Yin and Yang

There is a light at the end of the tunnel at the end of darkness…..but it might just be a furnace….

Do we keep searching for this light or learn to see in the darkness?

Most religions ask us to work towards enlightment-elysium-nirvana, seek salvation, rise above our world and animal desires. In other words escape this plane we are born to and search for something ‘better’. They intimate that this beautiful place we call earth and our innate natures, which reflect the natural ebb and flow of this plane, are wrong somehow.

I am not so sure that consistently trying to rise above our lot is the enlightened way to go…rather I believe it is all about learning to understand our lot and optimize it. But just maybe we look elsewhere for our freedoms and our hopes because this existence is so damn chaotic and confusing. I love to shoot at inanimate targets( yes guns and other weapons of destruction), but I realize that weapons like these can and do senselessly kill, and I deplore war, yet the truth is that, if my husband and children were threatened in any way I would not hesitate to do WHATEVER was necessary to protect them. Nature is full of beauty and definitely something to revere, yet we have tidal waves, hurricanes and earthquakes that destroy and kill and this too is nature. If you are a Christian and believe that we are made in the image of God then you are really in a quandary because looking at us intimates God is both masculine and feminine and good and evil and full of all the same contradictions that we and nature are full of….we live both in our light and in our shadow….

Recently, researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Bristol in the UK have discovered an unusual property of light. They have discovered the darkness within light. As the researchers explain, natural light fields are threaded by lines of darkness, which create optical vortices that appear as black points within the light. They also found that the lines of darkness exhibit fractal properties with Brownian (random) characteristics. The characteristics of these optical vortices suggest universal properties, which could help connect different areas of physics. The darkness in the light is what will bring different things together and enable a greater understanding of the complexities of our world!

Jung propounded a philosophy or theory of psychology that totally parallels this scientific discovery….it reflects physics back into the more subtle realm of psychology. The theory is commonly known as the ‘theory of the uninvited guest.’ The "uninvited guest" is a theme common to many of the old folk tales, legends, and/or myths. The story of the "uninvited guest" goes that there's a party or a celebration about to be held in a particular kingdom. Everyone in the kingdom is invited to the party, except for one certain person. This one uninvited person is not popular with the other town folk. This unpopular person is most normally someone who is quite ugly, evil, and/or for some other reason disliked - such as a witch, a gnome, a troll.
As a result of being the only person in the kingdom not receiving an invitation - the witch, gnome, or troll is ticked off - and thus they end up stirring up all sorts of trouble in the kingdom! The rest of the story is then centred on freeing and redeeming the kingdom from the horrible curse of the uninvited guest.
In this analogy, the king represents the superior or preferred function of ego consciousness that we have chosen to honour and rely upon in our day to day life. We have chosen to get around in the world by using this preferred function. The "uninvited guest" represents the inferior or rejected function that we feel the least comfortable with and thus reject it as not being a part of who we are. According to Jung (and in accordance with the ancient Greeks) our life task then becomes that of recollecting, redeeming, accepting, and loving the ugly, rejected, and uninvited function so as to bring about a sense of balance, wholeness, completeness, and meaning in our life.

In other words acknowledging the darkness and learning to work with it or to see in the dark allows us to better optimise our life experience….it helps to bring all the functions together…like the scientist’s dark lines….

So there you have it, learning to live in the here and now and on the plain we are on and in the world we have been born to might just allow light to glow in the tunnel as opposed to at the end of it.

In the east they may well have long realized this concept…. With the Ying and Yang symbol we can see this notion of light and dark as two sides of the same coin. What our occidental intellect divides into opposites, contrasts, and cause and effect, is, in the more holistic world view of the east, a totality with no distinct borders, it is yin and yang, darkness and light.
“In Praise of Shadows”, written in the 1930s by Japanese novelist Jun’ichiro Tanazaki, there is a poignant reflection upon the different attitudes between East and West with regard to darkness and light:
‘Darkness does not distress us; we surrender to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is set upon always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamps, from oil lamps to gaslight, and on to the electrical one. His quest for better light never ends, he spares no pains to eradicate even the slightest of shadows.’

Perhaps it is true also of western religion and its concerted determination to rise beyond the world and to illuminate beyond our so called darkness…Tibetan Buddhism is one of the few eastern religious ideologies that also embraces this concept to some degree and thus becomes easily assimilated into our culture ……it has a familiar path and light is firmly at the end of the tunnel and the suffering is firmly within it!!

There is a quote I like and found on the net, though have no idea wh:o wrote it;

“To be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your own path, and don't worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest”

So now when my children work with their shadows and refuse to acknowledge my commands (or subtle suggestions)….when they insist on having an uninvited guest to dinner, I smile secretly and acknowledge the appropriateness of their journey; when I catch myself insisting that a Polly Anna view of the world is the only way to stop the darkness, I turn of the lights and listen to my heart beating steady as a drum, when guilt about my shadow self rises up and threatens to suffocate me, I step ouside and breathe in nature as she is, rain or shine, storm or calm.

Life goes on, why not embrace it and have a hearty meal, (with the uninvited guest), anorexia only leads to shut down.