One of the most fascinating distortions that has taken place in human consciousness concerns our relationship with Light and Darkness. From childhood, we are taught to seek the Light (be only a good one) and avoid the Dark (shame on you, slust! you will burn in Hell). Light is associated with God, goodness, spirituality, growth, and truth. Darkness is associated with fear, danger, sin, ignorance, and destruction. We have become so accustomed to this worldview that we rarely stop to ask a simple question: what if reality is not that simple? What if the issue is not Light or Darkness, but the fact that we have forgotten how to see their wholeness?

I have always been struck by one contradiction. If we look at nature, nothing is born from light. A seed germinates in the darkness of the soil. A child develops in the darkness of the womb. Mushrooms emerge from the forest floor. Most processes of transformation take place away from the light and beyond human sight. Even our bodies heal and restore themselves more deeply during the night than during the day.

Darkness has never been the opposite of life. Darkness has always been the space in which life begins. Darkness IS life. 

It is no coincidence that many ancient traditions associated the Great Mother with primordial matter itself. The word matter carries the same symbolic essence as Mother, the vast field that contains infinite possibilities for the birth of new forms. Before anything becomes visible and manifested, it exists in an unmanifest state, in darkness, in potential, in the fertile void.... 

Interestingly, the word matrix did not originally mean a computer simulation or an artificial system, as many people understand it today. It comes from the Latin matrix, meaning "womb," "uterus," "mother's body," or "source of generation." The root of the word is connected to mater, "mother." From the same root come words such as mother, maternal, matter, and material. In other words, at the very foundation of language, matter and mother once belonged to the same symbolic field. The matrix was not a trap but a space of potentiality, a place where life had not yet taken form, yet already contained the possibility of infinite forms. It was the Great Womb of Creation from which worlds, ideas, beings, and destinies emerge. Perhaps this is why many ancient mythologies imagined the primordial source of existence not as a radiant throne in the heavens, but as a vast, dark, fertile void, not the absence of life, but the space in which life is preparing to be born. In this sense, Darkness is not the opposite of creation but its first home. It is where a seed begins to germinate, where a child develops within the womb, and where a new version of a human being is formed long before it becomes visible to the world. Even our bodies seem to remember this ancient wisdom. Many of the most important restorative processes occur not in the brightness of day, but in the darkness of night. As the sun sets, the body begins producing melatonin, a hormone that supports rest, recovery, cellular repair, and healthy aging. Across many spiritual traditions, darkness has also been associated with intuition, dreams, inner vision, and the ability to perceive what remains hidden from ordinary sight. Whether viewed through the lens of biology, psychology, or spirituality, the message is remarkably similar: darkness is not merely the absence of light. It is a fertile space of restoration, transformation, and emergence. Much of what eventually becomes visible in our lives first takes shape in the unseen.

Modern humanity, however, has become increasingly disconnected from this dimension of reality. We are offered a vision of God that exists only as Light. God becomes order, correctness, purity, and a set of ideals to which we must aspire. We are encouraged to continuously cleanse ourselves of everything uncomfortable, painful, contradictory, or inconvenient... Anger... Fear... Jealousy... Grief... Doubt... The shadowy parts of our own nature... 

The impression is created that the spiritual path consists of becoming so enlightened that nothing truly human remains within us. Life tells a different story. A person does not become whole by rejecting their darkness. A person becomes whole by living it. Because within the darker regions of the psyche live our rejected desires, fears, instincts, gifts, creativity, vitality, and power. Everything we once decided was unacceptable. Everything exiled from consciousness in service of becoming a "good," "spiritual," or "evolved" person.

This is precisely why crises are often so transformative. They shatter the image. They dismantle illusions. They return us to the inner darkness we have spent years trying to escape. The more I observe people, the more I notice that many seek spirituality as a way of avoiding their own depths. They want to reach the bright rooms without entering the basement. Yet the basement never disappears. It continues shaping life from behind the scenes until we gather the courage to descend into it.

In countless myths, the hero passes through death, the underworld, or the dark night of the soul. This is not a mistake on the path to God. It is part of the path itself. Because if God is truly the source of all existence, then God cannot exist only in the Light. In fact, God is grounded in Darkness... in this matter... in YOU! when you shame yourself, you shame God... 

The Divine must also be present in birth and death. In order and chaos. In certainty and mystery. In creation and destruction. In what we call Light. And in what we call Darkness.

Perhaps one of the greatest substitutions ever made was convincing humanity to fear the very abyss from which it emerged. To fear the chaos from which creativity is born. To fear the void from which new meaning arises. To fear the shadow within which so much of our power is hidden.

We have learned to worship Light while distrusting Darkness. Yet nature continues telling a different story. A story in which every birth begins in darkness. Every transformation requires a period of uncertainty. Every living thing moves through cycles of dissolution and renewal.

The older I become, the less I experience Darkness as an enemy. Instead, I increasingly experience it as the Great Mother... the vast field of existence that demands nothing, promises nothing, and yet contains every possible future waiting to be born. And it is up to me to take it all!  

And perhaps this is why the deepest encounters with ourselves rarely happen when we look upward in search of Light. They happen when we find the courage to descend inward and meet what we have been taught to call Darkness. The place where ready-made answers disappear. Where inherited beliefs lose their authority. Where, in the midst of uncertainty and mystery, something genuinely alive begins to emerge.