Seeing A New Light

Seeing A New Light

   Local internet was down yesterday...a minor inconvenience to me, but a major one to others.  But what emerged (at least for me) was a new knowledge, a new world of PPPoE and PPPoA and VCI numbers and how knowing those can really speed up one's getting back online (should your internet access go down, you can still access your modem and router via the Web which you can still get on even your ISP down...who knew?)...just a side tidbit.

   But back to the final questions on an alien visiting and offering you a chance to explore the universe.  One response to the idea of bringing someone --say a spouse or a child-- was would you have even asked that person?  And what if that person did NOT want to go;  would you go anyway?  Would you consider that decision a bit selfish or would you justify it?  And if they're staying caused you to stay, would you harbor some resentment?  And suppose you and your spouse or child were indeed ready to go but the alien then said ONLY you...would you go or stay?

   Barbara Brown Taylor's book on darkness says that we try everything artificial when we find something we cannot tolerate, in her case, the dark.  Artificial light, drugs, alcohol, the computer or television merely hide our inability to cover dark emotions, or as she says, a "low tolerance for sadness."  But she quotes a psychotherapist, Miriam Greenspan, who says that there are NO dark emotions, "just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear.  The emotions themselves are conduits of pure energy that want something from us: to wake us up, to tell us something we need to know, to break the ice around our hearts, to move to act."

   Brown Taylor's book also mentions the words from a blind French resistance fighter, Jacques Lusseyran, who was blinded as a child.  But rather than treat him as such, his parents encouraged him to embrace the change, to tell them when he discovered something new.  Ten days after being blinded, and still a child, this is part of what he wrote:  I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world anymore. Yet the light was still there. It's source was not obliterated. I felt it gushing forth every moment and brimming over; I felt it want to spread out over the world. I had only to receive it. It was unavoidably there. It was all there, and I found again its movements and shades, that is, its colors, which I had loved so passionately a few weeks before. This was something entirely new, you understand, all the more so since it contradicted everything that those who have eyes believe. The source of light is not in the outer world. We believe that it is only because of a common delusion. The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves.

   And thus the alien, as with ET, might merely be here to point to our heads, to say, "I'll be right here."  Brown Taylor's book makes a bold attempt to change our perceptions of the dark, saying it is as necessary as light, as renewing (possibly more so) as light...and that, the subject of my next post, is something to think about tonight.

   Thanks for being patient...