I Went on a ‘Dark Retreat’ and Spent Three Days in Total Darkness

Magazine|‘You’re Going to Lose Your Mind’: My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness

On Day 3, I started seeing Rothkos. Immersed in darkness, I was hallucinating abstract expressionism, smears of pink and blue pulsing through what I knew to be a room in Massachusetts, though it was also a cave and somehow a black hole. A strange inner cinema comes online after enough time in absolute blackness, a kind of backup generator for imagery. I sat. Had sat for hours. It was daytime, or maybe nighttime, one of the big two.

Was I unraveling? Raveling? What did I know for sure? I knew to breathe: Om ah hum. If I truly freaked, I could find the door. I didn’t want the door. I wanted to boil existence down, see what remained.

Another hour or four. No light, people, activity, screens. A brain in the dark, and a warping one at that. I watched a wolf’s head drift past. Memories slid in. Autumn afternoon in Virginia, rusty rake tines snagged on a willow root. That Belgian boy from summer camp who knew just one English phrase, “bed of nails.” My daughter home with the flu, head on my chest, lifting it sweetly to barf. The crook of an unusual tree in Mexico 20 years ago.

Om ah hum. Enough with the breathing. Tea? No more tea. I opted for a journey to the bathroom, mostly recreational — edge along bed, feel for far wall, left at dresser, don’t knock over soap dispenser. Sitting again, more staring, more blackness.

The Rothkos floated in front of where my face presumably was. Pink, blue, pulse. I’d done unusual things but had never stepped outside life itself. Greater strangeness was coming. But first: three soft knocks in the darkness. Meal time. Oh, god, yes.

Supposing that “time” is a “real” “thing,” it was four days earlier that I caught a late flight from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., where Lama Justin von Bujdoss, the man who just knocked softly, met me in his pickup. He would be driving me to the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center, his new venture in the woods of New England. For days or even weeks, visitors plunge themselves into darkness and solitude, per a highly specialized and largely secret Tibetan Buddhist practice, dating back over a millennium. In such a state, the true nature of one’s mind, and of reality itself, is said to clarify.