"In a Hindu temple, the inner sanctuary is always dark...When you come to the inner sanctuary you come to the...inner center of your own being, and you encounter God in the darkness."
- Fr. Bede Griffiths
"When we come to light, we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground...Light is the potential of everything."
- David Bohm
The tao that can be told
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Yet mystery and manifestations
Darkness within darkness.
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
- Book of the Way
"All of our consciousness...arises in the dependence on this mind of clear light."
- The Dalai Lama
"No matter how deeply I go into myself my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"That divine Darkness is the unapproachable light in which God dwells. Into this Darkness, rendered invisible by its own excessive brilliance and unapproachable by the intensity of its transcendent flood of light, come to be all those who are worthy to know and to see God."
- Dionysisus the Areopagite