Chapter 8: Darkness

This is not my usual self, nor is darkness my orientation, but is a side of me, a dark side.  I will not explain myself with the pretension of telling you that ‘I am not my self today.’  This is every bit me as the ananda, ananda that is my orientation by choice, and perhaps by constitution and good fortune.  I have disappointed my dearest, because of the darkness, and that is hard to bear and yet is part of the contours of the dim light..  Part of the shortcomings of me, part of the illness of bipolar.

 

A good friend once told me that my condition was a blessing and a curse.  One irony is that the exalted highs seem the blessing during their time, yet are the most destructive.  The lows are extremely unpleasant, but may be more valuable.  The worst times follow the highs, the best times, in reality and not just in the illusions that ecstasy bring, follow the lows.

 

But more to the point, it is two negativities about the darkness that have value in their own right.  Just that statement points to the value.  We live in a world where negativity is seen as only negative.  We are as if to remain positive even whilst our societies erode, where reason and conscience gives way to cynical relativity, or the excusing of extreme stupidity, brutality and ignorance because all the accusers are coloured in their own right.  We are to remain positive while beauty is corroded, value lost, tradition warped, and while human failure results in real tangible grotesque suffering.  We kid ourselves to get by, so time to time we need the darkness for balance.

 

The two negativities are the inward and the outward.  When things go badly, some feel one should not blame others and seek the source of the trouble within themselves.  But some apply this to everything.  There are others that take this advice, and punish themselves while letting society off the hook, seeking some absolute self-reliance.  There are others who are accused of only accusing society.  In my mood, it does not matter.  I know the brutal self-examination will come, if it does not I won’t grow and won’t be able to let go of the darkness.  At the same time, I’ve been that one whose ego wanted a self-perfection where I took responsibility for all my ills.  None of these positions are true.  In truth, you, my audience are partly to blame for my ills.  In truth, you cannot be expected of better unless you can be confronted with your social responsibility.  And yet, you cannot ever be expected to, as a vast group, achieve quickly the social change you must create.  As an individual, you cannot be expected to be saintly, not to err, not to consciously or unconsciously affect others negatively.  I would be the ultimate hypocrite if I demanded it of you, since I am the same.  There is enough blame to go round.  In our society we resist this pain of who we are, what we’ve become, the responsibility of where we’re going.  There are those who cannot avoid it, where cultures are confronted with social problems that approach a crises.  We are comfortable enough to argue that we’re fortunate, so why should we be negative, and forget that we are not liberated, because our liberation is bound together.  Don’t try to get away.

 

The other negativity is what I do, where I’m weak, where I repeat mistakes and where I can’t explain why I can’t meet the expectations of others, why I should ask for a break.  I ask because it’s survival, and often I know that others have had to meet the same expectations, I know it may be unfair to ask and receive.  Yet others cannot know why I can’t lift a finger, and so they do not have the same need to ask, and none of it is visible – this disability.

 

There is a difference between wallowing, and painting an inner landscape.  I write out of need to work it through.  I can hear so many judgements all the time, which is why I need to be explain, so then one of the judgements is self-involvement, and the more I explain the more I hear the judgement.  But I reject the judgement, and invite you to see the beauty of the dark painting.  Of course it’s self-serving, why shouldn’t it be.  If you get nothing from this, you are not served, why should you read it.

 

I yearn for communication, which is why I want to paint this for you.  For some reason I don’t want specifics but I can tell you that there is idealism in here trying to get out.  I suffer from a plague of ideas.  I start with recognizing a concern, maybe social justice, unemployment, something that can be prevented, down to one person whom few can understand why they don’t belong in jail.  I read and listen, react, talk with others and I think and then I begin to have visions.  Not visions in the sense that they come true without any intervention, but one’s that come true because of the intervention.  I see the intervention as stemming from the context, the understanding extends to a system of relationships, a sense of political, social and cultural ideologies drawing on the philosophies that I’ve encountered, and the thing about these ideas is they quite typically lead me to try and grasp mundane human psychology, where the intervention relies on an opening towards a human psychology of potential based not on any new ideas, but just living up to our stated and overt intentions as decent and responsible citizens, rather than the realism of the mundane.  These two psychological states seem to co-exist in parallel, in one real world of real people, with basic survival needs, with rights.  On the one hand we see that we want to eradicate poverty, and yet we seem to accept that doing it is impossible.  Again we swing to feeling that we must do it, and we must set goals, and then the mundane mountain of obstacles sends us back.  We create a mountain to pass, we say we must pass it, but we spin our wheels in our own mud.  So, once in a while I see a situation where I see the solution.  I quickly anticipate the obstacles and try to find the first steps.  I need others.  Others let me down and I they have some blame in that.  I know there’s nothing I can do about them.  So I return to what I can do.  And the whole problem is that I can’t get the power of communication to work, I don’t have the resources.  There’s two problems, in that I can’t get the medium and that people are not listening very well to ideas these days.  People in fact reject ideas, ideas are too difficult, and there isn’t time.  They create an impossible situation where problems are created where ideas are needed that are beyond the mundane, but the people ask us please to cast our ideas in the limitations of the mundane.  Because we don’t build anymore, not as societies.  We only try not to fall apart.

