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The light, the dark, and the center
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I've continued to have conversations these past few days about light and dark and how the last 2500 years of spirituality have mostly motivated people to fly up toward the light and leave everything dark behind or beneath them.
One commentator noted that the power of that motivating dogma to expand out and up to light has been so profound that very few people are even receptive to teachings that direct them toward their own center of identity and being.
I think that's debatable, certainly nowadays. But it gives helpful language to frame or speak of developments currently taking place in many leading-edge spiritual societies.
One simple way to describe those developments is that they are successfully helping many people learn how to integrate their light and their dark sides from an increasingly strong, confident "being-knowing" of their own essential center.
Even the center-oriented ancient and modern traditions of spirituality have tended to perpetuate a bias against and fear of our dark or shadow sides. But that bias is slipping away among more and more teachers and practitioners today. There's a growing movement toward inclusion, integration, and union of our spiritual and material lives -- from a divine, or divinely human, center of presence and conscious participation that includes yet transcends both.
Your essential center is at the heart, but not identified exclusively with any place in or outside your body and mind.
If this conversation makes sense to you, you have every right to make sure that any spiritual path you embrace shares this basic understanding and has the capacity to help you achieve such an integrative, center-based way of living.
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