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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: The Awakening Generation
Darkness and Duality
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by Ann Marie Judge |
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On a Mission
Our culture is on a mission and nothing is going to stand on our way.
Commercials, billboards, self-help groups, anti-depressants, therapies of every shape, color, and form, workout tapes, diet pills—endless myriad things our culture has fabricated that exemplifies our collective desire to “just be happy for once.” There is an infinite list of things we desire every day, believing it will bring us one step closer to that ambiguous end goal of contentedness and peace.
Interesting that, in this search for happiness, we have become one of the most discontent societies in the history of the world.
There is so much at our disposal right now that should by all means make us ungodly happy: showers, cell phones, dishwashers, bicycles, soap, flannel pajamas, CD players, towels, remote controls, dog leashes, computers, thumb tacks, sponges, skyscrapers, satellites... Why create these things but to make our lives more comfortable, more convenient? Compared to the coarse wool, chamber pots, and thatched roofs of the past, we should be the most joyous and contented nation in the history of the planet.
To Awaken Into Duality
So, you realize somehow that you aren't happy. With all the cars and the food and the clothes and the perfumes and the shiny things that hold your attention for moments at a time, there's still something missing. Your discontent eventually culminates into an event or series of events to which end you realize, “I can't live like this anymore. Something has to change.”
You decide to “wake up,” to try and start seeing things for the way they really are without all the sugar coatings and anti-wrinkle creme. You have thus chosen to leave the Garden of Eden, the Garden of Blissful Ignorance, and enter into the world of duality.
You dive into the world of duality and swim in the black and the white. You see everything around you in stark contrast and spend all your time poking things to see if it will prick or if it will purr. You work and work and experience and live to understand each half of the duality. Everything is more alive, more real than it has ever been. And yet, at the same time, it's all the more surreal and new to your human eyes.
You come to realize what you do in your life because of past wounds, insecurity, fear, and guilt. You realize that you always have a choice whether to react out of these negative emotions or from a place of love and understanding; you love all because you understand why people do what they do. You start to perceive the underlying energies that flow through all and you find moments of great peace within yourself.
Back to Square One, in New Clothes
Once you can see each half of the duality for what it is, know what each half feels like, sounds like, looks like, behaves like, then you are totally conscious of your choice between either side. And once you intimately understand the duality, you can perfect the life of peace and serenity on only the light side of things.
Some begin to pursue it as some holy grail of life, believing that if you concentrate enough on the duality, you can figure out how to aim straight for the light and thus reach enlightenment.
For many years when I was younger—middle and high school age—my mantra was this: "There are many ways to live and learn, and I choose to live my lessons and my experiences only in joy and beauty." I became a seeker of the light, and I only did that which brought happiness and joy to me. If it was dark or unpleasant, I knew it was simply a sign from my guides and angels that it was not the correct path, because I had chosen and asked specifically to learn my lessons in beauty. I had the ability to manifest whatever I so desired, and my manifestations were of love and serenity. I did little that challenged me in an uncomfortable way and my desires—as they were most always healthy and beneficial for not only me, but everyone involved—were my compass by which I lived and was guided.
Many religions teach that through being and carrying out deeds that cater to and spread the light, you can find the attainment of eternally living in only that light. Even the idea of enlightenment that we understand as a culture tells us that we must aim to transcend the dark side of the coin and learn to only see the light in things, the beauty of things.
And in the place of peace signs, warning signs starting flashing with neon lights in my head, brighter and brighter as I grew.
Within that that desire for peace and enlightenment, we're right back to our obsession with happiness and serenity in the clothing of spiritual attainment and peace. And please don't get me wrong; joy, peace, love, serenity, contentedness, and ecstasy are all incredible and awesome parts of the human experience. But we've forgotten the other half; or rather, we actively guard against it.
T.S. Eliot writes, we live in a place with “[No] darkness to purify the soul/Emptying the sensual with deprivation/Cleansing affection from the temporal. Neither plentitude nor vacancy.” When we dove into the duality and began to experience, to experiment with life and discover what we truly believed and felt, there were always two sides to everything, that stark contrast. But when we started to focus on just one side, it became the same muddy gray as the life we were escaping from.
A few months ago, I went through a particularly difficult experience in my life. It was one that I'd been through a few times before, and try as I might, each time it ended up the same way. I learned the same lessons over and over again and yet they never “stuck.”
I decided that this time was going to be different. Rather than trying to find that place of joy and peace within me, I dug into the anger and insecurity, the discontent and fear. I told the Universe, “I'm ready to experience pain. I'm ready to learn what peace and transcendence have not been able to teach me.” Every time I felt that I just had to do something, I just had to give in and do what I desired to do—in this case, my only desire was to give in and call him (yes, you can roll your eyes) and beg for him to be with me again, to make us work again—I forced myself to close the messenger window, to shut my laptop, to put down the phone and pick up a book. On one occasion (as silly as it may sound) I just got up and went for a walk, though it was actually the thing I least wanted to do at that moment.
Every time I did something against my desire, though my body and mind fought it tooth and nail, I discovered a strength in me that I never knew had existed. I'd never had cause to search for my own strength, to be tried in any way, while I was asking to live and learn only in love.
In those few months since, I have opened up in a way I never dared to before. In choosing to overcome my initial desire to give in to what I wanted on a surface level, I discovered that I was a much stronger, freer, more daring, more reckless person than I ever believed before.
Fear of the Dark
People are very often afraid of facing their fears and insecurities, all the dark places within, because they simply never have before; they fear to see what lies at the very darkest part of their soul. There is so much “stuff” on top of what's really at work that the idea of uncovering seems like an impossible task.
