Recovering from Darkness
Every action has a consequence, both inner and outer. In our inner space, they leave an imprint with corresponding emotional energy. When an action or an event that happened is unpleasant or painful, the conscious mind tries to evade the memory and related emotions by hiding it consciously or unconsciously. This results in a residue or backlog that was not well digested and integrated into our wakeful state and it sinks below the threshold of our awareness and become a shadowy backdrop with its reservoir of unprocessed and unassimilated emotions and forces. Such accumulations build up to become our shadow or the dark side or at least its personal component.
The life of an individual does not unfold in isolation, it is a process unfolding in the context of social life where just like the individual, the society too has its undigested and accumulated sufferings sunken below the threshold of its conscious understanding. This affects the individual who is born into it and we can say there is a personal shadow as well as a collective shadow. They feed into each other.
Our inmost being, the soul evolving through life experience, is of the nature of love and delight. The aspect of delight can be seen shining through the innocent children and their natural playfulness and purity. Later as the children mature love too finds its flowering if the individual grows up without getting damaged in the process. Love and delight have infinite depths and intensities which a genuine spiritual evolution of the soul can bring forth. This inmost being is pure and incorruptible, it is the deathless and eternal part of our being. However, it is exceptionally rare for an individual to find the growth and flowering of the soul into the radiance of love and delight. Such people are more of an exception than the norm.
Unfortunately, there is no education in our society to guide the growing soul to consciously nurture and bloom in love and delight. As a result, even the first blossoming experience of love is so overwhelming most people cannot contain it with balance and end up with broken hearts. It is even more difficult to handle the aspect of power with maturity. With all this shows up the darker side of life and in the process of dealing with all this, the soul gets veiled and gets weighed down by the shadow that builds up. Darker a society of birth, darker the envelope of imprisonment.
Recovering from this darkness is at once an individual and collective process. As we have now become a global civilization, we are also enveloped by the shadow of our global civilization. Our being in its depths spans into the universal being of all humanity. The weight of the dark deeds of the individual and collective past of human civilisational cycles comes haunting down as a cross you carry on your way to the recovery of your soul and its love and delight. Most people simply die on the way without ever truly recovering their soul and fulfilling their evolutionary flowering.
So the first thing to remember, if you are to recover from the darkness, is to remember that, even if there is a personal sense to the darkness that weighs upon you, through the personal encounters of the dark or grey side of your life, it has its roots in the collective past of your society or the humanity as a whole. Khalil Gibran writes beautifully in the Prophet:
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.
The darkness from which we must recover is at once an individual and collective challenge.
The more you recognise that what appears to be a personal experience with its tentacles of fear, shame or guilt or depression or other more explosive and violent forces of anger, revenge or hatred are, in fact, existing in a co-created network of social relationships. Some darker underbelly of the collective shadow has sucked you into its vortex through a set of personal experiences. It is not your darkness, it belongs to the larger collective and it is only propagating itself through you and you are only a fodder in its hungry mouth.
It is through the identification with its tentacles gripping you in the form of harsh self-judgements, shame, fear, guilt, anger, vengeance, hatred or depression you are held captive in its grip. As its consciousness envelopes, you feel yourself to be that darkness bound by its python grip. This veils the light in you, the true being of light, love and delight that you essentially are. Our soul, this inmost being in us, is always pure and incorruptible but when one has no access to it, and when you are identified with the darker outer envelope you find yourself sinking.
You have lost your innocence and you have met face to face the dark side of your society within yourself. Essentially it is a shift in identification from what you truly are to everything that opposes it. We are not only endowed with light and its possibility but also with it comes equally strong and opposite forces of darkness and its grip. In the process of individualisation, you inevitably encounter your shadow, a force that is lodged within you and opposes your progress. At this point, your destiny depends on which side will crystallize to form your personality.
But there is always that faint voice in you, a deep prayer in your heart, and that is the saving grace. If you can keep listening to it as you walk through the night of the soul, the light will eventually grow and the tide will turn. It is light that removes the darkness and this light is accessible by deep listening to one’s soul within. In every moment of crisis, from deep within, a cry will arise, a prayer that knows that saving light exists. That is the bedrock of faith upon which the rest is built. When you are sincere in your call for help, the light is bound to come. It is the light of grace that can dissolve the darkness and free you up from the clutches of your past. The more you open to grace, the more the sunlit path opens up.
It is this freedom that you can accomplish within you that will ripple into your social context. It is the fundamental wealth of consciousness you bring into your society in its collective transformation.
