Darkness is not an absence of light. It is the presence of light in absence of opaque things.
Since time immemorial, human beings have been afraid of darkness. Because, the obvious animal instinct are dependent on external sensory organs other than justification and reasoning. The prime sensory organ that helps in understanding the environment, is the Eyes. Eyes help in observation and understanding the security of the environment to a great extent. The situation, when a living being can not understand the security level of a situation, the being naturally becomes impatient and concerned about own existence (different kind of existence).
1. Experiment: In absence of light, the Eyes function in different degrees for different species of living beings. Let us consider two cases:
Case 1: Let us consider the case of Dogs. Why do they bark when they hear a sound and the source can not be seen? Do human beings shout in such cases? No. Human beings do not shout always. But a Dog always bark. The pupils of their eyes gets dilated. Because their cerebral cortex, or reasoning section of the brain are less developed that that of human beings and they fail to "understand". So, when they can not understand a thing, they are likely to feel more insecure and defensive than the humans. And everybody knows, the first reaction to defense is offense. Attack. So they start barking. But if we analyse the levels in fear and reactions to it, (beyond the scope of this article) we will be able to understand when one dog barks and when another dog runs away to find a safe place. Perception is an individual phenomenon, for any living being.
When it is a familiar sound, they still bark. But the nature of that bark is different than that in fear. Rather they are like "I am Upset" .. "Hate it"... "Love it".. "Why so late?" ... "Yeaaah... you are home..!!"... "Why dn't you come near??" ... "When are you going to pat me?" etc.
Case 2: Let us consider the case of a Human. What will the human do when the person hears a sound whose source can not be seen? The reactions will be different in different people. I have watched some sub-cases:
- A female child of 5 year old: The girl comes to near the source and stands. She also asks like her parent does: "who is it?", in a normal voice.
- A male child of 2 year old: Simple keeps on playing with his alphabet cubes after a little gaze to the direction from where the sound came.
- A male of 70 years age: The person comes out of his room and approaches to the source shouting "who is it?", more aggressive than worried.
- A female of 30 years age: The person approaches to the source and stops at a safe distance and shouts "who is it?" more worried than aggressive.
- A male of 19 yrs age: Simply overlooks the sound and keeps busy in his activity, especially if it is slouching.
- A female of 15 yrs age: Same as above.
Now, when the same experiment is carried out in darkness, the reactions converges to worry and aggression, when the sound is not familiar. But if it is familiar, or understandable, like slamming of a door in breeze. A few cases there exists fear, whose insecurity levels are high. But in other cases, there is no reaction at all. Because, then the "Cerebral Cortex" comes in action and process the available information with the level of security perceived about the environment. This generates the signal "acceptable".
So, it is the level of security perceived in one's own mind. In broad aspect, mind is brain. But when the "Logical mind" does not function, it is all the primitive animal instinct that comes in action.
2. The Myth: The primitive knowledge tells us inability to see is threatening. So, Darkness is bad. It is a possible threat to the existence of "Clarity". When something is dark, we do not get much information about it and we should stay away.
3. Analysis: So, eventually, darkness becomes "Evil", and all we have to do, is to "Win" every "Darkness" by "Light". Light is the symbol of knowledge whereas Darkness signifies ignorance. Yea. I do not hate this course of thinking. They are pretty natural, though primitive.
Visuality is regarded as "proof" of existence. All sensory identification is such. As far as the modern scientific methods go. Understanding has the following stages:
- Sensory perception
- Interaction with knowledge base
- Processing of information to raise a set of possibilities
- Narrowing down the possibilities with the previously gained understanding of the perspective and trial of fitting those possibilities
- Reaching down to a single possibility and that is the definite "understanding".
But trouble occurs when we start to realize, yes, we may be wrong in our "previous" understanding. Then we have no choice but to question everything. The chain breaks. and when they occur in multiple sequence, there is complete lack of consistency in decision making, though no dearth of consistency in thinking. That's when our behaviour gets jeopardised even if we are completely sane. You can think of it like a multishaped object inside our brain with several points (denoting possibilities), each reaching to all of the rest (many to many mapping). And we can call the state as "Everything is Possible". When the object grows bigger and bigger, our perception of it becomes lower and lower, since the perception ability is limited. So does our attachment towards it. Then perhaps "Peace" is attained. Because, Peace is not the absence of the object. It is absence of the "Perception" of the bothering object (set of possibilities).
[Can't say anything definite about this state of mind, have not yet reached it. But have felt of the growing object analogy and lesser attachment.]
4. The Fact: Light is there even in darkness. If there is something Opaque, that reflects the light (show the existence of) then we can see and reach to a definite "understanding" and can make decision about it. We depend on understanding to make decisions. If there is nothing or a Transparent thing, or something Opaque that absorbs the light, our "Sense" of understanding gets screwed. And the Primitive instinct tells us that, it is a threat to our existence. Discontentment Rises. Insecurity rises.
5. The Abuse: People who have been "possessing" the conventional sources of "Power" / "Security", against the conventional sources of "Insecurities", have been using the Primitive instinct(s) in their own favour as a way to treat their own "Perceived Insecurities". Two such devastating effects are:
- Colour Discrimination among Human beings: We have got addicted to the white skin as proposed to be "beautiful" and "sublime" and "sacred" etc.
- Prevention is better than Cure: Even if we do not know what exactly are we preventing from, it is really helpful to keep ourselves busy from other self constructive stuff.
But we need to understand one thing. The universe is black. Light travels straight through or gets absorbed by perfectly opaque bodies. There ARE, in fact, thousands of possibilities. But, we need to move past our sensory primitive understandings. There are limitations of our sensory perceptions. Darkness is not always threatening. If there would be no darkness, we could never get a good night sleep.
"Fear" itself is the greatest Evil we are dwelling with. It is an abuse to the development of Human Race, in this Universe.
Another Evil is "Fixated Ideas". We can never say something specific, what we do not know for sure.
Darkness is also Peaceful, not always threatening.
Darkness reverts back our attention into our thought process and we find different realizations.
Everything is really possible. We can not really plan our actions. We must depend on our sensory understanding AND other perceptions and wait for the moment. In right moments we do act in the way Perfectly Right with our own individualities. To kill our individualities, is to kill ourselves.
And one can not be fixated about the adjectives that generate inside our minds about other's individualities (expressed by their instantaneous Perfect actions).
The insecurity, we really are running away from, is not insecurity at all.
It is a process of change.
Darkness, Light and Colours are agents in that process with their own properties.
