Fear is the Only Darkness
Still, nothing sells like controversy
I’ve been thinking a lot about divides as we balance precariously on the ridgeline of the mountains of bullshit that passes for our satire-of-itself political situation. Partisan anger, we’re being told, is higher than ever, and yet I see a wave of all kinds of folk fed up with the entire solar system of cynical stage actors that make up what passes for governance and press at a national level here. Those summits of wretched governance are a mere distraction, a tightrope walk along a house of cards for the benefit of our entertainment. A little heavy handed encouragement to pick a side and fight amongst ourselves. They want us to be committed partisans, but we don’t have to be. We have the ability to live by our own unique sets of values. Instead of embracing our divisions, recognize that the two sides of any divide are in a symbiotic relationship with each other. Only together do they make up the whole.
There is no "absolute" frame of reference. We all see things just a little bit differently. We each experience life under a unique set of conditions. Our observations are always in relation to something else. Our experience is in essence, relative. Time dilation, a cornerstone of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, is often used in a logical, but kind of incorrect, way as a cliche reference to how we perceive time passing. It goes something like:
As we age we have lived longer, so the moments we experience continue to become a ‘relatively’ smaller percentage of the total time we’ve been alive, therefore we perceive time to be moving faster as we grow older.
While that’s not exactly the theory of relativity, Einstein's revelations do demonstrate that time truly is relative and can pass at different rates depending on factors like speed of travel and gravity. These factors don’t just affect our perception of time, they actually impact the way we physically experience time.
Measuring our perception of the passage of time is a subjective study. Time flies when we’re having fun, or can slow to a crawl when we sit and wrestle with our internal thoughts. Time may pass more slowly, even as we age, if we continue to seek out new and memorable experiences.
Time dilatation on the other hand, identifies the concept that time physically passes slower or faster depending on how fast we’re traveling or how much gravity we are subject to. If you travel away from earth at the speed of light, time dilation posits that when you return you will have aged less than if you had stayed on earth.
If not only our perception, but also our physical experience of time is relative, I would posit that since we are all on this earth, moving at the same speed, experiencing functionally the same gravitational pull, we all share a common thread that, relative to the rest of the universe and beyond, is uniquely ours. On planet earth, we experience time the same physically, therefore we are more alike than everything else off of planet earth, which is a vast infinite pool that we have barely dipped a toe in, much less swam to the deep end of.
Why then are we under a constant barrage of messages encouraging us to fixate on our differences? Why must every news story have a narrative angle that plays to a political affiliation? Why must every social and cultural action be dropped into a pre-determined partisan bucket? Why is even our arts, music, sports, hobbies, and comedies divided into these two stupid camps?
Fear. And fear is itself relative, when considered in the context of opposing forces.
“You cannot see.”
“You think I cannot see?”
“Of all things, to live in darkness must be the worst.”
“Fear is the only darkness.”
–Caine’s first meeting with the blind Master Po in the 1970s TV series Kung Fu
In the classic, albeit controversial show, Kung Fu, a Shaolin Monk wanders the 19th century West kicking ass and regularly having flashbacks to his training in China as a young man. The series imparted many bits of eastern wisdom on the American public for the first time on television, most of which were thinly veiled direct lifts from the Tao Te Ching. Adding to the controversy, Bruce Lee, in 1971, approached Warner Bros with a pitch for a show (The Warrior) about a Chinese immigrant who traverses the Wild West using his kung fu skills to fight villains, leaving the reader to decide for themselves if the studio then stole his idea, changed the name to Kung Fu, and cast David Carradine instead of Bruce Lee as the lead.
Despite these controversies, Carradine and his fictional masters deliver clear and condensed teachings that remain valuable. And according to his own writings, Lee took it in stride, recognizing that it would be a huge leap for a studio to cast him in a lead role. Their failure to recognize that opportunity only served to commit him further to breaking into Hollywood movies. Instead of focusing his disappointment on the movie executive’s shortsightedness, he recognized that humans are all capable of both compassion and empathy, prejudice and bigotry.
