The Dance of Light and Dark

Reflection: #32 (Topic: Death)

This reflection was written for the Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Occasionally, STSC members create something around a set theme. This time the theme was “death.” If you are a writer, you might consider joining us.

---

When one takes all colors of paint and mixes them together, the result is black. But curiously, when one takes all colors of light and mixes them together, one gets white.

Lets reflect upon this: Paint is matter and light is energy, so another way we can think about our curious observation is this: combining all colors of matter together gets us to black, and combining all colors of energy together gets us white. Black and White. White and Black. Matter and Energy. E=MC². M=E/C².

Energy and Matter - the two fundamental forces in our universe - they swirl back and forth, around each other, engaging with each other, each morphing into the other, in an intricate dance that ultimately reveals itself to us as reality. Matter becomes Energy and Energy becomes Matter again. Light becomes Dark and Dark becomes Light. And Yin and Yang continue their endless, infinite waltz. They are Order and Chaos.

We experience a world of chaotic matter which is brought into order by the forces of life and consciousness, yet this world returns to the blackness of chaos eventually leading this reality to the heat death of the universe. We witness this process with our own bodies, we animate them with our life energy but, since they are made of chaotic matter, entropy works relentlessly to return them to chaos, though we temporarily resist that process with the light and order that lives within us. Entropy however never stops, it does its work, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, but always our bodies are returning to the darkness of pure chaos.

We may experience the world though the chaos of matter, but we live in a world of thoughts, of emotions, of...vibes. We truly live in the energy of order, and in that world of energy we are all trending toward increasing order and light. We create knowledge. We learn things. We form memories. We create. We are so good at this act of creating light and order that we build technology and entire advanced civilizations.

So, while our bodies might be returning to their fundamental dark form, which ultimately leads to the "death" of this crude, chaotic fleshy matter, our thoughts, our minds, our inner essence, especially if we cultivate the light of our consciousness, is trending further and further back towards it's natural state, one of pure light. And as we are being destroyed in chaos, we are being created in order. We are becoming Pure consciousness. Pure order. Pure truth. Pure beauty. Pure love. The end of suffering. Perfection. Completeness. Peace. Joy. Enlightenment.

We, on earth, exist in a predominately chaotic world. We exist inside the dark blackness of Yin. But our essence, our ordered energy is the bright spot of white Yang that lives inside that darkness of Yin. When we "pass on”, perhaps we'll experience the dualistic alternate reality and will live in a world of pure energy, of Yang, with a dark spot of black chaos to explore more fully and with greater understanding.

While we've come to view chaos as "bad" in some ways, the two actually work together endlessly creating and endless destroying. For, ironically, and in keeping with the harmonious balance of dark and light, the first act of creation is to destroy. Once must first destroy the imaginary construction of themselves to tap into the highest level of consciousness and then one can let true creation flow through themselves and out into this world. As that inspired flow of order creates, it is converted through you, and your chaotic body, into the world of matter.

It is a two way flow: While your body, living in chaos is diminishing, your energy, living in order is growing, where "you" are being built invisibly in the energetic side of the universe, growing ever more powerful until you finally rejoin the perpetual, eternal, infinite consciousness that, underneath it all, you have been all along.

---