As people focus there awareness on any single facet of the world, it comes to fill our minds. Define our experience, if only for a moment. But as we become more accustomed, those moments get longer and longer until this thing that we were observing from the outside is now something we are immersed in, and it in us.

You cannot come to know anything deeply without also being known by your deeds and words, if not in your essence. And for everything that you judge as something that “should not be”, you take one more step into being defined by the judgement that things should not be. A destructive force. Isn’t this the essence of what we mean when we speak of monsters? Efforts to eradicate the darkness have only ever dug its pit deeper.

I think monsters are things that we fear and don’t understand? We fear, and claim not to understand those things we judge and actually do understand. We cannot fear what we do not know at all, but we can fear that which seems to run counter to our vision of what we call good. Failure, anger, greed, lust, the list goes on and on, but for having names for all these “evil” things, have we come any closer to actually eliminating any of them?

We strengthen them. Make them subjects of focus, and we blind our neighbours in the name of refusing to see our own blindness. As it’s said, and I paraphrase, “Don’t try to remove the cinder in your neighbours eye until you remove the timber in your own.”

To deny them is to focus on them and to obsess on them is to focus on them, so looking or not looking. Is there something in the middle? There is, and it’s the subject of this class. As night falls at the end of every day, all things that we would pursue meet their ends. Perhaps only to see renewal on the following day, but again perhaps not. All that seems wrong in the world has gone wrong for a reason, and darkness doesn’t have an independent set of reasons for happening. All that goes wrong, goes wrong in the name of “reason” itself. Every belief you hold, every prejudice, every conviction, ties you both into a creative and life affirming process, and the aftermath that is its own end. So seen in a whole light, you can come to know the ways of love and lust, and demean neither. Know the ways of altruism and greed, and insult no one, because all that we would reject comes about as an effect from what might be considered a light centered cause.

Ever notice we often can come to despise “virtuous” people? Why is that?

I don’t claim it for myself? But indeed you do, and you must. It’s the basis of being able to see any order or value in this life at all.

I think those who resent the virtues of others are disappointed that they do not see those virtues within themselves. In part this is true, and I will add another part. The virtuous cast long shadows. In their effort to be true to their high ideals and stand up as an example of what is good and right in the world, they create disturbances that do not serve to enable others the freedom to know the peace they feel they have found. The pure are motivated to purify. The holy shun the profane. Is it possible for this to be different?

Reminds me of Jesus, actually. He embraced the sinner when the virtuous wouldn’t. Yes, and his judgement was considered suspect for doing so. He even spoke of their virtues in the face of those who believed they espoused a virtuous culture, saying that these who were not of the light had more of an ear to hear the truth than their spiritual leaders. This made him very unpopular.

We do not avoid darkness by hiding in our homes. It is even true that the night sky is brighter than the lights in our homes, but we perceive our household light to be brighter because the lights are more focused. Therefore they “break” the darkness more than the moon or stars. Admittedly, there are those who are lost in the darkness. People are prone to getting lost from time to time no matter what their focus. But even the most anti-spiritual person on the planet can be moved to pray from time to time, even if not to any familiar God or principle.

Getting lost is part of learning the way. Indeed, it is. And there are those who are living in the light who get just as lost, if not more so.

Eventually, we learn to recognize which direction we should go to reach our desired destination. We learn to take the path with heart. The trick in confronting the darkness is not to confront it at all, but to see there is only one world, and that world is whole and is truth made manifest, as seemingly paradoxical as it might be.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~