Put a light on it!

It was a dark night, perfect for watching the stars. All I needed was my telescope, and a nice, deep, darkness. The campfire near me was still flickering, and in the beginning, I thought it wouldn’t bother me. I didn’t feel like taking my time and putting out the fire.

With my eye in the telescope’s ocular, I was trying to focus the image, and take a look at Orion’s belt. I noticed something annoying, in the corner of my eye, something that was disturbing my entire focus: the fire. There was no other way for me to continue, it really messed up my focus, unless I put out the fire. So, I took a bottle of water and put it out.

My eyes instantly felt satisfied with the complete, pitch-black darkness. I didn’t even need the telescope anymore, as the Milky Way was showing itself nicely in the sky. My mind was in awe and my eyes refused to blink, not to lose the beautiful scene in front of me. It was silent, and dark, and still. I was amazed and felt grace and gratitude. The thing is, it takes quite some effort to find a good spot, with perfect darkness, to wonder through the sky.

A perfect darkness! We need a perfect darkness, to contemplate and be amazed by the quiet and discrete world surrounding us, by the greatness and the beauty of the Universe.

Jumping a bit to a different subject, the last two years were… let’s say interesting. I don’t know what everyone has been through, but based on my personal experience, I can only imagine. And in these times of trouble and confusion, I saw a lot of motivational stuff praising light, happiness, joy and, what I call, Pink Unicorns!

I felt a paradox, between what I saw posted on the internet, all the motivational and joyous messages, and how I actually felt inside, what was on the news, and the words I was hearing from the people around me. The discrepancy was huge, my mind was in pain, my body started to get tired by all this conflicting information, but my soul was calm and present. I started asking myself: how come, despite it all, my soul is at peace, my fundamental mood is of calmness and serenity. Just like the paradox from the media, there was one in my mind too. After sitting a long time with myself (lockdowns helped a lot with that), I finally understood it: there was no paradox, there is no paradox, it is OK just as is.

We are everything, at the same time. We are both light and darkness, but more than that, we need both light and darkness. I have noticed a trend to promote only light, happiness, positivity and a perfect mood. And on the other side, too little posts, research, documents on how to deal with the bad stuff, how to make it through losing someone, how to breathe another time, another day, how to survive fear, how to deal, in the end, with the negative, bad, ugly, undesirable part of us. I can get why we want to look the other way, and search only the beauty and the silver lining, I definitely understand it, with growing up in a fear based system, where all reasoning was done based on the worst outcome. We got here after hundreds of years of misery, pain and suffering, culminating with the Dark Ages. And after that darkness, and the horror of those centuries, the illuminated era came. Light came into place, and it seems humankind wants to forever forget, dismiss, not talk about those times, and especially the misery that came along. Humankind behaves like a traumatized person, that has been through hard times, and found that the only way to cope with the PTSD is to deny it ever happened! Humanity put the negative thoughts, the negative part of human experience, under the mat, it didn’t clean it, it didn’t get over it, but it left it to rot until the smell of it will force us to act.

But until then, all we see is light and unicorns! We want to dismiss all the “darkness” in us, we define it as not good, as something that has to be eliminated and replaced with positive vibes. We are complete beings, with all the range of feelings, thoughts, experiences that we can have. We shut out half of ourselves, we dismiss half of our personalities, who we are and what we do, by not even wanting to take a look at our dark side. Of course, we get to feel incomplete and insecure! We consider half of our person should not even exist, is shameful, it’s embarrassing, should be cut out completely.

Try driving a 4 wheels car, with only 2 wheels! Try looking at the stars, with the Sun in your eyes (or a camp fire flickering)! It’s exactly the same outcome: nothing proper will happen!

The dark side, the shadow, our negative part, is not there to annoy us, put us in bad situations, destroy us or others. The dark side is there to protect us, keep us surviving, in a world that constantly blames half of our personality. The shadow comes into action, takes over and dismisses anything else when we perceive ourselves to be in danger. It kicks in the survival mechanism, no matter the consequences, it’s following the “do or die” principle. And the shadow kicks in the most, when is blamed or banished. How many times did we feel anger for being ashamed by someone? The anger, the dark thoughts about the other one, shaming us, were there only to keep us from dying of shame. They were there to show us we can still be strong and worthy. Negative feelings and thoughts come from fear, from the fear that our person could be neutralized. So, we can see, as a logical conclusion, that negative feelings are not the enemy, they are there to protect us from a perceived danger. What needs effort and focus is precisely that perceived danger. We shouldn’t shun away the dark thoughts, but we should acknowledge them, observe them and sit with them, so that we can determine their cause, the source of our fear, and work on that.

Thoughts are just thoughts, until they come into action and get materialized. Why are we so afraid of thoughts? Probably because we know only fear and fear related reactions. Most certainly, because we don’t KNOW how to deal with such thoughts. We think we have no saying to them, so we are afraid (again, fear!) that those thoughts will turn into regrettable actions. But if we eliminate fear, the “bad” thoughts also go away. Fighting our thoughts will only cause a fight back from their side, according to one of Newton’s laws, and will only cause a reaction of the same intensity as the feeling. That reaction will either turn the body sick or will make one lose their control and… snap! In which case, the people around will see just the snap, as a bad, shameful consequence of bad thoughts. Yes, that is true, but we should dig deeper and see the cause of those bad thoughts, and eliminate and treat that, which is FEAR.

In the end, our “negative” side, is just a part of us, that can become our friend, our ally or our foe. We can allow it at the negotiation table, while observing in detail it’s reasons and logic. The more we are going to push it away from having a say, the more it will fight back. We can listen to it and get valuable information about why we have certain thoughts and feelings, and it can be one of the best tools to understand and manage ourselves. We can take, as an example, the anger I mentioned above, when someone tries to diminish our efforts. That anger shouldn’t be translated in punching the other one, to make them shut up, but it should be directed inwards, as to finding the reason of it. Maybe the shamed person feels worthless, powerless, ridiculed, overall has a low self esteem. In this case, that anger can show the low level of self esteem, and the person can start working on that, looking for support, improving themselves, seeing their worth and the things they have already achieved. That shame can be then turned into a moment of realizing ones worth, strength and courage, so it can be switched into an asset and a win.

In any case, if we just let our “dark side” speak, state it’s ideas, we might even notice that it doesn’t want to take the lead anymore. I am not saying that we should put our darkness in charge of our lives! But I believe we would be calmer and happier, if we stopped judging, cutting down, and banishing half of who we are and what we feel and experiment.

In certain moments, darkness can show you wonders, can highlight subtle details and bring a whole new perspective on what is in front of our eyes. Just like I needed darkness to see the Universe’s greatness, the darkness inside us speaks about all the possibilities that we have, in order to achieve our own greatness. If we listen to it, it can take us to deep places, where, if we have the courage to take a look, we might find gems and become better, stronger, wiser.