imply its opposite — Light, Clarity, Consciousness, Manifestation. But the Darkness spoken of here isn't that kind of darkness. It isn't a thing, and it isn't in contrast to anything. That is precisely the illusion that collapses in what might be called the Dream of Darkness.
In many traditions, darkness is treated as the hidden or unmanifest — the background from which form arises. But that already implies duality: darkness versus manifestation, emptiness versus fullness. What is pointed to here dissolves even that. There is no actual boundary between Darkness and what appears. The apparent world is not separate from the ungraspable source — it is its very expression.
Darkness is not behind the dream. It is the dream.
The dream is not separate from the source — it is the shimmering texture of what cannot be known.
This isn't a metaphor for something deeper. It is what appears — without meaning, without origin, without a dreamer. The Darkness is not hidden behind the veil. The veil is Darkness appearing as veiling. The dream is not something to wake up from — it is what's happening when no one is dreaming.
The moment we treat Darkness as something distinct — something "over there" behind appearance — we fall back into dualism. Darkness vs. form. Absolute vs. relative. Emptiness vs. fullness. But this division is conceptual. What appears is not other than the formless. It is not a manifestation of something. It is just this — arising from nowhere, belonging to no one.
The Dream of Darkness is not a veiling of truth — it is truth appearing as form, as movement, as texture. There is no behind, no beyond.
So Darkness is not separate. It is not a mystical depth we must return to. It is not a metaphysical layer behind what's happening. It is what's happening, without needing to be named. The dream is not in the way. It is the way — even as there is no path, no destination, and no one to walk it.
Darkness is not absence. It is not presence. It is not unity, not division. It is not light's opposite. It is the collapse of opposites — not as a realization, but as the natural absence of separation in what already is.
There is no separation between Darkness and the Dream. The Dream is not a distraction from the Dark. The Dark is not hidden behind the Dream. There is no one to emerge from it, and nothing to return to it.
There is just this — impossible, weightless, and utterly without distance.
All seeking is born from the presumption that something is missing. That presumption gives rise to identity: "I am the one who seeks." But in the absence of lack, there is no need for selfhood. Darkness does not give answers; it makes answers unnecessary. It does not illuminate; it renders illumination irrelevant.
Śūnyatā in Mahāyāna Buddhism touches this point: the emptiness of all things is not a quality to be grasped, but a recognition that there never was any essence to grasp. Śūnyatā, too, leads to silence, to a breakdown of the subject-object paradigm. But while Buddhist emptiness often implies a path—however paradoxical—Radical Non-duality and the vision of Darkness strip even that away. There is no unfolding. There is no realization. There is only what is, unclaimed, unpossessed, unseparated.
Both Zen and Taoism resonate deeply with the vision of darkness. In Zen, enlightenment is not a gain but a loss—the dropping of all concepts, goals, and efforts. The mind that grasps nothing is already empty. Zen koans often break the seeker's logic not to replace it with another answer, but to dissolve the questioner altogether. As the Zen master Bankei put it: “The unborn is the ground of all.”
Darkness is not apart from this. It is what remains when even silence is not being held. It is not peace as a state of mind, but the absence of the one who could be at peace or not. The classic Zen expression "Not knowing is most intimate" points to this: in true intimacy, there is no one outside experience. No one left to know, no knower, no known.
Taoism goes even further in poetic economy. The Tao Te Ching opens with paradox: "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." The Tao is not a presence we can find; it is the mysterious flow that appears as everything, yet belongs to no one. Darkness, too, is unnamed, unfixed, endlessly fertile. "Darkness within darkness," writes Laozi, "the gateway to all understanding."
In both traditions, as in the spirit of Radical Non-duality, what is most real cannot be named, held, or taught. It is not hidden, but overlooked because of its simplicity. Like darkness, it was never absent—only assumed to be so by the light-addicted mind.
In Christian mysticism, especially in the writings of figures like Meister Eckhart and later Martin Luther, the idea of deus absconditus—the hidden God—describes a divine presence so unknowable, so utterly beyond comprehension, that it appears as absence. God hides not because He is not present, but because He is too present to be seen. This resonates profoundly with the concept of Darkness as presented here—not as a void, but as that which precedes the split between seen and unseen, presence and absence.
