Genesis 15:12 Meaning When the Sun Was Going Down

As the sun goes down, a deep sleep falls, and with it a great darkness. The mind fears this. It knows itself only in the light of thought, in the endless commentary that names and plans and remembers, and when that light dims it feels its own ending as horror.

Yet something must grow still in him before the promise can be spoken. What looks like the terror of nothingness is the threshold of presence, the place where you stop being your story and become the awareness underneath it. He sleeps so that a voice deeper than his own thinking can finally reach him.

The deep sleep is the soul lying down into flesh. Imagination, which is the only God, agrees to forget itself and put on a body, and that body is the cross it must carry until the road is finished. Abram is a state you enter on purpose, and the sleep is the moment you sink out of your own light into the weight of a mortal life.

The horror of great darkness is that same life felt from the inside. The soul endures the long stretch of bondage to the body, the four hundred years of wearing a garment that hides the God within. Nothing has gone wrong here. The darkness is the price of the descent, carried and not escaped, until the journey ends in glory and the sleeper wakes as the Father he always was. The going down is arranged so that the rising can happen.

As the daylight fades, the waking mind loosens its grip and a deeper part takes over. A heavy sleep comes down, and with it a darkness and a dread that do not belong to ordinary life. This is what it feels like to sink below the surface of the mind into its depths.

The fear is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is what a person naturally feels when he comes near the vast, unknown region inside him that his daylight self keeps hidden. Going down into that darkness is frightening because it is so much larger than the small, managed self a person lives in by day.