16. Allow for Darkness, Chaos and Randomness
‘The Ground of the soul is dark’
Meister Eckhart
‘The inner being of a human being is a jungle. Sometimes wolves dominate, sometimes wild hogs. Be wary when you breathe! At one moment gentle, generous qualities, like Joseph’s pass from one nature to another. The next moment vicious qualities move in hidden ways. A bear begins to dance. A goat kneels!’
Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi
The soul is rooted in mystery. Darkness and chaos are as much part of who we are as light and beauty. The soul mediates between our essence and our personality to make us the person we are. We may be fortunate in that all these things conspire to allow the lighter side of our souls to shine through. Or it may be that darkness and chaos come to the fore. This does not make the soul itself evil — it is just that the acts committed by the darker side are called evil because they can hurt others. Evil therefore remains a moral problem — something to be contained and fled from — but the darkness and chaos from which evil is born are not evil in themselves. There is no need for a spiritual cure and no need for us to try to force change on our own souls.
If the true nature of the universe is mystery, hidden from us, then we must accept that any explanation of such matters is beyond our grasp. The feeling of this mystery is somehow bitter-sweet — will always be conflicted as it is the meeting point of form and the formless. There is darkness in every soul. We carry with us a sense of our own mortality and perhaps vestiges of our pre-conscious past. Craziness, darkness, fear, longing, pain — these things are part of every person. To wish them away is to deny part of ourselves. So, life and love will always be bitter-sweet, because life is balanced on a knife-edge.
What we so often seem to avoid doing is to enter into darkness and chaos. Any sign of stress or discomfort and our culture’s reaction is to immediately seek some ‘fix’. The fix is often reacting only to symptoms — anything to get us back to work — anything to return us to relative happiness and contentment. Why not instead dwell for a while in darkness? Why not withdraw from the world and spend some time in the shadows? Perhaps it is a luxury to be able to do this. But perhaps it is also our culture’s poor response to these matters that makes this seem an odd suggestion.
On the pragmatic level, we are forced to accept the circumstances that are presented to us. This is easy enough when life is good. It is pain and sadness that are the problems. In one way or another religion tries to sweeten the pill of these things by offering explanations for their occurrence. Not only is pain and sadness accepted they might even be embraced. Mainstream Christianity feels the need to separate evil from the rest of creation. It denies evil a real existence in a way and claims that it will ultimately be defeated. Eastern religions would say that the distinction between what we regard as good or bad experiences is illusory. But it is so difficult not to see this as a rationalisation. What if there is no afterlife, no literal soul that is ‘growing’, ‘learning’ or ‘experiencing’? Can pain and sorrow still be accepted in such a world?
At least the Eastern faiths acknowledge fully the reality of suffering! Acceptance is a useful and beneficial attitude towards life. Most of our lives involve events and circumstances that are beyond our control and often beyond our power to change. If we can simply learn to live with these things — honest about where we stand — then that is all to the good. Some Buddhist traditions speak of fully realising our existential situation. At the same time however, there may be opportunities for changing ourselves or our circumstances. Wisdom lies in being able to discern when this is appropriate and finding the proper means of bringing about the changes that may be desired. Very often ‘the means’ are more about letting go and letting the soul heal herself — letting go and letting be. The change is less about ourselves and more about a creative response to the beauty in others and the beauty in the world.
The other concern is with self-acceptance. If you are a person not burdened by some physical or emotional problem and have grown up in relatively untroubled circumstances then self-acceptance is perhaps not a problem. In fact, the problem might be a blindness to any faults rather than a struggle to overcome. Perhaps though, more people than we are often aware of harbour issues that give them grief. Again, as with external circumstances, there is a balance to be sought between what can reasonably be accepted and what perhaps needs to change for the benefit of ourselves and those around us. Trying to change ourselves is never going to be easy. In fact, the effort itself can be self-defeating.
In an earlier chapter we looked at psychologist Erich Fromm’s suggestions for self-analysis. We can repeat the importance of this process here. It may seem somewhat self-indulgent to look inward at our own concerns, when there may be a great deal of need all around us. But, as Simon Parke reminds us in A Beautiful Life: ‘We hurt other by our unexamined suffering’. The real reasons for the way we react to other people and to circumstances are therefore deeply rooted in our own concerns. So the process of unravelling this is not wasted.
As Fromm suggests, it is often best simply to watch how we respond to things and circumstances — always trying to create space between what happens out in the world and our response to it in terms of emotions, speech and actions. We most of us live in our minds — anticipating future events and reflecting on past ones. If this process is a negative one — that is if we fear for the future and regret the past — then we will continually give ourselves the emotional hit that such imagined events incur. Stepping back from this and realising that the past is gone and the future could turn out (and probably will turn out) differently from how we expect is going to be a good strategy. To live always in the present moment can be very worthwhile. However, it is not given to many of us to find this practice easy. The imagination allows us to respond creatively to the world and can embrace both the past and the future in more positive ways.
Sometimes, in a dark place, our strategy can only be to remember what is good about ourselves and to try to celebrate our own being. It is good then to remember that we are already all that we ever need to be. But what if there are things that we find ourselves doing that are just not accepted by the society around us? What if we have some dark obsession or overwhelming compulsion to hurt others or to behave in ways generally rejected by society? What then? The need to change is clearly there, but we have already suggested that change might not be possible. The inner person, the essence or soul of a person remains unchanged, indeed remains perfect. But that means beauty and perfection are veiled by layers of damaged personality, rooted deep perhaps in childhood experiences, emotional pain, anger, bitterness, hate and ultimately self-loathing. I’ve suggested above that our human view of ‘evil’ is a moral one, but we might struggle to come to terms with a view of the soul as ‘perfect’ when it contains such darkness. I don’t pretend to offer an answer to this — if indeed an answer could be offered. All that can be said is that such a person needs to be embraced rather than shut out. I beg you — where possible — to include and always to accept others who betray signs of such darkness. As we’ve seen, darkness runs through all of us. By excluding we cut off part of ourselves. By including, we heal.
The economy of descendancy has told us that we are part of our soul rather than our soul being part of us (even if we interpret this in a non-literal fashion). So too, our soul does not belong to us but has her own ways. She is part of mystery, with far more knowledge than we will ever find by ourselves.
If then the reality of who we are lies beyond what we can ever know, there is a sense in which trying to change is contradictory. If time is a mental construct and not the underlying reality, then there cannot be a ‘future me’ who is different from the current me. I am already all that I am going to be – or all that I ever need to be. When we speak of change then, it can only ever be meant in a parochial sense. It is hopefully of benefit to remember that we are all of us already far more than we could ever realise. Our efforts need to be made in the light of this.
