Look up into the sky on a starry night and you will see that there is a lot of darkness in the universe and very little light. So great is the darkness, in fact, that we must find creative ways to measure it. The distance between stars is calculated in light years, but in reality that convention is a kind of mathematical trick. We can't really conceive of that much darkness and the distances it embodies. We speak of light years as if they meant something to us, and we define them in terms of light, which makes sense to us, though in fact they are made of darkness, which does not.
So great is the invisible counterweight of darkness in the cosmos that we think nothing of chipping away a bit of it to make a little something for ourselves. And so we are truly shocked when we find ourselves suddenly weighted down too far on the scale of being. Suddenly global warming is an issue, or overpopulation, or pollution. The only surprise is that we find this surprising. But, then, we have forgotten what darkness is for.
Conservative social critics have sometimes lamented the loss of religious consciousness in the age of TV, Twitter, and the Internet, but they are coming into the argument far too late in the game. These things--and all that goes with them--were already inevitable when the incandescent light bulb came into common use. That was tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the 20th century--from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams. For all these spring directly from the overflow of human consciousness, for which the flood of light is both the metaphor and the means.
Advances in science, industry, medicine, and nearly every other area of human life and human enterprise resulted from the influx of good, cheap light like nothing the world had ever seen--a brightness that had never been approached by talow, wax, oil, or even gas. The only casualty in the ongoing conquest of night was darkness, a thing of seemingly little value, an absence really, a blank space on the canvas of eternity we could fill at will. Or so we thought.
The time has come to rethink our relationship with darkness and all that goes with it--dreams, doubts, uncertainties, and especially sleep. By far most of the world's living animal species are nocturnal, though we ourselves are diurnal. Nevertheless, we carry the dark within us through the invisible counterweight of sleep.
It is impossible to know what consciousness is for without first knowing the the meaning of sleep, just as we can't know the meaning of life without first knowing the reality of death. How can we know what real clarity is if we have nothing to compare it to--no dreams that wake us in the middle of the night like a hand placed gently on our shoulders saying, "Listen to this...this thing of the shadow, tree-hidden but revealed briefly as a moth wandering into a moonbeam." You are on the verge of knowing it in the daylight hours, sometimes find yourself stopping on the street with the unmistakable impression that it has suddenly called your name. But when you look for it in light it cannot be found. What is it? And why is it not revealed by thinking or capturable in words as everything else seems to be?
These questions have been with us from the beginning, but they are not answerable by light.
