Light vs. Dark

I had a lovely evening of esoteric exploration the other day when I sat around a bonfire sharing ideas with a wonderful group of like-minded women. One of the many topics we discussed was the notion of Light versus Dark. We had all agreed that we were “Lightworkers”, dedicated to holding the Light and working for the betterment of mankind. But one of the questions I came up with was—Why only Light? Why, when we are in healing mode, do we only channel through White Light? And what would happen if we chose to bring in the Dark, or lack of Light? Well, needless to say, this brought up a lot of people’s judgments about the “Dark Side” being equated to evil and badness or the hurting of mankind. Echoes of Satanists in black robes doing rituals for selfish, immoral or malevolent gains sprang to mind. Everything we have been fed about subcultures stealing the Light to do their malicious wrongdoings came up, sending shudders through the group.

Yet, if we take the concept of darkness as nothing more than the absence of light, then we move closer to balance. One of my favorite Lightworker friends and I decided to do a session where we explored holding the space for the darkness – or in this case, the absence of light. Without judgment or moral valuing, we allowed the impressions of darkness to permeate our auras. We saw, in its truest balanced sense, that darkness is nothing more than the energetic equivalent of the opposite of light: in that we would never be able to experience light without a backdrop of dark. In many cultures dark is the Yin to light’s Yang. It is just the balance of polarities. Without judgment of its dualistic qualities, dark is nothing more than a counter-piece to light. It is only when we place association onto the dark that it becomes a negative or fearful energy. We as humans make that judgment call and sully the pure energy. Our conditioned precepts take it out of balance point, using duality to bring the evil/negative side to dark.

So there we were, sitting under a vastness of stars around the bonfire. We would never have been able to see the stars shining their bright light had it not been for the black sky’s backdrop. We would not have been fully appreciative of the glow of the fire had there not been a dark surround of night around us. Light needs dark to radiate its presence. Again, in its pure form there is no light = good, dark = bad. No white robes vs black robes. One doesn’t take sides because one side cannot exist without the other.

What does bringing in the dark feel like?  There seems to be a vast potentiality within the darkness. Light limits us to a spectrum frequency whereas the absence of light gives us the freedom of seeming limitlessness. It is in this very unboundaried potential that we can have the ability to manifest anything. So darkness begins to equate to inspiration, higher formless thought, a sense or feeling rather than patterned thought. It is a boundless realm of possibilities and opportunities. It is amorphous, and only with light can we change the dark into form, reality or thought. My colleague said she felt a sense of richness and sacredness.

Dark also equates to the feminine. Dark is the womb, the deep incubating energy holding the space for potential form. The feminine is nurturing, encouraging growth. Deep within the Earth, underground there is a loamy richness, offering the very lifeforce energy that fills bulbs and seeds with promise of developing towards the light, a natural movement from deep potentiality within to a manifest form in the light. Another image for the dark became the chalice – a vessel to hold the light. (In the Roman Catholic mass, the chalice holds the Light of the Lord aka the blood of Jesus Christ. Probably a disturbing thought for a Catholic that the Dark supports the Christ…) But these are just possibilities into the limitless faces of the dark and its representations that we explored.

In past times the Sun represented the Light and the Moon represented the Dark; polarities of masculine and feminine, active/passive, hot/cold, outward energy/inward energy, longer frequencies/shorter frequencies, more physical/more mental, summer/winter, etc. Again, in polarity there is balance, so in lightworking we can hold a space for the dark as well, as long as we can be in a neutral place of non-judgment, never fearing or associating it to evil or negativity. Yes, in yin and yang, the yin is considered a negative force, but only in that it is the polar opposite of the positive as unconditional energy, not in moral value. We Lightworkers cannot bring in the Light unless we are comfortable honoring the Dark as it is only through the emblanketment of dark that light has form.

December begins winter, the solstice is the darkest day of the year. It is a yin time when we become more internal, more passive, more meditative (like animals hibernating). This is a natural flow of energy towards dark without judgment. Let’s all try to bring more balance into the world by diffusing the concept of dark with evil. If we neutralize the prejudice towards dark, it will then just be an energy, neither good or bad, just the absence of light.