Reflections on Darkness and Light
Foreword
Who I am and who I’m not
I am a writer, a mystic, a lover of nature.
I’m not a scientist, doctor or lawyer, philosopher, celebrity, podcaster or prophet. I subscribe to no political party, no system of coercion and control.
My small following is a resonance of ideas, of tastes; of a will to resist and persist, to honor and celebrate.
I’m neither guru nor saint, expert or fraud, since I make no claims to arbitrary truths.
Poet at best, Kokopelli at heart, praying by moonlight, dancing to the waves.
The following reflections are my perennial meditations, my quests of the soul to understand, to learn of this earth while here. Sometimes content, sometimes anxious to circumvent, or reconcile.
You could say I’m a glass half empty, half full kind of guy.
Kind of like the seasons, winter and summer, and the day and night, the interplay of darkness and light.
Darkness and Light
This is the primal, inescapable division of labor, or virtue, or physics, in the universe. At least in our experience, visually dependent as we are, we register reality in its black and white chromatic state, neither one better than another. My personal quest to promote light and banish darkness is both necessary and futile. Necessary to uphold the balance when darkness encroaches; singing of light while it lasts. Despite the futility of quenching darkness forever, or of forestalling the cycles of night. It may be my chosen path to identify more with the light, but then I must recognize by doing so it doesn’t mean my team will win. Neither is it fated to lose.
Since I volunteered to play this game, to act upon this earthly stage, I might as well pick a side, wear the costume, act the part: Long live the light!
Yin and Yang
Of course the Taoists would put me to shame. It’s all part of the balance, the eternal dance, neither dark nor light preeminent. Therefore the sage does not fight the river, or ride the merry-go-round too tightly on any one horse, but watches bemused as the carousel turns.
The Contentment of Cows
I used to think our human life was meant to be of the nature of contented cows.
How boring, you might say. Or: That’s fine… until it’s time for the slaughterhouse.
See how far that idea got me?
Still I long for it: freedom from strife, pain, worry, stress… like the lilies of the field!
Yeah right, the lilies until the cow eats them. And they probably poison the cow too.
So much for the theory of the contentment of cows.
Duality and God
The Yin Yang symbol says it all: Duality within Oneness.
God and His/Her Creation: Subject and Object.
And God created Heaven and Hell… and said it was All Good.
Paradise on Earth: A Walled Garden. You’re either In or Out.
Adam and Eve, in God/Goddess’s image: take your pick.
Life and Death: One Mystery.
Past and Future: All Present.
Full and Empty, Matter and Energy, Particle and Wave, Up and Down… they all meet in the center, which is everywhere.
The Pirates of the Caribbean
But then, then, from the empty horizon a mast appears, then more, and they’re coming our way. They’re coming for you and me. They’re coming to loot and plunder, to rape and burn, to cause havoc for the fun of it, and because otherwise they’d be gunners in the Royal Navy. So it’s not about blaming them.
More to the point of, we will always need to be wary, or on guard, or prepared for fight or flight, in the face of these predators. Maybe they are just the apex, and we further down the chain just need to work on our defensive measures, our protective coloring, our stealth and, remember too, our virtue, lest we fall upon each other, or sell out to the masters from afar.
Back to Flores
What happens at a period of history between peaceful coexistence (or isolation) and predation by warriors, bandits, pirates, mercenaries, proxy armies, and holy crusades. Viking or Māori, cannibals or kings, what happens, on first contact?
Harking back to our lost innocence, we savor the magic of The Fifth Sacred Thing, Aragon and Rivendell, Shangri-La and Eden. We imagine paradises of anarchic self-assembly, organizing only to meet immediate needs, and to have fun, feasting or famining together.
Inevitably, then, come the barbarians, the vandals, the pillaged cities. Comes the knock at the door, census record and injection vial in hand. The flaming arrow, the naval blockade; the bioweapon release, on horse blanket or nanoneurological substrate. Subliminal hypnosis, and yes, religion too.
Imagine the scenario, one of countless, but at the very juncture of one isolated species, homo floresiensis—said to have endured in what we call Indonesia till 50,000 years ago. A diminutive race only a meter tall, well adapted to dense tropical forest, they survived as a remnant of past migrations to avoid conflict, likely enjoying one last respite, a period of tranquility, though haunted by what their kind had endured in the regions they fled.
Refuge found finally on Flores Island, these human cousins lived a life, we can well imagine, supplied with fruits of a benign lifestyle. Hunting, foraging, adorning shelters from the rain. Births, marriages, deaths.
Until… we arrived. And it came down once again to: Us and Them.
Us and Them
The scale of predation fits the locale; so even for instance on our island of ten thousand, there will be vandals and miscreants, drunks and freakouts, crimes of passion or chaos. There is no idyll realm, with or without king or queen, priest or prime minister.