You see, Hollywood bigwigs aren’t the only players in this eternal game of discrimination by generalization. Lee was unceremoniously run out of his kung fu school as a teenager when some of the mid-ranking teachers found out he was 1/4 white. At the time, it was essentially sacrilegious to teach the secrets of Chinese martial-arts to outsiders, so at even a suspected 1/4 whiteness, Lee was forced to train secretly with Wong Shun-leung, who was then only willing to teach him at the request of the grand master Yip Man.
Back to the Tao Te Ching, in which the paradox of existence is one of its base teachings.
When we name one thing, its opposite is created.
When people see things as beautiful, ugliness is created.
When people see things as good, evil is created.
Being and non-being produce each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
–Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu, A translation for the public domain, J.H. Mcdonald, 1996
Our differences our complementary. We are but halves of one whole. When we are divided we are incomplete. Fear keeps us from accepting our other halves. Fear makes us afraid of those who our ego tells us are different from us. No one is immune to the fear of the other, but an empty mind is less-susceptible to the judgement that turns fear into anger and bigotry, discrimination and hate. When we hate the racist, we also hate ourself. When we turn our hate on others who are living in the darkness of fear, we often are projecting our own susceptibility to judgement, prejudice, and discrimination on them. Instead, we should aim to stand side by side with our opposite and uncover the roots of our racism and prejudice together.
If you use respect and radical empathy as a way of having people invited into a conversation instead of a fight, you're more likely to achieve your goal.
–Loretta Ross
This is of course the yin and the yang of Taoism. It is the idea that opposing forces must be thought of as complementary at the same time. They can not be separated, as it is their interaction that forms a dynamic whole. Contrary forces in fact create each other by their comparison. They are at once interconnected and interdependent. There is no top without a bottom. There is no left without right. And as Tom Robbins liked to say, “a big front has a big back.”
Darkness is not about seeing or not seeing with your eyes. Darkness is the absence of light around you. Fear is relieved when truth shines a light on it. Illumination is an open heart and mind. Our leaders often choose to try and keep us in the dark. They are afraid that we will join together and take away their power. Divided we are more easily controlled. You, however, can not be controlled if through their darkness you can see the light that darkness must be creating as its opposing force.
Alarm bells should go off whenever you are confronted with a narrative based in generalizations and fear. We are so often confronted with stories intended to make us fear the other side of the political aisle, that culturally we have come to understand this as nearly the only way a story can be told. We are divided into groups that have no true bounds, that do not describe us meaningfully, but plant seeds in our hearts and minds that we are more different than we are alike. With the awareness that this fear based storytelling has the intentions of keeping us in the dark, we can rearrange our stories in a way that brings us together and shows the light that darkness must create. We use fear to bring forward our awareness.
When we shine a positive light on those who we may perceive as different, we disarm their fear. By showing them we are unafraid, they are free to relieve their own fears about those who are different than them. And these differences that we perceive, they are so much less meaningful than the positively beautiful ways that we are all alike, riding this paradise of a planet through the cosmos, with the remarkable ability inside each of us to recognize how delightful it is to share this existence. Can we drop our fear and egos, and call in those who we do not agree with instead of calling them out?
With truth, history, evidence, and time on our side, we hold the winning hand despite our fears of powerlessness and failure.
… if you ask people to give up hate, then you need to be there for them when they do.
Calling in builds bridges instead of burning them down so that we might walk together along the path toward collective liberation.
–Loretta Ross
Wisdom's not a weapon to be wielded Not a tool to extract revenge A gift to be shared Not a gift to be told It can be prodded, shepherded Steered, and inspired It is a gift lead by example Only received when ready You can not scare wisdom into me You can not scold your view on me Wisdom is shared with humility and patience And darkness is balanced by illumination Hold on And enjoy the ride As the pendulum swings Side to side Like a pendulum swings Let go of your pride And all these divides And the side with which you identify Moralities whip You don’t hold the handle Its crack’s destination Leave karma to cancel Let sleeping beasts lie Attack with your heart Attack with compassion Some science some art Some laughter some tears Some solar time charts Interconnected Not so far apart
This!
"To instead of embracing our divisions, recognize that the two-sides of any divide are in a symbiotic relationship with each other. Only together do they make up the whole."
And this!
"And these differences that we perceive, they are so much less meaningful than the positively beautiful ways that we are all alike, riding this paradise of a planet through the cosmos, with the remarkable ability inside each of us to recognize how delightful it is to share this existence."