Integrating Darkness
The demonization of darkness & the new age belief that the light will prevail over darkness limits the depths to which we sink our teeth into life & is akin to wishing the sun would swallow the night sky.
I see the demonization of darkness as both a deep misunderstanding of the nature of darkness & a sneaky way to blame something outside of ourselves for the reality we’re experiencing; a dismissal of self-responsibility that’s enabled through the categorization of “us vs them,” which paints ourselves as the protagonist & the other as the antagonist.
Don’t you think the “other side” is probably doing the same? What makes our side the “right” side?
Since everything stems from & returns to the same source, that which we demonize is not separate from us, but rather a piece of us that needs to be integrated.
You can view the dance between darkness & light, or yin & yang, as either war or love-making (though how many lovers are free of conflict? ), but ultimately they are 2 parts of the same whole, each containing the other, & the whole, within.
Their eternal dance is the ebbing & flowing primordial pulse, the breath that weaves between life & death & maintains balance of the whole.
The “other” is simply another “us” we have yet to understand & see as ourselves.
This is not a war in which one side is meant to finally outweigh the other, but rather a dance in which we’re meant to awaken from the illusion of separateness & find the harmony that exists within wholeness.
Imagine if light literally devoured darkness. The innate rhythms of nature that perpetuate the cycles of life would be thrown completely out of balance.
Positive & negative charges are necessary to generate electricity & magnetism. Masculine & feminine are essential to creating life.
Can you see how seeking to defeat the darkness is like severing a person in two?
The darkness is a necessary piece of the whole, not an obstacle to be overcome.
It’s not through eliminating the opposite side that we create harmony, but by integrating it into loving wholeness & acceptance.
The work of integration begins within & is reflected without.