How easy to think of us islanders as holding together, apart from an out-of-synch world. Living a vision of a healthier way, in theory.
In practice, it’s a microcosm of that world we came from, with its divisions of race and politics, progress and conservation, freedom and rules. We have enemies in our midst, as we subdivide to those who wish to impose their will, or cannot help themselves; and those who want to be left alone, in peace, with things as they are or were before all the trouble started. Whenever that was.
After the mythical Fall from singular grace, came every splinter and nuance and mélange of respective menace that might be dreamed up on an uncensored community bulletin board.
The Commons: a quaint concept, among shepherds of yore. Come to think of it, I guess they’re still in charge.
Meanwhile, I note in passing, the dwelling of neighbors up the street. Loud dog in a closed carport of a dark, one-level house, a black pickup truck outside, and a hulking storage container parked beside the driveway. What’s up with them?
Heaven or Hell
The Yellowstone saga as depicted in the popular TV series presents a montage of human life on earth, in Elsa’s words from the prequel 1883, as Heaven and Hell. Meanwhile “God is the land.” His human creatures are set loose in the Wild West, left free to their own duplicitous devices. Out of the walled garden of civilization, into raw immersion, competition, battle for resources. At constant risk from smallpox, Comanches, bandits, encroaching settlers, Washington policymakers… what’s the difference? We’re all marauders, and maraudees.
Myself, I might dare at my peril to claim a charmed or even lucky existence, though to no great effect for all that, except to pontificate, or play lute while Rome burns, again. A protected, privileged scion of empire. My father bombed cities, and jumped from his flaming chariot, then returned home to spawn me. Fed on Lucky Charms, I enjoyed in full the fruits of the American Century, with a few fortunate scrapes along the way, spiced with celebrity sightings.
Skirting the hell in my time, of Vietnam. Skirting death itself a few times, with surprise more than trauma. Applying the actual word “hell” to relationship cauldrons—suicide threats, screaming matches, toxic silences, months of indecisive limbo. In other words, self-chosen drama.
Nonviolent to a fault, abhorring it yet obsessed with why it obsesses. Is it Hollywood programming? A childhood of horror movies? My father’s karma as a war criminal? Or just human nature?
Not mine, I say; but will I fight in self-defense? Or those I love? My community, my country, our leaders, our faith? It doesn’t end, these reasons to fight for oneself, until the mindset creates the fight. Self-defense means preemptive attack, to be on the safe side. Predictive crime is all the rage in the matrix now: we can lock you up for possible interpretation of terrorism.
How to fight that? Violence, of course, feeds the beast that craves it. I prefer to starve it, in whatever way Heaven may provide.
Heaven is waiting, just the other side of all that, the worry and pain, the disease of killing. Heaven inspires to find a time and space to spell the end of it, or banish it far away.
Struggle and Acceptance
The show goes on; the audience riveted, as the violence and dark deeds proliferate, dominating our attention for high drama, operatic fixation. Do we struggle against our restraints, or passively accept the offer of continuously streaming programming?
The actions of our own government, long suspect for crimes foreign and domestic, finally came to verify the devil’s work upon every one on the planet—seeking to imprint that nanotatoo on every neck, brand and collar. So the struggle came home, no longer distant, “over there” in Afghanistan or Ottawa or Fairy Creek, but to the doctor’s office, school and post office, hardware and grocery store, church and kirtan circle, ferry and firehall.
There is the outer struggle, with more or less choice to engage, depending on karma’s sword cutting generous or close; and the inner struggle, which is really about struggle versus acceptance.
The Covid time has been a hard instructor, about finding the balance between butting one’s head against the wall, fleeing the country, or praying to Netflix. The latter, a common variant of “letting it all go.”
My father fought and
came home drunk, from the struggle.
Though he won, he lost.
My mother, wiser:
Whatever will be, will be.
Que sera, sera.
Engagement and Witness
On a more positive note, struggle could be softened in approach, hybridized with acceptance the way Krishna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, instructed Arjuna: to act without attachment to the fruits of the action. Thus the spiritual warrior is willing to engage in the conflict at hand, without struggle.
Likewise witness represents a hybrid of struggle and acceptance, in that the attention is fully engaged with the conflict at hand, without opting out into denial, apathy or retreat.
While both engagement and witness are hybrids of struggle and acceptance, they offer a fine-grained duality of the same kind: engagement more active, witness more passive. Both qualities are helpful in facing the conflict at hand; and both roles can be helpfully filled by different people in a group, according to their nature.
A Quantum Earth
In which we create the earth of our own vibration; or we bring the wider resonance into being with our own attunement to a desired frequency. Knowing full well what distortions are being perpetrated upon the human field—from shadows within, or shadowy forces “out there.”