 

That is to say we are in a dark age.  And I have said that when I wasn’t myself in the darkness.  Truth is that I am blessed with a great many emotional riches that normally tide me over with a buoyancy.  It is just that my usual self is somewhat floating above where we are.  I need this darkness to get to the bottom of things.

 

Don’t forget that when the Mongols overran the Muslim empires of North Africa, Persia, the Middle East and Muslim Spain, my religion was broken.  It was broken from its heights, its Golden Age.  The Crusades followed and the dominance of Europe.  The military advantage was joined with the liberation of knowledge from dogmatism.  That liberation of knowledge was said to be inspired by the Greeks, a Renaissance of rationalism and humanism.  What was forgotten was that it was actually transmitted.  It was transmitted because the Arabs and Persians were inspired by nearly the same tenets as the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and these could not have happened without them.  The tenets were nearly the same.  In the Western secular tradition, the separation of church and state freed science from apologetics.  The Muslims had a similar notion, because the Muslim scientist took free inquiry in the same direction.  The Muslims did not see this as separation, except that authority over free inquiry could not come from a clerical institution.  This free inquiry was challenged by orthodoxy, but they did not have the upper hand, and the enlightened caliphates were patrons of the sciences, of astronomy, the arts and culture, of free health care, of social services, etc.  Separation was necessary in the Renaissance because of Galileo’s challenge to the notion of the earth as the centre of the universe, and so to challenge orthodoxy and break the pattern of apologetics.  Separation was necessary because of the darkness that arose from the dogmatism and orthodoxy of the church, and it’s political integration with the Westphalian states.  Yet Galileo’s discoveries, as is yet hard to prove, were likely based on work done by astronomers in the Muslim world who had performed the same calculations revealed in Galileo’s astronomy, and performed in an environment with few pre-determined problems about whether the earth was the centre or not.  These concerns were not concerns that the Muslim astronomers felt acutely in accomplishing their work.  Thus their humanism required less of a sense of separation of spheres, in fact it did not need a distinction of humanism vs. God-centredness.  Thus, when this knowledge spread to the West, from a place that did not require separation, it required separation for the West to be able to accept it.  This process has a few implications.  One is that some feel that the separation of secular and spiritual spheres, though politically necessary in Western society for freedom and science, has uninteneded consequences of de-spriritualization.  This de-spiritualization can have ugly faces, because when rationalism exists without a supra-rational, a super-ceding ethical level, one which is derived from natural justice, which is less empirical and more felt, existential, holistic and deep, that rationalism can operate in a form completely detached from the human.  That rationalism can result in quite severe consequences, because internal logics serve themselves.  We can see therefore, no check on Nazism within its own system, but in lesser extremes we see decision-making that can entirely rationalize itself as poverty reduction, where anyone outside it can see that it is tearing the world further apart.  But what happened to the Muslim world is worse.  After the destruction wrought by the Mongols, that world was subjected to the Crusades, and then to colonialism, then to being proxy pawns in the Cold War.  More guns were given to children than books, well that’s a metaphor perhaps.  So now, Muslim orthodoxy has gone to some wild extremes in reaction to the West, and now we have regressive reactionary Islamism which looks nothing like Islam of the 12^th century, and uses Islam as a banner for a kind of barbarism Europe experienced in the Middle Ages under the Church.  From this we get a mob of Muslims in Sudan asking for the death penalty for a teacher who merely named a teddy bear Mohamed after a child in her class, following a vote of her students to do so.  We get insanity.

 

And so it’s time for Muslims to throw off the yolk of their religious masters, reject their orthodoxy and yet not dive into a mush of commercial secularism, but find our own Renaissance.  That would give me hope.

 

Be good to others, and compassionate, and kind, and understanding and forgiving – this is what God wants.

 

See you soon.