Czech readers would know from which famous Czech fairytale this quote comes – “That depends on the darkness. It’s definitely not pitch black. In our country, when it’s pitch black, we export this pitch black darkness. Some rulers pay well for good darkness…” Of course, it was said by the “wise prince” in the movie “Once Upon a Time There Was a King”… And not only materialistic rulers need good darkness. Even some spiritual movements could hardly exist without good darkness, because they would have nothing to define themselves against…
Good darkness is damn important. Anything can be hidden in darkness and then fought against… As they say, two birds with one stone… I always found something strange about those various ostentatious “preachings against darkness”. How everyone agrees so beautifully – someone preaches and others fervently nod… And they tremble at the thought of exposing someone else as the dark-one and evil-one… Because if they succeed, they “protect themselves against darkness” and keep their light…
Well, recently Kateřina and I had one of those processes in expanded consciousness… And imagine that the process seemed to show that actually all of our common ostentatious “rejection of darkness” has one very prosaic reason. As my grandmother would say – “it’s very useful for everyone…” and she would add “because we all have skeletons in our closets…”
Over the years and centuries, we have all pushed many of our experiences and traumas “into darkness”. We all use that “darkness” of the collective subconscious of humanity for this purpose. We all have something there that we don’t want to encounter again… And sometimes there is a lot of it… often really terrifying pains and traumas, so it’s no wonder that we run away from it… who would want to experience that again, who would want to go back to it… it was so terrible…
Something happened to us and it was often cruel evil, but there is also something we caused others and we still don’t understand how we could have done it, it was such a terrible evil… that’s why no one should see it and we have to hide it somewhere… So here comes the “darkness” and one shall never think about it again or return to it…
However, our processes in expanded consciousness repeatedly showed us that you can’t really run away from anything… If we really want to “liberate” ourselves from certain experiences, we can only do so by understanding them and integrating them into our overall internal mosaic of all experiences, and thus becoming wiser… But any attempt to suppress and reject them leads nowhere. In every experience that we cannot reconcile with and cannot fully experience, we leave a piece of ourselves forever…
And when we suppress too many of such rejected experiences “into darkness” of our subconscious, then suddenly in the next life we have to experience them again. Simply because we have moved too large a part of ourselves into that “darkness” in these small pieces we need to reintegrate them again…
We can suppress them for a while, but then comes the proverbial “last straw” and we can no longer play the “bright ones”, and suddenly we are back in the “darkness” and we have to experience it all, whether we want to or not. Why? Did the Devil send it to punish us? Of course not… it happens so we can reintegrate ourselves again. Those small trapped and rejected pieces of our soul want to return back… The greater balance must be restored in our soul again… It’s the same law of balance that applies everywhere…
But it works the same way even in shorter periods of time. We all know it – we have years that we really enjoy, we are positive, bright, happy, and leave all the bad things behind and never look back… And then it suddenly comes back like a boomerang… and we lament how bad this new period is, how all the pains and problems have suddenly returned… and we don’t want it, we reject it, and we want the one responsible for it, who is the “dark one” in our life, who caused this – and once we get rid of them or punish them, we will be so happy and so bright again…
The second option is to consciously engage in processes of expanded consciousness, where we focus on experiencing and integrating these things. Both options, of course, are painful and demanding. But it is easier to face something voluntarily and of our own decision… This experiencing of heavy traumas and integration of our “lost pieces” should eventually acquire a “sacred dimension” and should be understood as proof of our “true maturity”… Without rejection, condemnation, or judgement – with great love and understanding… And therefore with wisdom…
Or we can preach against darkness and fervently agree and importantly say that many people have disappointed, fallen away from the light, broken down, could not endure… Could not endure what? They could not endure rejecting and suppressing and pushing away traumas and heavy experiences anymore and were drawn into experiencing them… So that greater balance could be restored in their existence…
As Carl Gustav Jung once said, we don’t become whole by trying to hold onto only our bright side, on the contrary, we must understand and integrate our darkness…