The mystics spoke of encountering God in darkness, not light. The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th-century Christian text, urges the seeker to abandon knowledge, image, and even the desire to know God, and instead surrender to the dark silence where true union—without separation—may be revealed. This is not unlike the message of Radical Non-duality: the end of grasping, the futility of conceptualizing, and the radical suggestion that what is longed for has never been absent.
In this hiddenness, God is not a being behind the veil. The veil is the illusion of separation. And so, in the Darkness beyond narrative, beyond doctrine, beyond even the need for redemption, the hidden God is not found—but neither is He lost. There is only this: dark, immediate, ungraspable. A presence without center. A silence without opposite.
Robert Saltzman's The Ten Thousand Things mirrors this terrain with unsentimental clarity. His writing dismantles the spiritual persona—the one who believes they are approaching awakening—and leaves behind no substitute. The darkness he points to is raw, indifferent, free of narrative. "Not knowing" is not a tool but a final honesty. His refusal to pretend that meaning can be secured aligns with both Radical Non-duality and the spirit of Darkness: a surrender without surrender, because there is no one left to do it.
Robert Saltzman stands apart from both traditional mysticism and popular non-duality. His work is not poetic, not transcendental, and never wrapped in spiritual glow. He offers no practices, no metaphysics, and no promises. His writing moves through what might be called the harsh clarity of immediacy — a space where no concept, no identity, no spiritual story survives.
In The Ten Thousand Things, Saltzman dismantles not only the illusion of the seeker but also the entire framework that makes seeking possible. He strips away the spiritual ego, the self-congratulatory narratives of awakening, and the subtle hierarchies that even non-dual communities often perpetuate. What remains is not enlightenment — it's not-knowing, stripped bare. It's presence without position. An honesty without grip.
For Saltzman, Darkness is not a passage or a metaphysical layer — it's what shows up when you stop pretending to know anything about what this is. His form of radical honesty doesn't point to some secret reality behind appearances. It points to the impossibility of framing reality at all. And that impossibility — when no one resists it — is the stillness he never calls spiritual.
“Not knowing is not a limitation. It's freedom. What else is there?”
His is a voice of refusal — but not cynicism. He refuses transcendence, revelation, and resolution. Yet what emerges is an unexpected peace, one not built on belief but on the collapse of the need to believe. This is not the end of meaning. It's the end of the search for meaning as something that must be found elsewhere. In Saltzman's view, Darkness is not the unknown — it's the dropping of the illusion that anything can be known at all.
Shiv Sengupta is a contemporary voice in the space of radical non-duality, but his expression leans toward a paradoxical fusion: a language of intimacy, devotion, and beauty — all directed toward no one. His talks and writings unfold with gentleness, but they carry the same uncompromising message: there is no path, no teacher, no self — and no separation between what is and what appears.
Where many radical speakers emphasize absence and negation, Sengupta brings a tone of quiet reverence — not for something beyond, but for this, just as it is. His language is sometimes poetic, sometimes brutally direct, but always points to the unspeakable simplicity of what appears without cause.
Unlike traditional bhakti (devotional) approaches, where longing is directed toward a divine other, Sengupta's perspective reveals longing itself as an appearance of wholeness. Devotion, in his view, is not a bridge — it is the play of that which never needed to be bridged. The lover, the beloved, and the longing dissolve into this seamless unfolding.
“This is already”
For those who resonate with tenderness and fierce clarity, Sengupta offers a rare blend: the raw immediacy of radical non-duality without spiritual detachment. He speaks to the heart, but not as a path — as an echo of the wholeness that never fractured. In this light, Darkness is not negation, but the unnameable intimacy of everything appearing — soft, fierce, sacred, and absolutely ordinary.
Miranda Warren's expression of non-duality comes through not as emptiness, but as a living love story—a seamless story without a storyteller. In her book 'This Terrible Love' and related talks, she describes life as:
“a love story, a story of life seen without the filters of separation, and it is my story and your story and no one's story at all.”
This vision transforms Darkness from a void into the very medium of love and unity—it's not the absence of light, but the space in which life sings itself, without any division between source and expression.
