There are two poles of the One Reality — the bright and the dark. Their mutual play creates this manifold, multi-layered world of many shades and hues. The dark hides the bright carefully in its folds of darkness and slowly releases it by the pressure of the growing light. The bright hides under its cover the secrets of the dark side that must find expression sometime and somewhere in the mysterious play.
The dark pole is where the Consciousness becomes dull, heavy, obscure, and forgetful of its knowledge and power. The bright pole is where the Consciousness knows Itself as a self-existent being of Conscious-Force. Matter and material life is largely built of this heavy and obscure stuff. That is why, when we are identified too much with our physical life and material existence, we become forgetful of our higher truth and our consciousness becomes dull and obscure, heavy and tired. And when we are identified with the brighter side of Reality, we recover our clarity, feel a calm and luminous joy, experience lightness of being and accomplish even difficult things with a natural poise of ease and peace.
The dark pole has its own power—the power of obscurity and darkness. It veils our sight, makes us blind to truth and light and hope and instead fills us with fear and the shadows that we can neither understand nor catch. It puts us to sleep paralysing our will and faith and filling us with an inertia and dullness that is alive to nothing but sharp pain, intense passions, chaotic deeds, loud music, mad dance of riot and carnage and rampage and violence. It makes us forget our divinity and makes our senses dull to all that is subtle and beautiful and ethereal and true. It obscures our perception and thereby falsifies our thoughts and feelings and judgments making our knowledge and will and strivings full of error and misunderstanding. The end result is great suffering, dis-ease, pain and degradation.
The bright pole brings Light and Harmony and Clarity and Wideness and Peace and Strength. It quickens our senses to the sublime joy and the ethereal tastes. It calms our passions, subdues violence, introduces peace in the turbid emotions of our heart, and informs our minds with the greater light of intuition whose revelatory whispers are truer than reason and higher than thought. It spontaneously brings harmony and order, corrects our errors, and rectifies defects. The end result is health, and joy and peace and progress.
Man’s consciousness moves between the two poles—caught in a narrow strip of grey, in an inter-regnum between the light and the dark poles. It aspires for the Light but is pulled to the dark, it strains towards the bright but is chained to the dark. This is the enigma and paradox of human life. And yet man carries in himself the key to the paradox. For man has in him a double nature. He has an outer surface nature built by his animal past, tied to his atavistic habits of the body and life instincts. He has also an inner and deeper soul-awareness, a consciousness of truth and immortality that is naturally attracted to Light and Harmony and whose touch brings into the stormy and troubled outer nature of man Peace and Joy and Clarity and Goodwill and Sweetness and Strength and Light and Wideness—a touch divine upon his troubled life and days.
Man’s body of clay houses in it not only the animal and the dijnn but also the gods of light. It is the interplay of these dark deities and bright gods in the fields of earth that kneads matter and releases in it the various possibilities of life and mind. In man, this play assumes the form of a conscious struggle, since unlike the animal world, the gods begin to awake in man’s conscious intelligence, visiting him in his hopes and dreams, whispering to his heart in his hours of quietude, gathering around him when he prays or meditates. And when they withdraw, they leave their stamp upon his flesh and the thrill of their contact vibrates within the cells. And even though Night closes upon him again, even though disease, disintegration and death pull him back to the abyss of darkness from which he has climbed, all is not lost. Thus continues the mysterious march, the epic of human life in which life, death, disease are mere incidents that obstruct our sight. But one day, man’s gaze will grow deeper, a Light from his depths will invade the fields of his mind, a power of the higher hemisphere will enter his cells and release from them a purer and greater force of life, a truer sense, a higher thought. Then shall we be truly free from dis-ease and triumph over death and conquer Immortality.
