I wrote the words of this song during a shamanic darkness initiation in 2005, in which I’d been blindfolded and kept in the dark for three days. Someone put a pad and pen in my hand. I couldn’t even see what I was writing. It turned out to be my first ever poetic writing. I didn’t know then that I was writing a song that I’d be making the music for with Suno, two decades later!
You can hear the song here, and then if you want to, read on for more details about shamanic darkness training:
The Glittering Blackness
Darkness training is a shamanic practice, but it does not require the usual method of being drummed into a trance state. It’s as easy as dreaming. It’s just a simple way of inner visioning that will take you deep into the black soil of your mind. This realm is called the “glittering blackness” by mystics, because the light sparkles against it almost like the phosphorescent, iridescent life-forms found deep in the oceans. The Amazonian shamans refer to this realm as “forest television”.
My own experience is that no panorama in our bright waking outer world even comes close in its beauty to what can be seen in this deepest blackness, and it is intensely healing. It is an enchanted realm that is so magnificently wondrous, I hesitate to try to wield clumsy old words to describe it. But in some ways, the diamond ring stage of an eclipse comes close in that the primary moving and shapeshifting forms are jet black with a light brighter than a thousand suns blazing behind.
It takes about 36 hours of being in complete darkness for colourful psychedelic visions to appear; before that, it’s mainly silver on black, but still just as fascinating, such as huge black mountains with deep crevasses beaming out Strobe lights. Sometimes there are great waterfalls of white platinum light tumbling down into the depths of the darkness. And there are silvery flowers, and ferns and feathers – and some lifeforms that are completely indescribable.
Dark Matter
I believe that what we see in this darkness practice is the same dark matter that is referred to by astrophysicists. To them, dark matter is invisible, because their outward-facing microscopes and telescopes cannot see it in outer space. But this dark matter is highly visible to the third eye in inner space, where we can watch it lovingly sparking the whole creation into life. It is the darkness matrix.
Interestingly, the word ‘black’ in German is schwartz and it comes from the Sanskrit word swaroopa or Maheswar, which is used to describe the great black one, Shiva, the Vedic god who oversees the destruction side of the death-rebirth processes of Nature, and the breaking down into nutrient-rich fertiliser, or black soil, that is essential for the germination of new life, which I believe is what we’re seeing in this dark matrix.
Activating the Third Eye
Diving into this inner blackness is a way of visioning that I was taught early on in my shamanic training, more than 20 years ago. I was initiated by Simon Buxton who, along with Ross Heaven, went on to write a book about this practice titled Darkness Visible.
I found it was a great catalyst to get my Third Eye to open without any of the pressure of having to go on any kind of journey, because I was finding it difficult at first to see anything. Like many in the West, my Third Eye had become dormant and ossified after a lifetime of disuse, and also buried under a ‘tomb’ erected as a sorry byproduct of the Standard Western Diet.
Otherwise known as the pineal gland, the third eye is at the base of the grail cup-shaped hypothalamus, and it becomes calcified when we don’t get enough D3 and K2 vitamins to manage our calcium properly. A lot of this chalky solution ends up in places where it shouldn’t be, such as coating our arteries as well as our pineal gland. Fluoride can also cover the third eye in a sort of thick white slime which, strangely enough, is a similar consistency to toothpaste.
There are various dietary methods for descaling the Third Eye, but the most powerful way of all is just to activate it. I’ve found that diving into the darkness is the best way to activate it because it forces the brain to produce its own natural dreaming chemical of dimethyltryptamine aka DMT. It is a bit like taking a demolition ball to the ‘tombstone’ and once freed, it ignites into activation.
Thus no illegal drugs are necessary to create these conditions. There are also no drumming protocols nor axis mundis to remember. It is just about simply slipping gently into the glittering blackness, the permaculture of the soil of the mind, and just by engaging with it, you will ‘water’ the germinating growth of the seedlings of wisdom there that will then go on to manifest in your life.
Annie Dieu-Le-Veut 