Here, Darkness isn't the negation of form; it's the tender stillness through which the song of existence resonates. It is the canvas of love that never needed coloring; the embrace that has never known separation.
The "Headless Way," as articulated by Douglas Harding, offers a radical shift in perspective: from being a person among other persons to the direct recognition of being space for the world. It invites a turning around of attention — away from what is seen (the body, the world) toward what is seeing, and finding… nothing. Or rather, no-thing.
This headless seeing — clear, open, immediate — resonates deeply with the metaphor of Darkness in "Dark Spirit". Darkness is not a condition to be removed, but the invisible clarity in which all appearances come and go. Just as Harding points to the absence of a face — an absence that paradoxically allows for the presence of everything else — so "Dark Spirit" invites us to dwell in that which has no name, no form, and no observer.
Both perspectives dismantle the illusion of a central, bounded self. There is no 'me' here, only a vast and unknowable openness in which the world arises. The 'Darkness' is not a fog to be pierced, but the nameless clarity that holds all things — without judgment, without separation, without resistance.
Joan Tollifson writes with disarming honesty about awakening, aging, embodiment, and the illusion of control. Her emphasis on present-moment awareness, raw experience, and the non-conceptual nature of reality aligns effortlessly with the ethos of Dark Spirit.
For Tollifson, the spiritual journey is not a heroic climb toward a peak experience but a gentle (and often messy) falling away of illusions. In this way, her work echoes the Dark Spirit's rejection of transcendent ideals in favor of what is right here — broken, ordinary, and luminous.
She speaks to the paradox: that there is no one to awaken, no goal to reach — and yet, something shifts. Not toward knowledge, but toward the unknowable. Her emphasis on "just this" resonates with the sense of intimate nothingness that Dark Spirit points to — the fullness of absence, the vivid presence of what has no center.
The spirit of Darkness also finds strong resonance in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze. Each of these thinkers questioned the so-called light of reason, identity, and metaphysics, and instead pointed to a more primal, chaotic, or concealed ground of being.
Nietzsche gazed into the abyss and saw not nihilism, but the collapse of imposed meaning. His call to affirm life without justification mirrors the invitation of Darkness: to live without a ground, without an external referent, without a self. In his rejection of metaphysical certainty, he exposes the seeker as yet another mask for fear—fear of the abyss, fear of unknowing.
Heidegger, meanwhile, explored the notion that truth is not full presence but unconcealment, which always includes concealment. The darkness he evokes is not ignorance but the very condition for anything to appear at all. To dwell in Being is to dwell in a twilight where presence and absence collapse into one another, where language fails, and only a silent attentiveness remains.
Deleuze offers perhaps the most radical philosophy of Darkness: a vision of impersonal becoming, of pre-individual flows and forces that undo identity. His concept of the "dark precursor" refers to the untraceable source of transformation, the invisible catalyst that shatters structure without itself being seen. It is not an object of knowledge but a pure difference that destabilizes the known.
Each of these thinkers—through abyss, withdrawal, or ungrounded becoming—moves philosophy beyond light and clarity. In doing so, they resonate with the vision of Darkness presented here: not as void or negativity, but as a generative dissolution, a surrender to what cannot be claimed or understood. Here too, the light-addicted mind is undone. Here too, Darkness remains.
There is no one to awaken. There is no insight to reach. The darkness that frightened the seeker was never darkness at all—it was the light of no-one, shining without origin or aim. This is not an experience to be had, but the end of the one who could have it.
And in that absence—in the very heart of what was called Darkness—there is only this: uncaused, unowned, neither divine nor profane. No truth, no illusion. No seeker, no finding. Just the echo of nothing, appearing as everything.
“No one knows what life is or isn't, what "mind" is or isn't. Certainly no one has the slightest idea about the "purpose" of life, or what any of it means (if anything).”
“ "I don't know" is both the beginning and the end of the circular journey of wisdom. It is its only natural start and only natural conclusion. And when that journey is complete, there is nothing left to do but to simply live whatever this is.”
Reflections are written in collaboration with AI, based on themes, language, and questions by the author.