So, we work and work to hide it and become only the light with hopes that the darkness will simply melt away, no longer needed. And it lies there in the realm of the subconscious, never seeing daylight.
I've also heard many people adamantly refuse to face the dark because “they don't know what they're capable of doing if they did.” Some fear it even on a physical level; if they saw the darkness, they might find a rage so great that they would hurt someone or themselves. And on one level, this is probably a very valid fear.
So, why dive into the dark? Why even go there at all?
The Truth
I can't think of a way to sugar-coat this. Simply put, within this darkness lies some of the strongest power and most incredible human experience that exists in the Universe. But we've hid from it for thousands of years, and thus hid from our potential as a human race. We saw the power within and said, “No, we can't do that. If we have that kind of power, think of all the pain we could cause.” So, we called it “evil,” “wrong,” “darkness,” “death” and made people fear it.
On one level, this was a fail-safe—that didn't always work, as all our warfare and politics have demonstrated—that protected us from ourselves and others. This can be clearly demonstrated on every level: political, religious, economical, social, global, national, regional, state, city, community, familial, and individual.
After thousands of years of calling this darkness “evil,” we don't even question it any longer. We don't see how even in the supposed peace, the power of darkness creeps in. The most potent example of this in my life was when I went to a peace march in Washington D.C. back when the Iraq war had just begun. It was one of the most volatile situations I've ever been in. I went on two more marches closer to home and participated in all the protests at my school; they were as volatile as that first one in D.C. And all of this was in the name of “peace.”
No, I would not call the passion and ferocity of a peace protester “peaceful.” I'd call it beautiful and awesome. But never “peaceful.”
Here's the trick.
Divine Conflict Versus the War of Egos
As you begin to delve into the duality and into the world of the spirit, you come to understand the exchange of energies between you and the world. You see that everything you do affects everything, that all energies coalesce and interact with one another. You cannot hurt someone without being hurt yourself.
Never before has humankind desired to understand these underlying exchanges on such a large scale before. The return to the spirit, to religion, to faith makes this apparent. People want to know what's going on beneath the surface, beyond sight, between the lines on the page.
If you understand these energies, and understand that the ego is not the spirit, that anger and insecurity and fear are not places you want to react from, you no longer feel the need to inflict pain on yourself and others in any form. Whether it be hating yourself and feeling guilty for something you did, or angry with someone for something they did to you, you are freed from it when you no longer live through the vengeful ego or the insecure, scared child.
Fear is the only true cause of “evil.” This darkness is not the evil created by fear. This darkness is not the desire to hurt someone because of an injustice done to you. The darkness that is on the opposite side of the light is not trying to start a war to prove your power to someone else. Insecurity is what causes people to need to prove strength to the world.
This darkness does not need to be proven. It is the silent power of ultimate knowledge of life and death, released from all fear.
This darkness is passion. It is strength. It is rage and fury at the state of the world, the will to change it with a mere thought. It is the desire to crash head-on with the things that hold you back. It is the power to overcome. It is the adrenaline rush of the mother protecting her children. It is staring into the face of your adversary that wishes nothing but to bring you down, looking into his eyes with all the power in your heart, and smiling the most epic grin of your life.
There is a place for peace and passivity. But this is the time for the spiritual journeyers to stop hiding in their holes in meditation and to awaken to the opposite side of the light they are so intent on finding. There are things going on in the world that passivity will not change. Nor will the desire to inflict pain solve these problems.
Think of the strength of your mother's arms around you, and know that is where true strength is. This is not a weak or passive love. Your mother does not hold you because she has the desire to inflict pain in her heart. She holds you out of a massive love. She would not sit back and meditate while her children are being abducted.
The Unity
If darkness and light are two sides of the same coin, what exists in between? What is the true substance of the coin of duality? What is the thing that never needs to prove itself, that just is, though it wears infinite faces? What one thing has driven the human to evolve beyond mere animalistic desire; hunger, thirst, bloodlust? What is the one substance that can fill every empty space in life, the one thing that moves and shapes and forms and flows between, above, beneath, around, through everything? What is the one universal language of the world, beyond even expressions, kisses, hugs, laughter? What makes the man come home at night from his work? What makes the woman dance with her children and sing them lullabies as they drift off into dreaming? What one thing could be at once so light and so dark, so massively powerful that it shapes universes and so subtly passive that it makes an infant smile through his tears?
Love. Only love.
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Ann Marie Judge
Crystal Child, Student of Life, Spirituality, & Writer
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Ann Marie graduated from high school in 2005. She attended Beloit College in Wisconsin for her freshman year of college and will be attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2007 for photography.
Not yet old enough for acronyms at the end of her name, she considers herself a student of life, and has been deeply involved in the spiritual community since her first awakening at the age of twelve. Since then, she has had much education in the metaphysical and spiritual arts by a wide variety of teachers and healers. She was very quickly recognized as a Crystal and Indigo child, as well as a clairvoyant and intuitive.
Because she was able to begin living for the spiritual at a young age, her dream is to reach out through her writing to other young people that are experiencing similar awakenings while still being within the educational system and a society that often does not recognize or nurture young, spiritually-gifted ones. Her vision is to form a community of spiritually-minded young people so that the younger generations will be prepared to be guides and teachers as the spiritual consciousness of the world continues to rise.
Though much of her life is still largely potential, she feels this time in her life is the first step in fulfilling her dream of becoming a published writer so as to serve the children and young people of the world that feel the spiritual stirring within. As well, she hopes to educate parents on how to nurture and understand what is going on in their children's minds from a young person's perspective.
Visit her website at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com
to read her works, view
her art, and gain insight into the spiritual experiences of an Awakened young person."
Find the forums at
www.RandomActsof
Literacy.com/forums, as well as a link to it on the navigation of the RAOL homepage.
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