Amidst the Veil
Dear All,
I share these words with you in love, in the hope that they may serve as a loving and gentle reminder to remember what is truly important in life, in your life.
It was last year, December 2023, a few days before New Year's Eve, I organised a Nocturnal Silence Walk in an enchanting forest together with my dear friend Sacha Post. It was a bleak evening where the night had made its early entrance and the little light of the winter day had been exchanged for a pitch-black envelope. We came together as a group, dressed in warm clothes, sturdy shoes and wrapped in an enthusiasm for what lay ahead. The warning for the rain-battered forest had already been sent out, carefully worn paths had degenerated into swamps that no hiking boot was resistant to. Yet this information did not deter anyone, everyone knew that entering the meandering forest in the dark would quickly become a real adventure. In a small valley, surrounded by sandy hills, we started our journey together, an opportunity to exchange a few words in turn was sent out before we would let the silence of the dark forest speak loudly. The invitation for the walk was clear, the question to everyone; “What may be born from the fertile soil of the unknown? What do you wish to walk towards in the new year?”
The time between Christmas and Epiphany is known as the Twelve Holy Nights and has been regarded for centuries as a period of pure potentiality, in which the veil between observable reality slowly thins and one is invited through introspection and silence to slowly sense the unborn of the year to come. In the darkness, when the sensory impressions withdraw, we are invited to step into the unknown, in which there are no straight paths paved with our expectations but a winding, overgrown, sometimes muddy sand path that leads us to a yet to be discovered destination of that which is to be born in our budding experience. In the unknown we can sometimes feel lost and the cry for certainty becomes louder, but, especially in such moments, when it seems as if the road is a dead end, when our feet get wet because the path leads through the cold water, that is when we begin to experience the invitation of the unborn. The unborn speaks of going beyond the point where you can still come at it with your own expectations. Where expectations stop, where ideas about what it should be end, there, in that “darkest point of the forest”, the road leads us. Where exactly? That's the cosmic joke, life is going on a road that leads to the discovery that the person along the way could fundamentally never go anywhere because he or she has always been there. The destination is therefore not a point outside ourselves, not something that can ever be reached (physically) but, as Joseph Campbell says, a discovery that “the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know”.
“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words…”
It is by entering into the unknown that the known begins to speak to us because only the unknown takes us beyond the point where our carefully constructed ideas about ourselves and life hold. The deepest knowing is present in all of us because the deepest knowing belongs to what we really are, but the veil of forgetfulness lies over our perception like a densely woven cloth and thus we forget what we know. The metaphor for the dark forest, or the unknown is in essence never really unknown because you cannot go anywhere that does not ultimately provide you with more insight into where you have always been. The unknown is only unknown because we have forgotten what is already known to us. This may sound rhetorical and obvious but the profound simplicity of it is something that we easily overlook because we spend our entire lives convinced that we can go somewhere. Do you see the irony? You could say that one only sets out to return home, or in other words, we enter into the unknown to become familiar with what is actually already known to us. This is a common theme found in countless traditions, myths and religions; the hero who returns home after having journeyed into the unknown, comes home with an insight into himself and is thus able to perceive life anew from a deeper understanding of his relationship to the mystery, or rather, how he is at his core the mystery he sought to understand.
This hero’s journey is our life, it is the adventure that has been given to all of us and this is a journey that takes us through night forests, across stormy seas and up narrow mountain paths. Many challenges inevitably await us all, but nevertheless we travel on, to that moment where we finally reach the mountain top and get a view of what was there all along, a view in the most intimate insight, that in reality there was nowhere to go because we are that which we are seeking. And then, when you see all this, when you are allowed to feel this beautiful dance of forms so deeply embodied, and then? What do you do? Well, you do the only thing you can do and that is smile, smile because you were allowed to peek through the veil of mystery.
“When you realise that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die…”
There you are, at the same point where you once began your life journey, not with a played-out and ready-made explanation but with a deep knowing that you cannot understand it but that it is not necessary and then you see that you have been on your way your whole life to end up at exactly the same point where you once began…in that same dark point of the forest, in the unknown. But this time no longer in the absence of the trust that is needed to continue, this time no longer in the presence of the desire to go elsewhere, no, this time in full remembrance that you have been in the dark forest all that time and that there, in that unknown, a memory to be lived was born in us…
May the coming days lead you through unknown forests toward open vistas of intimate remembrance.
In love and reverence, sven
