Google “darkness” and all sorts of sinister pictures show up.
Of course, there’s always a point of light in the darkness—a candle, an open doorway filled with light—because without contrast there’d be no picture at all.
If everything is light—if I don’t put something dark on this white page, all that exists is blank whiteness with no-thing in it. Without polarity we (apparently) have nada.
Yeah yeah yeah. We all know that.
But do we really?
If so, why do we make such a big thing out of the LIGHT? We want to strive for the light, go to the light, pray to the light, loose ourselves in the light. We’re frightened of the dark. What does it contain? What’s there? Surely nothing good!
Dark is bad. Light is Good. The Light is Heaven the Dark is Evil. Enough said. But who told us this?
In all these pictures in order to get to the light we have to move through the darkness. To get to the lighted cabin we’ve got to walk through the mysterious woods; we’ve got to pass through the dark tunnel to get to the torch burning at the other end. Light and dark are not opposing forces, they are complementary. They work together, belong together. We can’t have one without the other.
But what does this passage into and through the dark mean? What does it entail?
It’s human nature to be frightened of the unknown and make up scary superstitions about it—to hunker around campfires telling ghostly stories to frighten the children into being good and (more importantly) obedient! But if we ever want to grow up and approach the light—the real light of a higher, more coherent consciousness—we’ve got to go through the dark to get there. And the first step in the process is to stop seeing what’s hidden as something bad and scary.
We have to know that darkness is part of us and learn to recognize its face. And one of the faces of darkness is the feminine nature.
Ack! Did I just say that? The feminine is the face of darkness!? OMG! But it’s true!
Gut-punch reactions to such a statement show just how much fear has been programmed into us by ancient patriarchal religions that are all about elevating the Light and the Father. However, since ancient times light, the sun, and consciousness have been associated with the masculine. Darkness, the reflective, ever-changing moon, and the Earth have been associated with the feminine. And if we can just take the judgment hat about “darkness” off for a moment, it’s easy to see how appropriate the associations are.
By nature women are more mysterious than men. Our thought processes can be non-linear, multi-layered and un-obvious. We navigate the dark waters of emotion more easily than men. We’re grounded in the Earth and are close to Nature. Even our procreative organs are hidden. The vagina is a dark tunnel; our womb a hidden nest from which the miracle of life blossoms.
In contrast men are obvious creatures of the light. Their thinking tends towards the self-evident and the linear; emotion tends to be marginalized or avoided. They’re abstract in nature, and male genitalia is proudly displayed (well, usually) and easily seen.
For 3000 years all that is masculine has been elevated and all that is feminine has been marginalized and demonized. Compassion, empathy, community, relating, nurturing and love have been swept aside as irrelevant, and the trend in human endeavors has been towards investigating what’s obvious and external. To facilitate this huMANity invented logic and philosophy and the scientific method, focusing all eyes on the prize of understanding and controlling the tangible world we live in—and all that is feminine along with it.
We’ve made tremendous technical advances as a species as a result. But we’re still a haunted people. Great misery and suffering have accompanied our achievements because consciousness has been narrowed onto striving, doing and having things… and an obsession with obtaining power at all costs.
What else would frightened children sitting around a campfire in a cold, dark wood seek? Isn’t it natural to think if there was enough kindling stockpiled, enough supplies—if we built high enough walls, owned enough property, hired enough guards and created massive enough weapons—that the darkness of the scary unknown around us could be kept at bay?
And yet what we see outside us is only the reflection of what lies within. And between 92 to 98 percent of what humans call “self” is subconscious in nature. Yep… our desires, thoughts and decisions are driven by subconscious emotions, invisible programs and motivations as much as 98 percent of the time!
Holy Moses, we’re in the dark already… we just don’t know it!
So what to do?
The root of the word psychology is the Greek word psyche—or soul. In myth, Psyche was a woman who, after great suffering and tribulations, married the God of love, Eros, and was raised into the Greek pantheon as the Goddess of the soul, the spirit of life itself.
Delving into the psyche—the deeply feminine, soulful, emotional, wild and obscure territories within us—is where it’s at. Embracing the dark face of the light, embracing man’s “other half,” embracing feminine values, is the path through the woods.
The darkness is itself a torch—if only we have the eyes to see.