The Dark World

Life is a series of cycles and changes. If we were never to experience change, then we wouldn’t be able to differentiate between anything or place things in categories to understand the world. Perspective exists only out of contrast between different experiences. If the only color you could see was black, would you even put a name to it, or would it just be a world of darkness?

In psychology we know that thinking about sad aspects of memories will lead us to focus on the bad and see people, places, and events in retrospect as predominately negative, even if they weren’t. The opposite is also true, and it is called the “mood-congruence effect.” There’s something about the human experience that says, when you see that Dark World, that is the only world, at least until you break out of that state of mind.

It could be that the reason we have a variety of life experiences is to transcend the Dark World. You need to experience something good to know why you should struggle through the bad, and you have to know the bad to appreciate the good. If we were living beings with no memory, then neither of these perspectives would make any real sense because all that we would know is our current experience.

Bad experiences are not only necessary, but they push us to change our reality for the better. Good times always end, but it doesn’t take a conscious action to make them stop, they will always end on their own at one time or another. The opposite is true for the negative; although some things do pass with time, it takes positive action to negate the effects of the decay that naturally occurs on all of us living things, pushing us back into the Dark World.

So, what is this Dark World and how do we keep ourselves from falling in? There are two explanations: a biological one, and a spiritual one.

First, biology tells us that we must do two things in order to leave the Dark World: achieve biological homeostasis and meet the near-optimum (or at least adequate) conditions for healthy reproduction. What this entails is healthy eating and exercise, the right amount of sleep, while avoiding disease and getting just the right amount, not too much and not too little, of everything you need. It also means meeting the reproductive demands of both basic biology as well as social psychology. Be physically able to reproduce, but also have a look, personality, and lifestyle that attracts the best type of person for you and your child.

These things might sound just a tad superficial, but they’re the fundamental building blocks for any species to continue and prosper. More interestingly however, might be the spiritual side of the Dark World, albeit more elusive.

Instead of piecing things together in a quilt of facts and theories put together by scientists, spirituality asks us to throw those things out the window and instead focus on philosophy and human experience. There’s nothing wrong with that per say, but you just have to find the happy medium that works best for you. It’s healthiest to have a mix of both, as opposed to being on one extreme or another.

In fact, the spiritual Dark World is created in part by this extreme. Humans are not robots, and they have to be spontaneous. Living life only based on reason and facts can be great for certain things, but without exploration, life becomes a Dark World of itself. I can only tell you this from my point of view, but doing what comes naturally and spontaneously is part of why each of us exist.

God, Nature, The Universe, or any other quasi-spiritual deity you want to blame for your existence wants you to be yourself and not simply follow a narrowly structured path This is supremely evident based solely on the fact that life is more fun that way – spontaneity removes us from the Dark World and allows us to see beyond the veil and catch a better glimpse of what reality really is.