Should We See The Darkness More Clearly Than We Do?
Imagine this situation: you are walking through a very bright place and someone is approaching you. You can not see the person’s face well enough to recognize who it is, because the light dazzles you. You may raise your hand to protect your eyes and get a little shake, but you need to see the darkness more clearly than you are doing at the moment.
And that’s when you see if the other person is a friend of yours or just a stranger asking about the road. When you see who it is, you can choose whether you want to give the person a hug or just show the way where he or she wants to go.
Imagine a world where there is only light. If you have never experienced darkness, how can you understand and appreciate the light? It is the contrast between light and darkness that leads us to deeper knowledge. We live in a world of dualities: upside down, hot and cold, good and bad.
The pain allows us to appreciate the joy better. The chaos of the world makes us appreciate peace more. The hatred we see can make us understand love better. The difficulties we encounter in life can therefore be an important tool for creating vital self-awareness.
The more nuances we know, the wiser decisions we will be able to make. The darkness therefore gives us an opportunity to reflect. The darkness does not look outwards, but makes us look within ourselves. Life is a journey that goes from head to heart.
The difficulties of life facilitate this journey, open our hearts and teach us to appreciate the difficulties better. The darkness gives us an opportunity to get to know ourselves and be coherent with what we have within us.
Imagine that you come from a place where you play the most beautiful music in the world. You’ve heard it all your life. The music has never been absent and you have not heard anything else in your entire life.
One day you realize that even though you have always heard it, you have never really listened to it. In other words, you never appreciated it because you took it for granted. You’ve never heard of anything else. So one day you decide that you want to be able to evaluate this music.
You do this in a challenging way so that you can achieve greater gain, and suddenly realize that you could have gained a much deeper understanding of it if you went to a place where no music is played to try to recreate this music from your domicile.
You had only done this after the echo of how it sounded had ended. The experience of remembering and then recreating the symphony from your home would have made you really understand how amazing it was.
You’re visiting a new place. You listen to new music. Some songs are amazing, but others hurt your ears with their dissonance. These inhospitable tones allow you to create your own music. And darkness will be a necessary part of this creation.
You will soon start writing your own compositions. At first, the unpleasant music in the new place will distract you. Over time, however, you will succeed in shutting out the outer sound and listening to the melodies you have in your heart; your musical creations are becoming more beautiful.
You finally compose a masterpiece. When you have completed it, you will remember something: the masterpiece you have written is the same music that was played in your home. And this memory gives rise to another insight, namely that you are this music. It’s not something you hear outside of you; the music is you, and you are the music.
By “creating” yourself in a new place, you will get to know yourself in a way that you would not have thought possible if you had not gone outside your comfort zone. You know that if you had not experienced this darkness, this new experience, you would not have been able to appreciate the beautiful music that you have around you.
Life’s difficulties exist so that you can experience who you are not, before you remember who you really are. It can be said that we explore a dissonance of sounds and dark moments before we recreate the symphonies we have heard in our home. We need to see the darkness more clearly. We need that darkness to be able to get better at choosing direction and really appreciating the light.
