That Mysterious Darkness Of Space

By James Donahue

December 2005

When we stare out in that infinite vastness of space on a clear and starry night, most of what we see is a patchwork of faint lights from distant stars and galaxies shining through the darkness that we perceive as a vacuum of emptiness.

But is what we think we see only an illusion? Is there something more to our Universe than emptiness? From esoteric literature - Crowley’s great Book of the Law – we perceive the Universe as two living forces, Nuit representing all and Hadit representing nothing. Nu is the all-encompassing Universe and Had is the invisible energy that makes it all work.

Nuit proclaims in the first verses of the work: “The Khabs is in the Khu . . . worship then the Khabs, and behold my light shed over you.”

In translation, Khabs and Khu are ancient Egyptian words that generally mean “the starry sky” and “spirit-soul,” respectively. The light of Nuit, then, is a universal light. Crowley interpreted it as a secret light comprising “the innermost, essential man,” since Nuit also declares: “Every man and every woman is a star.”

Just as we have a light of the soul that is obscured, or veiled by the body, there also is a light of infinite space. Crowley wrote: “the light of space is what men call darkness: its nature is utterly incomprehensible to our uninitiated minds.”

Books have been written about this single deep, philosophical concept. It is among the great occult teachings concerning our own personal understanding of ourselves and our link to the vast information system that encompasses our universe.

Strangely, science today is beginning to come to an understanding of this veil that prevents us from seeing the energy system that makes up our universe. The consensus now is that the stuff we can see . . . the stars, planets, moons, comets, floating particles, and life forms, contributes about four percent of the total “mass-energy budget” that runs our universe. Something now called “dark matter” is believed to fill another 23 percent, and the rest of the universe is “driven by an even more mysterious thing called dark energy,” one writer for space.com concluded.

This story by Robert Roy Britt, the publication’s senior science writer, quotes Robert Minchin of the UK’s Cardiff University, as reporting the recent discovery of what appears to be an entire galaxy of suns, planets, moons and whatever else comprised completely of dark matter.

In other words, this galaxy is invisible to us, but its gravitational force within the universe has been discovered. The stuff is so dense that Minchin calculates the ratio of dark matter to matter as we understand it at about 500 to 1.

The discovery immediately raises a myriad of questions and theories that may never be fully understood. For example, if one dark galaxy exists, are there many others, just as exist in the universe that we can see through our new and most powerful of telescopes? We also must ponder the universal law of balance when putting such a vast “negative” galaxy into its existence. Does everything that we perceive in the light have its own negative twin, or dark shadow?

Among the occult truths is that all energies at work on, within and around our world must be balanced for them to function in harmony. If there is up, there must also be down. Light is balanced by dark. Large is countered by small. Good cannot exist without the concept of bad.

Thus it is conceivable to think that everything that is perceived in the light has a negative, or dark, twin.

And if this is true, do we as individuals have a negative partner existing in a parallel universe? Are we able to move mentally between bodies, perhaps doing so when we dream?

Ah, but there is much more to this great swirling, pulsating, burning and ever communicating universe than we mere mortals can ever expect to comprehend.

“Know, O man, that Light is thine heritage. Know that darkness is only a veil. Sealed in thine heart is brightness eternal, waiting the moment of freedom to conquer, waiting to rend the veil of the night.” -Crowley