Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown

These disorganized musings by Zen meditation teacher Tull (Relational Mindfulness) cobble together material related to darkness and spirituality. “It is only when we allow ourselves... to commune with the elemental darkness that we gradually open to an unwavering inner light,” Tull contends, encouraging readers to interrogate the negative connotations that literal and metaphoric darkness has assumed in the Western world and to face the fear darkness represents. She suggests that exploring the power of darkness “celebrates” one’s connection to the earth and rejects hierarchy, but she neglects to spell out why, offering instead a tenuously related anecdote about how the author’s time in a monastery affirmed her opposition to hierarchy. Many of her assertions rely for evidence on elliptical observations, such as when she posits that the “balance of dark and light... is relevant to all of life” and cites as proof crystals growing in unlit caves and human embryos forming in the darkness of the womb. Even the material that lands—such as the author’s realization that her fear of darkness was actually a “fear of emptiness”—is stranded in an aimless narrative that struggles to find a coherent through line. This eclectic and baffling meditation gets lost in the dark. (Sept.)