In the beginning there was Darkness, and only that. Make no mistake about that, no need to take anybody who tells you anything else with any measure of depth, seriously. Everything has come from Darkness, we all have. We may not have a memory of it, granted, but Darkness is where we began. Before we became we, we were wombed. Wombs are made of darkness and that is the darkness we eddy in and emerge from, and because it is the darkness of the womb we come from, almost the first thing we do is to ball up our eyes and screw up our brows against the light we have come into. Next time you get an opportunity, and you well might, see what happens when you come out of wombed darkness. It is a journey from Darkness unto Light, this gift of life: tamaso maa jyotirgamaya.

It is probably to chase Lights that we come from Darkness. But it is not as if all of us carry our essential meanings and pursue them, do we? We are too many different and varied beings, we do different and varied things, we very often do what we are not meant to do, or jet off in contrary directions to our purpose. We vow to do right, we harness ourselves to the purposes of achieving wrong, we proclaim dharma and enact adharma, we feign to embrace all — Sabka saath, Sabka vikas, Sabka vishwas or some such thing has been playing wastefully on loop — and then some of them we embrace we stab in the back and leave bleeding. Happens. We are like that. We say one thing, do another. We call for Light, we proceed towards summoning Darkness.

And we have done this so long now we have mixed up Light and Darkness, we do not know which is which. We have wounded Light. We have dealt sores in Darkness. Go chasing Light someday, and you will know. A good place to do that is in the sky. Lift yourself up. Up, up and up, through the dust and the smog and whatever muck there is, and through the clouds and the layers of wind below and above that make a flaky sandwich of clouds, and then through the clouds above the clouds until you are where there is nothing above but layers of Light and layers of Darkness. Try getting there for a start. Keep an oxygen mask handy, be warmly clothed and shod, it’s cold there, like mercury dripped, frozen and fallen kind of cold. So take care while you journey up.

Once there, you will find Light and you will find Darkness. In equal measure or in differentials of more and less. If in Light, there will forever be darkness to chase. If there is Darkness, there will be Light somewhere round the bend. That’s how things are, where there is Light, there will also be Darkness for each gets distinguished by the other. One separates from the other and then merges into the other. That’s how it is, you’ll see it up there. A darkening of things. And a lightness, a crystal lightness curling away. And there is Darkness, boring into itself, like marks of wounds, or like evidence of deed wrongly done. And there is forever a line which tells one from the other, and those lines mark the choice between one thing and another. And while up there between layers of Light and layers of Darkness, the choice is clear, you pick one or the other, and you become who you are.

If the fight’s in fitness

And if it’s a fight for right

It can’t be for darkness

It must be for light.