It is surprisingly easy for us to find ourselves mired in darkness. We read daily the evils of the world on our computer screens, in magazines and in newspapers. You can rest assured that by the time you finish reading this sentence someone, somewhere in the world, will have been hurt by someone else. It is not enough to say that the ills of the world around us are many. On the other hand, human beings are still doing what human beings have done for 50,000 years after a fashion, the difference is that there are many more of us now, a large portion of us are packed in like sardines and we really make little effort to know one another. We have carefully constructed boundaries between us in the form of property lines and laws that seek to maintain the structures of power and privilege without requiring us to remain dutiful to one another as human beings. Instead, we are encouraged to amuse ourselves with reading about every awful thing in the world around us as though it is about to crash through our door while simultaneously being informed that we are powerless to stop it leaving us the only other option: Complain.
This is a good time of year to enter the darkness as we await the return of the sun, but what treasure should such journeys yield? In spiritual practice, entering the darkness most often means a journey into the parts of yourself that encompass your anger, anxiety, fear and despair. The purpose of such a journey is not to wrestle it and make the darkness yield to the light but rather to learn how to live with it, accept it and incorporate the darker part of our nature by acknowledging our weakness and anger and using it to move forward in our lives.
The problem with the information we ingest from the "outside" world is when we refuse to filter it appropriately. Acknowledging that something is wrong is all well and good but when all we do with that information is internalize it, the information loses it's value. What usually comes out of that internalization is the desire for changing the world around us in destructive ways because that is what the information feels like it is doing in our guts. What's worse is when you begin using others as human shields, admonishing them for failing to do something about the ills of the world while doing nothing yourself. When you scold people for fearing to act and fail to act out of fear yourself, you are a greater part of the problem than the people you are angry at in the first place.
As I have stated before in this blog, finding harmony within yourself, or at least beginning to reconcile the disparate portions of who you are, takes on an important role in bringing that balance to the world around you. It is the internal struggle of the self that most defines who we are and how we can be a force for change in the world around us. When we take the darkness of the world into the darkness of ourselves though, the reconciliation of our spirit suffers.
This need not be considered in purely spiritual terms. In that, I mean that any person who wishes to see change in the world around them must first be sure that they can do for themselves what they wish to do outside themselves. If you attempt force change on people by despising their actions or the way they think and speaking in hushed tones about it on social media you will come up empty handed every time. If you wish to make a difference, you must first face the darkness within yourself and learn from that struggle before you start complaining about all the people in the world who have not come to terms with their own darkness.
I don't mind admitting that 20 years ago I was a dyed in the wool racist. I had a series of bad interactions when I was going to school in "the big city" and the culture shock of actually interacting with other ethnic groups left me falling back on all of the racial bullshit I had learned growing up in rural Maine. It took me a long time to finally let go of that but when I did, I found that what fell away was the superficiality of it and not a deep seeded belief. In my time of distress (and for some time after) I clung to the familiar trappings of what I had come to know growing up in a town without any real diversity. When I finally freed myself from being shackled to such notions, my real education began. The problem as I look back upon it, was that I had all of these ideas about how the world actually worked (not uncommon for an 18 year old) and when I went out into the world for the first time, the limits of my knowledge were confronted in a way that had me run scared back to the bullshit ideals of racial prejudice. That part of my journey is as much a lifelong pursuit as becoming a Warrior or a Druid Priest. However, having started the work of identifying this about myself, I can learn how to deal with the prejudices I see in the world and understand better how to combat them. Darkness is neither good nor bad, it just is. Ultimately though, darkness is about fear and learning to deal with that fear.
The point here is that when we rely too much on others to tell us how we should think and feel we begin to lose the option of thinking critically about what it is we are being told. It is no different with negativity. The journey into your own darkness should be one to strike a balance in yourself not to judge yourself by the opinions of others. It is one thing to seek wisdom and bring that wisdom to your own table, it is a far different thing however, to swallow something hook line and sinker then chase your own tail trying to find it.
In essence though, what I often find is that when we do such things we are really avoiding the journey into our own darkness. I would describe it spiritually as taking the darkness of the world and connecting it to the darkness of the self in a manner that it becomes a constant feedback loop. We feel as though we are doing something about the wrong we see outside of ourselves in a manner that prevents us from being active in our communities.
We cannot begin to disassemble the power structures that enables oppression of any kind until we find within ourselves the power to overcome our own fear. Oppressive cultures and power structures exist because we allow them to out of fear. In our system of American Government, that fear has led to an increased number of laws with the openly stated goal of "protecting" us, (in some cases from ourselves) yet these same laws challenge our basic human rights. You cannot remove those power structures by whining on social media, playing video games or sequestering yourself away from the world because you fear it. Even if you are just beginning the necessary work of the self, you owe it to yourself and the world you care for to do something, anything no matter how simple. For, if you recognize the ills of the world and do nothing more than complain about them, it is because you are waiting for someone else to solve the problem without your real world effort.
There are actually quite a few people who are waking up these days to the disparate intentions of power and social justice. People who, through even the smallest of efforts every day, attempt to make the world around them a better place. These are people who respect and value their own contribution as human beings to the ills of the world and make consistent and small changes to support the greater change towards equality in our culture for everyone and not one group in particular. It is refreshing and exciting for me to speak with them and know their names and learn their stories. Those that refuse to encounter others outside their carefully constructed inner sanctum will never truly meet these people, even when they shaking their hand. Instead, they will assume that decent, caring people, are like all the other mean spirited, predatory beings they read about online or see on T.V., should be treated as the enemy for crimes they never committed based on the opinions of someone they have never met. Those who have walled themselves off from actually interacting with the world around them will treat even those who are actualizing positive change with the indignity of strangers. How is that social justice? When you become the monster you wish to fight, you are not sacrificing yourself in a meaningful way and you are not creating change...you are creating one more thing to change others through fear. A whip cracked across the back to keep up the pace of work is the same as a whip cracked across the back when you are told to stop. You do both because you fear the whip, not because you have become a free agent.
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