Balance

Friday, May 20, 2022

5:25 a.m. After a day off. Shall we discuss darkness, its rightful place in our lives?

We can, if you will set your switches.

We can discuss something else, if you’d rather.

No, this is fine. We’ve led up to it many times.

The concept of dark fire – how long ago did that image first come to me? Very well, maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence.

Discuss the immediate background, briefly.

On Wednesday in our ILC group, we did our drumming on the question, “Is there a dark side to guidance, and, if so, tell us about it; if not, what are we misinterpreting?” Your response to me posed several questions about what we meant by darkness. Ignorance? Evil? Potential? Nurturing darkness? You reminded us that the non-3D is not all love and light, any more than 3D is.

And we suggested that a productive question to ask is what is your most productive relationship to darkness.

Let’s start with dark fire. Years ago you gave me the image of a compost heap, which generates terrific purifying, transforming heat, but only in internal darkness. Only the inside of a compost heap gets hot. The process is invisible and cannot be sense except by putting your hand into it, which you won’t do more than once. You made the explicit comparison to our inner work: invisible to the outer world, but transformative.

Many things take place in darkness. It is only a prejudice to think that light is the only valid healthy state of affairs. Even physically, light and darkness in balance is the ideal, not all one or all the other. The proportion between the two can vary widely, but the balance will be struck somewhere at any moment, however much it may change in the next moment.

Bearing this in mind, look again at what we suggested the word “darkness” might mean to you. In all these cases, just as in physical life, the desired result is not exclusion, but balance.

Ignorance? You will never know everything, either intellectually or instinctually. So, in practice, you choose what you will devote your time to learning. By implication, this is choosing by default what you are willing to remain in ignorance of. Since you can’t know everything, ignorance of some things – of many things – of most things – is a necessary part of life. Choose wisely.

Let’s defer considering evil for the moment.

Potential. This means, your own unknown self, the you that you may become or may choose not to become. It is darkness to you. By definition, if you are aware of your potential in any one area, it is not darkness to you, but what about all the other possibilities within you that you have never considered, never suspected? Your life will have a way of putting things in your path – temptations, you may call them, or opportunities. Same thing, different nuance. What you do or do not pursue defines you as much as anything.

I have said, I like thing that come in out of left field.

You have said you pay attention to things that come out in of left field. Not quite the same thing.

Granted.

Nurturance. The womb. The writer’s fantasies as he waits for them to become malleable. The poet’s muse. Guidance, for that matter. Anything intangible that leads to creation can be looked at as a nurturing darkness. This doesn’t prejudge whether the creation is “good” or “evil”; it describes an aspect of darkness that sometimes escapes people’s attention. Good things grow in the dark, as well as bad. You plant seeds into darkness so that they may transform into a light-seeking being.

Thus, you see – not that these ideas will be new to you, but that they may be unfamiliar in this context – darkness has its place in the scheme of things. Try not to fool yourself into thinking that you are a better design-engineer than nature, or are smarter or more moral than God. Be more like Isaac Newton, who said the way to learn is to sit before facts like a little child.

Not sure it was Newton; may have been. I recognize the quotation, anyway.

Now as to evil. This is a large subject and although you perhaps think we have beaten it to death already, in fact we have barely begun to scratch the surface. As with anything else, context is all.

We have said light and darkness each have their place. So do good and evil. But discussion will require a certain amount of brush-clearing, because of our previous discussion of the apple and the fall into perceiving things through judgment.

I can feel in advance that this is going to be tricky.

Not tricky; intricate, requiring a certain amount of work on our part, your part, and the reader’s part. We have to sort it out for you, you have to transmit our thoughts as clearly as you can, not letting your own assumptions get in the way, and the reader has to actually listen, and consider, rather than merely decide what fits in with what he or she already believes, and rejecting the rest.

Often a problem.

A condition, call it. But in the absence of active consideration, no learning can occur; certainly no productive transformation. Confirmation bias provides stability, but at the expense of potential growth.

Bullets?

Perhaps. Let’s see.

• Good and bad as judgments. The fruit of the tree.
• Light and darkness as conditions.
• The vast impersonal forces as they flow through 3D humans and thereby process the shared subjectivity’s unfinished business as well as the individual’s.
• The nature of perception via comparison. How do you know hot if you have never experienced cold? Or, rather, how can hot exist without reference to cold?
• A system’s components are always balanced, though not necessarily obviously.
• “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
• Whether you are lost depends not only on where you are but where you were and where you want to go. “Confused” is not the same as “lost.”
• We say it again: Never assume you are smarter or better than the conditions of existence. What looks wrong, or unnecessary, or repugnant, may be merely a matter of your point of view. You may not like dung beetles, but they serve a necessary purpose. And those who see them differently see not something repugnant but, for instance, a scarab.

Seems to me the problem has several parts. First, our perception is skewed by our tendency to judge everything. Second, the reality itself is somehow more complicated than you can easily describe.

Both those factors.

So how do you propose to proceed?

For the moment, look at good v. evil in the context of the balanced system we suggested in discussing light and darkness. There will be plenty of other contexts as we look at it, but this will do for now.

Ah, and I get – correctly?- that good and evil shares the considerations you suggested as alternative meanings: ignorance, potential, and nurturance.

Yes.

We don’t usually think of evil as nurturing, or even as potential.

Well, now we invite you to do just that. It is people’s tendency to rush to label things good or evil that prevents them from appreciating nuances and complications.

It has been an hour. Do we have time enough to tie together those bulleted points?

Of course not, nor would it be desirable. An open-ended discussion can be extremely useful. Tie it all up with a bow, and people can decide to accept it or reject it. Leave the pieces to be assembled, and maybe they’ll actually think about them.

And in any case you’ll tie them up later.

Usually. Call today’s session “Balance,” perhaps.

Our thanks as always.

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