Energy, Divine and Dark

Parallels exist between the raw unconscious substrate called the uroboros, from which psychic energy is said to be carved out by the conscious ego, and the divine dark encountered by the mystics in their transcendental state.

The divine darkness is often described by the mystics as a raw, untamed expanse associated with the Godhead and which can’t be known or understood intellectually. It’s similar in some respects to the kabbalistic concept of Ein sof, that ‘part’ of the divine which is beyond thought, and which seeks to remain shrouded in its own mystery, resisting discovery and exploration by conscious forces.

Ein sof may be thought of as dark energy. Physicists don’t describe dark energy as dark in a physical sense, but in a measurable sense. It’s dark since the energy can be accounted for, yet not directly quantified or understood as part of the physical interactions with which it’s associated. 

Whether conceived of as the uroboros or as an energy, divine and dark, these forces may be infinite, and the conscious ego which carves itself out from this substrate, is in a sense, finite. It’s almost as if the ego represents a bounded nucleus floating in a cell of protoplasm which is infinite in extent. The unconscious energy which surrounds the conscious forces of the human ego threatens to swamp and reabsorb the conscious territory staked out and claimed by human consciousness and its creation: civilization.

No matter how much consciousness expands and refines itself, since it’s surrounded by an infinite jacket of unconscious ocean, it will always remain limited when compared to its envelope of endlessness. This conscious, very human energy, may expand forever, yet it expands into a womblike darkness which, though it gave birth to consciousness, understands it not. 

We are, in a sense, always expanding our awareness of the infinite, into the infinite. Our potential is therefore unlimited. Yet we can never reach the perfection of infinite awareness, which some may call God. Heaven is a state, not a place. We never fully achieve this nirvana, yet we continue to increase our sense of enlightenment as we near that shore upon which we never land. For the darkness is endless, and has no shore. God recedes always over the horizon, a sun setting before us on a sea in which we sail forever west.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just