The summer of 1977 was a rough time for New York City:
- the fallout from a crippling financial crisis reduced municipal services to nearly zilch,
- trash was everywhere and nasty-looking graffiti was all over everything,
- property values were falling so fast that landlords were burning down their own tenement buildings to collect insurance on them,
- a serial killer who claimed to be acting on orders from a demon who spoke to him through his neighbor’s dog was on the loose,
and, as if all that wasn’t bad enough, the Mets traded their superstar pitcher, Tom Seaver, to the Cincinnati Reds. What the #@%&??!!
Things were not going well.
Then things got worse.
I was living in the brahmacārī ashram of the Hare Krishna temple on West 55th Street in Manhattan that summer, a stone’s throw from Central Park—right in the heart of the city that never sleeps.
One night in mid-July, at just about 9:30, I walked up to my room on the 6th floor to “take rest”—the euphemism we used for hitting the sack.
I opened the door, flicked the switch, the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling lit up . . . for a second . . . and then fizzled out.
I wondered where I could find a replacement bulb for a moment. Then I looked across the room through the window and noticed that there weren’t any lights on in the building across the street.
I stepped back and looked down the hallway: nothing but the dim glimmer of an emergency light around the corner and the muffled voices of my fellow monks.
Doors opened. We asked one another the obvious question—“What happened?”—and replied to one another with the obvious answer: “I don’t know.”
We made our way up the stairs to the roof above the 12th floor and looked out over the parapet. Every building in sight was bedecked with obsidian windows, the streets below illuminated by nothing but vehicular headlights. Midtown was totally blacked-out.
An unusually inky sky told us that it wasn’t just a local phenomenon: the whole city had been plunged into a tenebrous abyss.
A chorus of sirens began to wail all around us. The police were on the move.
As well they needed to be: burglar alarm systems all across the city had just shut down; every criminal in town was on the move, too.
A moment later, we started asking each other, “Do you feel that?”
The answer was a collective “yes”—we all felt it.
What we felt, beyond the external darkness that registered on our retinas, was a thick blanket of tamo-guṇa, the metaphysical mode of darkness, draping itself over the city, inviting an atmosphere of avidyā, ignorance, to unfurl in its umbra.
The Sanskrit word “avidyā” is usually translated as “ignorance,” which is correct, but incomplete. “Avidyā” doesn’t just describe an effect; it reveals the cause of the effect, too.
Avidyā is a compound word: the first letter, “a,” is a negating prefix, such as in the word “ahiṁsā:” non-violence.
The word “vidyā” is usually translated as “knowledge,” so “avidyā” really means “no knowledge,” but that still doesn’t convey the full meaning of the word.
Sanskrit shows up in English more often than you might think. In this case, the Sanskrit word vidyā shows up in the Latin word videre and, consequently, in the English word “video,” which translates directly as “I see” and refers to a medium for visual imagery made possible by a projection of light.
Thus, the deeper meaning of “avidyā” is revealed: the inability to see due to the absence of light.
As is the meaning of its counterpart, vidyā: the ability to see due to a projection of light.
This is why yoga wisdom describes avidyā as a kind of darkness that can be dispelled by the shining lamp of knowledge.
The lamp of knowledge definitely wasn’t shining the night the Great Blackout, as it came to be known; the perfect storm of lightning strikes and miscommunication that brought the power grid down brought the consciousness of the city down with it.
Opportunistic thieves were the first to take advantage of the power outage but the propensity for criminal mischief began to spread like a virus; throughout the night, caravans of people who would normally never think of doing such a thing were seen pushing shopping carts filled with stolen merchandise through the streets.
It went beyond just looting; property was indiscriminately destroyed and whole city blocks, especially in poorer neighborhoods, were decimated. Over 1,600 locally owned stores were catastrophically damaged and over 3,700 people were arrested. It was the worst night New York City had seen since the Draft Riots during the Civil War.
And we could feel it. It wasn’t just dark; it was darkness, a night in which the mode of ignorance prevailed.
Fortunately, we were all safe on the rooftop. The sun rose early the next day and we went about the business of our usual spiritual practices, but with a little extra intensity, each of us hoping to cleanse our consciousness of any darkness that might have seeped in from the night before.
Power was restored by the time night rolled around again. It took a while, but the city eventually recovered. The financial crisis slowly subsided, the trash got picked up, the graffiti got more artistic, property values stabilized, and they caught the Son of Sam.
Things get bad. Then they get worse. Then they get better. The lights go out. The lights come back on. Things go in cycles.
They (whoever “they” are) say that the darkest hour is always just before the dawn. And now, like that night in New York in 1977, it appears to be a long long long long time before the dawn.
But dawn is coming.
Until then, we can go about the business of our spiritual practices with a little extra intensity to keep the darkness out.
And keep each other company on the roof.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k