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OutliersManifest  ·  3434 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What is the Dark and How Do We Push It Back?

Light and Darkness. The two forces that make for three. You cannot divide the world completely into light or dark, because the razor margin in between one and another is both yet neither. We exist on this meridian, watchers on the worlds edge between light and dark, id and super ego, desire and duty. Like the ying yang symbol, these edges ebb and flow. Sometimes you are cold and logical and other times you give in to emotion, for better or worse. I could not rightfully call either of these forces "good" or "bad", as they are beyond the scrim of my understanding. Instead, I see these forces as matters of proportion in our human systems. Light is the force of revelation, as it banishes the darkness/ ignorance so that we may see the world for what it is. Yet, too much light can drive a man mad. You are who you are in the dark, and in the face of no dark corners to hide in, where can I be me? Darkness is Lovecraft’s placid sea of ignorance, the boogeyman that gives mankind a definite border in his kingdom. Sometimes you need “Here be dragons!” to keep you away from a situation you are not really prepared to face. Some darkness/ignorance is a necessary thing, as it seems that our own psychology has defense mechanisms designed to narrow our scope to keep us from simply being overwhelmed by the indifference of the cosmos. Darkness be cool and nurturing, yet it can be the void that steals the man. What I mean to say is that dark and light have their place in the world. It is by our ignorance and inaction that we allow them to become unbalanced as so to bring us harm. Light is extroversion and inter-connectivity, and darkness is introversion and disconnection. As sentient beings, our awareness is neither but a function of the interplay between both, acquiring relevance only through the contact between these two yet three forces in our lives. We are active agencies that through our actions choose amalgams of light and dark and project them to others around us. Websites such as hubski are such expressions of the interplay between light and dark. What do we as individuals transmit and receive through this system? Will we derive deeper understandings of these forces and therefore of ourselves through discussion and consensus? I certainly hope so. This website is the first I have ever signed up for out of anything other than necessity. I see how we as individual subsystems of a larger social function can transmit data which can be acted upon to bring real change. Awareness is the leading edge of a revelation, a million years of human knowledge leading to the idea that we divide the world into self/ not self yet our reality is the division operator. I do believe in “pushing back the dark”, yet I am aware that while knowledge itself has no “charge”, its use can be positive or negative. What ideas will you push? ( I will say as someone that bailed from reddit that I felt overall it was a system that perpetuated ignorance, and therefore an active force for darkness in our societies. I do miss the terrible puns however.)