We don’t split the Earth itself in two, since each experience is individual and unique, within the collective fields. Yet each of us has the capacity to reside within a world that is a worldview, a perceptual matrix of sensory construction and energetic substance, promising a quality of experience more pervasive than the conventional furniture.
Earth to Pandora
[see review of Avatar: The Way of Water by Jonathan Cook: Avatar Makes Us Long to be Na’vi, While Dooming Us to Remain Murderous Humans]
Personally I found the remake less fatalistic, less devoted to mechanistic violence, than the original. More attuned to adolescent humor and hand-to-hand combat, amid the tropical splendor of a finely inhabited waterworld. Once again Gaia’s (Eywa’s) creatures came to help turn the tide against the GI-Joe intruders. I guess the moral is, even if the battle between good and evil is metaphorical, to convey it in story form requires it to be cast as… a battle. Arjuna says hi.
Left Brain, Right Brain
One critique of our human departure from Oneness points the finger at our bicameral brain, with its different functions and ways of seeing the world. Some say the blame for our crimes against nature can be laid at the feet of the left side: the rationalist, the materialist, the denier of the sacred, the faithless, the proud, the doomed. Meanwhile the right side sees the whole picture, supplies intuition, resonates with beauty and grace and all the ineffable, heavenly aspects of this creation. Fears may dwell here too but are met with faith. On the other side, cold calculation, blind machination, engines of destruction.
In this precarious balance we are set at the edge of the wilderness, our survival skills put to the test, and more: can we not only eke out a living at the expense of others, but also find the capacity to share and deliberate, to cooperate in common bond?
Cloaks of Protection and Invisibility
By attuning to a state of peace, invoking guardians and protectors as allies along our journey, we put on a cloak of protection, of divine grace, of synchronicity and guidance.
Since others’ perceptions of us are subjective, the field of experience we move in is also subject to our cocreation.
The shared reality is not a consensus, yet it does dilute the illusion of each separate lens. There is an overlap. The surveillance algorithm is confused and disarmed by data that is novel, idiosyncratic, unboxed, off-label.
Unbranded rebellion wears the camouflage of normality, blending in to the popular fabric of life.
The Shadow and the Collective
The Jungians have grappled well with the darker side, not only in psychotherapy but application to the world shadow, and the acting out of archetypal forces of darkness, death, evil. It is not our job to eradicate all that, but to integrate it, individually and collectively. What that means, it is our job to discover.
Good and Evil
So easy to lump everything into this archetypal battle, the supreme dialectic that has fueled the engine of history. Those seeing themselves as good, at the expense of “others” scapegoated as evil, tend to be the most active perpetrators of atrocities. Their moral pride gives them the courage to carry out crimes against humanity in the guise of public safety or benefit. Or if too heinous to justify en masse, then to tell oneself the same lie while ravaging the world undercover, with impunity. Either way, acting with impunity and shielded from justice. Insulated by paid or coerced collaborators, layers of bureaucracy and financial loopholes, legions of conscripts and mind-servants.
Revolution and Evolution
Evolution is to be expected, in the natural paradigm… yet even in the nonhuman realm, nature in its own path of progress accomplishes change by cataclysm and catastrophe as well as slow-drip erosion or accretion. It’s all a matter of scale: each adaptation or failure measured in a framing of time. Glacial in one measure is ecocidal in another, longer view.
Likewise, what are human revolutions, in the length and breadth of time, except bubbles in the stream, perturbations in the ever-rolling waves of stasis and calm?
War and Peace
Measured over time, the wars that mark our history leave great swaths of years, decades, centuries, of relative peace. In a given location, there might be millennia without traumatic conflict, invasions, civil wars.
The whole canvas of time is analogous to the whole canvas of space: bursts of violent, spectacular light, and great masses of dense matter, floating as infinitesimal specks, when we zoom out to the vastness of velvet black.
Love and Death
Love and death are the prime attractors of our raw emotions, of glory and grief. These are the inescapables. Love is what we call the urge of all to multiply itself. Sadly it comes at the expense of that which yields, and waits its turn to return in the great beyond, which is to say tomorrow.
So our stories turn on this day we are given, this love, this death. This polarity marks the basic nature of our fate and challenge.
They used to speak of Love and Death in the American Novel, the overriding themes. And for the visually attuned we turn to Yellowstone, or Woody Allen.
But for the full experience of Love and Death, how do you beat Anna Karenina?
Choose Your Own Adventure
Since we’re here…
Accept the battle, Arjuna, of desire/aversion, without denying either one, but giving respect and applying discernment.
Life is the Good Fight you’ve signed up for already, so embrace the warrior’s duty to do it with equipoise, determined but unrattled, following the Tao.
Life and Death, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, God and the Devil, Us and Them, Creation and Destruction…
The cycle turns, of wins and losses.
