A man dressed in a black robe curved with red stiches on the zooms placed a big letter on the crossroad billboard. In his left hand he has the most up to date "all countries" bingo book in his hand. With a dark seal he locks the letter up so i'ts only visible to those who are in the book.
Today the dark side is everywhere. We are completely saturated in it. It declares itself in every news broadcast, television show, and tabloid. No one growing up in a society like ours escapes being conditioned by this violence. Every one of us, from the most perfectly civilized to the imprisoned criminal, harbors an inner, festering, neurotic sore, a private shadow of anger, terror, lust, and pain. This shadow, this "dark side," is a miniature copy of the greater darkness of society which manifests in war, oppression, and starvation. We are surrounded, inside and out, by evil and suffering of all description.
With study, certain characteristics of the so-called "dark side" become obvious. This darkness is not really a "side." or a shadow, or a persona -- it is a tangled web of complex forces, programs, and effects which we repress from ordinary consciousness so that we rarely see its true nature. It can readily be divided into the following four areas:
(1) the biological dark side:
(2) the cosmological dark side;
(3) the cultural dark side: and
(4) the personal dark side.
The Biological Dark SideThe biological dark side is the easiest to understand. The attack of the predator and the bloody murder of our loved ones forms the root of our images of darkness and "evil." For eons, biological organisms have been killed and eaten, struck down by disease, dying broken-legged in pits. The logic of the biological dark side is simple: what hurts me is evil. the attacker is evil, the disease and the storm are evil. Our 'bios', our life, makes us vulnerable. It takes a living thing to experience pain and horror, and we are
all living things.
The Cosmological Dark SideThe cosmological dark side is ultimately the most terrifying. There is an anguish implicit in being a fragile living being -- doomed to live in an uncaring eternal universe, doomed to suffer and die and disappear -- that is universal and absolute. This anguish cannot be explained away, and it cannot be fought. The spiritual literature claims that the cosmological dark side only appears terrible, and that, in fact, its nature is love. The truth of this assertion can only be verified in the crucible of personal experience.
The Cultural Dark SideThe cultural dark side -- exemplified by the violence on television and the crime and oppression in our cities -- surrounds us so completely that we have become numb to it.
The violence of the cultural dark side is so vast and deeply entrenched that we cannot do anything to avert it, but must depend on luck to keep us safe. Fortunately, for those of us in the evil worl, our luck is good most of the time. Moreover, the cultural dark side has been well-researched; the study of anthropology and sociology will prove quite useful to the esoteric darkness student.
Remember this: people are blind to the cultural dark side, so close to it that we can't see its forest for the trees. Torture, rape, and murder are going on while you read this, and such behavior is conditioning you, especially through the suggestions and headlines of the mass media. This constant conditioning is a unique feature of modem shinobi times, and it creates special problems for the practitioner.
The Personal Dark SideThe personal dark side is the distillation of the other dark sides that have been imprinted into the psyche of each individual This storehouse of bad memories, hurts, fears, and all the other programs of violence and lust lies just underneath the surface of ordinary consciousness. It is Freud's Id and Jung's Shadow; it is the source of troubling dreams, crimes, and other disruptive behavior. The depths of personal darkness can be extremely shocking. It's hard to conceive of, let alone grapple with, the amount of pain and rage stored in the psyche.
We make great efforts to suppress this storehouse of darkness but it has a damnable tendency to erupt into everyday neuroses, psychosis, and sociopathy. The modem medical discipline of psychology specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and containment of the personal dark side. The study of psychology's basic texts is essential for esoteric students, an invaluable preparation for recognizing and dealing with our own petty darknesses in explorations outside the island of light which is everyday mind.
The personal dark side rises up in meditation to torment and tempt the practitioner. It is the personal "Devil," the private hell, which must be confronted and transformed when it blocks the path of the esoteric student. The biological, cosmological. and cultural dark sides are the foundation of the personal experience of evil; in the end, however, individual practitioners struggling with the Work must face, by them- selves, their own darkness.
- Quote :
- "Nature red in tooth and claw" is the mother of our experience of darkness. Most human evil appears to be a distortion of the natural aggression, territoriality, and herd programming that is built into our bodies. Unharnessed aggression leads to war and unchecked herd obedience leads to inquisition. Theft, rape, vandalism, war, slavery, and the whole sordid list of "evils" have their counterparts in the natural world of plants and animals. Theoretically, the logic of the natural world is perfect; Nature keeps what benefits survival -- what works -- and abandons what does not, Apparently, then, evil "works."
If evil is a part of natural law and structure, then we must be ready to understand its benefits and its positive aspects.