Attempting a Continuously Positive Mindset

[Sacred Fool]

This conversation is touching on a pet peeve of mine, ergo--ahem--I rant.

Darkness is continually degraded in Western culture, and most unfairly so.  We're encouraged to fear dark places, dark things, dark people, dark humor and certainly the final darkening of earthly perception: Death.  I find it very irritating because, for one thing, half of a "diurnal period" -- as someone likes to call it -- is dark, so if you are fearful of darkness, then, by definition, half of your life is lived in fear.

I attribute this widespread gross cultural distortion to the disproportionate effect Manichean philosophy has had on Eastern religions adopted by Western peoples.  (Note: Judaism, Christianity & Islam all came out of Asia and, thus, are obviously Eastern, as the term is commonly used.)  This fixation on the eternal "battle" between Light & Dark is a pernicious virus, in my view.  Of course, one may choose to view Creation using this template and participate in it accordingly, but so much beauty, harmony and gracefulness goes right down the toilet when one formats oneself to fight for the Light while fearing or trying to destroy the Darkness.

Generally speaking, most movements that follow this path are hate-filled, loathsome and small minded.  Often they implode due to scandal or through some other means that shows that they had no real allegiance to Light.  They just claimed it for themselves without taking the trouble to understand it and without taking time to understand themselves.

To be fair, though, it is not unwise to counsel caution when exploring darkness.  As Ra notes, missteps are very easy make.  There's a tendency to overdo things and create imbalances because, in the dark, it's hard to see what you're really doing.  But that's an important point.  That is, learning to respectfully operate in the dark sharpens your ability to work with Spirit because in that context where it's hard to see what you're doing, you are forced to improve your ability to see with more clarity into your own self.  You become more sensitive to your own subtle light.


Darkness, people, is the only available tool for articulating light.  This is a fundamental element of the structure of things.  These dark letters are obscuring the pure white light of your computer monitor right now, but, if you are bothering to read them, then they are more important to you at this moment than a blank screen.  ("Blank" means white, by the way.)  Anything which articulates pure Light does so using darkness.  Yes, therefore, darkness moves one further away from pure light in some sense, but...BUT...light majestically articulated reflects the sentiment of Divinity back to the Creator in the case of "great music," art and other such things.  In my view, our role here is not to imitate or somehow recapture pure Light, but it is to accept darkness as a tool and craft the distorted light with more skillfully articulated distortions so that the energetic structures we create allow more Divine Light to appear through them.

So, what does it mean to skillfully articulate darkness and light?  I say, this is the work of balancing.  It is the work of accepting the sometimes bumptious flow of love and light, sensing how they are being articulated and, where it seems there could be improvement, introducing forms of articulation which might be more crystalline, more concordant with Divinity.  In that sense, darkness becomes a tool, an implement in the service of Love & Light as it is integral to the sculpting of--well--of our very being, we the offspring of many-ness married to Oneness.


Woof!



[PS:  Although a "two-seater" might describe something found in an outhouse, "diurnal" is not something made of porcelain.)