Ok, so this title sounds a lot like the lead in to an 8th grade emo song, but it’s what came to me so I’m rolling with it.

We as a species have done a lot of work to fight back the dark. We started with the classic campfire, and we’ve now moved up to everything from iridescent street lights spilling untold numbers of photons into the void, to the humble portable flashlight. Everywhere we go these days, we can claim to be masters of the darkness. Flip a switch, and the lights come on. Hell, with some technical know-how, the switch is superfluous with smart home technology. Just have your phone track your location, and when you get home, it’ll send a signal for the lights to activate. Darkness conquered without even a first thought. And speaking of our phones, we don’t even need to carry that dedicated flashlight any more. With the tap of the screen, the immediate 12ish feet in front of you is yours to behold even in the darkest hour. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where we would not be able to proclaim ourselves masters of the darkness, short of going on a long night hike and having your phone battery die. But few people would even dream of doing such a thing… Well, maybe not. Dreams may actually the only place you’ll find yourself doing that very thing!

But, as I’m not quite to that point yet, let’s talk about symbols for a second instead. Lightness and darkness might some of the oldest symbols that humanity conjured. The interplay between day and night, light and dark, plays out as Gods or deeply primal energies in almost every culture’s mythology and religion. And these haven’t exactly gone away. Just look at a statement like “Jesus is the light,” or “the Lord shines his light upon us.” You don’t have to be Christian to feel the power behind a statement like that. The marrying of Jesus to something as powerful as light itself is to infuse the concept he represents with tremendous power. He becomes the savior in the dark. And we are seeking a savior.

We as humans crave light, clearly. Moving away from religion for a second and towards human biology, without light, we would have a much, much harder time making our way in the world as we are built. Our eyes generally aren’t great at seeing in the dark. As a thought experiment, we may have found different Gods or primal energies if we were a race of myth-making owls, for example. The darkness may be seen as the force that invigorates them with the energy of hunting and activity, and the light would be seen as a messenger of retreat for fear of pain and weariness. But for us, the light is what lets us see food, obstacles, our neighbors, and importantly, predators. In the darkness, we can be ambushed, we can trip and hurt ourselves, and we can easily get lost and find ourselves alone. The darkness very much is a real danger to a human who does not have access to a literal beacon of hope in the form of a torch, lantern, or flashlight. Again, there’s a reason our religious saviors are always described as a “light in the darkness”. Seeing the light of your campfire after wandering lost for hours might literally bring you to tears of joy and feelings of being saved. It is what keeps us safe from the danger that lurks in the dark.

Now, as humanity has invented more and more ways to chain, bind, and vanquish the old Gods of the Night, light is no longer much of a savior either. The sun isn’t much of a God if I can flick a switch or tap a screen and accomplish the same thing! And the darkness isn’t so scary, it can be banished with nothing but the wave of a hand holding a flashlight! But try an experiment. Put yourself in a room with no lights at all, not even the light from outside that sneaks under the door, the light from your watch, or the LED clock blinking in the dark. None at all. Pitch darkness. Now, close the door. Sit there for 10 minutes. What do you feel? If you’re like me, it doesn’t take too long for a bit of disorientation and fear to set in. Once the time is up and you enter back into the realm of light, do you feel a wash of relief?

Another experience I recall was whenever I’d be leaving the basement as a kid (and even older, honestly), I had to turn the light off right before I actually got off the stairs leading back up. And I was convinced that once that light was off, I only had mere seconds to get off those stairs and into “safety” before the monsters that lurked within the dark would fly up and drag me into the darkness. Of course, this never did actually happen. There aren’t actually flesh and blood monsters in the basement, under the bed, or in the closet.

But as we’ve been exploring in some of these posts, just because something isn’t flesh and blood that we can see with our physical eyeballs or touch with our hands, doesn’t mean it’s still not real in some sense. That feeling of fear, and disorientation, and maybe even terror, is very much real. These have real, physical, measurable effects on our bodies. What we feel is as real as the screen you’re reading this on. Just because we can’t grip it with our hand doesn’t make it non-existent. That feeling of relief and safety, is also very much real. I’m not convinced that the Gods of light and dark are as conquered as we think.

And so too inside us. As humanity seeks to light its world up in a vain hope of eliminating that which it has feared the most since its dawn, the more the monsters find home within the darkness we cannot banish: the unconscious. There will always exist parts of ourselves that we either cannot, or will not see. The predators that really did lurk in the dark now are entirely relegated to the internal world. In the developed world, we don’t have to fear being hunted by cougars. But, how many of us have had dreams of being chased by things we cannot escape? How many of us feel something sinister closing in on our bad days? After reading a horror book or watching a terrifying movie, do you sometimes wonder if that sound really is a murderous clown? These unconscious creatures cannot be fully destroyed, for darkness truly is a God.

I truly do feel like a lot of the apathy, numbness, and general discontent with the modern world can be attributed to the loss of depth and meaning, and with that, the loss of stories and myths. No longer do we give praise to the conquering sun in the morning for vanquishing the terrors of the night. “Why should we?” you might ask. We have spotlights. We have streetlights. We have headlights. Hell, we can create mini suns in our labs!

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. I can say that we have lost something extremely dear to us in “conquering” nature. I don’t believe we should halt scientific learning for the sake of maintaining ignorance, but I also do believe we’ve lost touch with the mysteries of the great forces of life. For most, nature has lost its power, its divinity. I can personally say that a deeper appreciation of the cycles of the natural world and the patterns underlying the universe that still dance the same dances that they also have has done me justice. But I think what that looks like is different for everyone. Many find the idea of the Light of Christ conquering Darkness of Evil compelling, and I’m not trying to take that away. Those are stories that still connect many of us to these primal forces. Others have other stories. But I do think it is important to have a story.

Another popular idea is the idea of humanity’s intellect and technological advances banishing the literal darkness, as we’ve seen, and banishing the darkness of ignorance. Look almost anywhere, and you’ll see this “myth” played out. This story is very compelling for a lot of people, and it harnesses the same energies as many religious stories. But just as when religious becomes dogmatic, there is danger in believing this is the only possible truth, and that all others are just ignorant or unintelligent.

What’s my story? I’m still exploring that a bit. For me, like many others, I moved my darkness inside (and not entirely in the 8th grade emo way!) The unconscious parts of myself became alien, disorienting, and at times terrifying. I’ve personally had dreams of running away from various monsters or dangerous people, much like I ran from the darkness of the basement as a kid. And in this sense, we can think of awareness as a type of “savior” figure. Being aware of patterns is a sure-fire way of beginning the process of loosening their grip on you. The patterns that are in the dark are the ones that still rule your life. There is still power in this “myth”. This too harnesses the power of light and dark in a way that describes inner work as being God’s work.

A part of me (and a bigger part by the day) believes that old, powerful, and dangerous things still do lurk in the dark. And I don’t think that’s something to try and banish. When we take the power and the magic out of things, we also sap them of meaning and depth. Filling a deep lake so that anyone can see to the bottom makes it less scary, but something important is killed in that process. The awe of the vast unknown. The holy terror of unfathomable openness and depth. The mystery of the darkness.

I don’t have a clear solution to this loss of meaning that humanity seems to be experiencing. But, I’d like to muddle that through for myself at least, just like a person stumbling around for their campsite in the middle of the midnight darkness.