The dark side.
It conjures images of Darth Vader, Voldemort, the Wicked Witch of the West and Sauron: beings of great magic and heartless cruelty; characters from literature and film that we love to hate. But what is it about the perfect story villain that is so attractive?
So often we feel tossed about by life’s challenges and struggles. We feel helpless to the randomness of crime, to the fear of pain and loss, to the threat of time’s ever ticking clock. The dark side represents a quick and dirty antidote to those feelings of helplessness. Easy power. Illusions of control. The false promise of immortality.
This is the allure of the dark side.
Human beings having been telling stories to explore these ideas of dark and light for thousands of years and it is one of the most common and prevalent motifs in mythology, religion and folklore. Even today some of the most popular movies, books and stories explore the relationship between the powers of good and evil. These modern stories usually have a clearly defined hero who must confront a dastardly villain. The villain seems to have the easy power and the hero must always strive. The hero must defeat the villain.
But the villain is not the dark side.
The villain represents the fear of our own darkness, the fear of who we COULD become without the light. Within every human being lies the potential for cruelty and hate as well as for goodness and decency. As much as we might like to think of ourselves in simple terms of either one or the other, the truth is we are both hero and villain. And in all the stories the hero must come into relationship with fear.
This deep primal fear causes us to repress this darkness and hide our faces from our own tendencies toward violence, for malice, shame and hatred. Instead of confronting, we avoid the dragon that lies at the entrance to our dark cave. But that repression causes our dark inclinations to grow in power. They become hungry when we refuse to acknowledge their existence.
The challenge then is to come into meaningful relationship with your own darkness. We must challenge the villain and conquer our fears so that we are free to enter the darkness alone. But you may ask, doesn’t exploring the dark side make one more vulnerable to it? Shouldn’t you fight evil and darkness rather than befriend it?
Exploring your own darkness makes you stronger, develops your night vision and builds confidence. It also helps you see what alternate futures are in store for you if ignore your potential for evil. Temptation is an advance notice of what you could become. It gives you a glimpse of the consequences of a certain choice or set of choices without bearing down with the full load. But the value of exploring the darkness doesn’t end with just prevention of an unwanted future. There is power in the dark self and befriending it can help us to check wanton power.
Nietzsche wrote “for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” While Nietzsche seems to be cautioning us to be wary of the darkness I believe that self-refection requires this deep gaze, this search inward to reach any truly transcendent state. To face the dragon, is to confront the fear of the darkness. We conquer our fear by moving toward the darkness not by hiding or avoiding it.
Questions you may ask to begin to discover your dark side
- What am I most afraid of?
- What is something I would prefer people didn’t know about me?
- What bad behaviors in others do I find most contemptible?
- Who do I judge the most harshly? And why?
- What would be the worst insult to my character?
- What historical figure do I find most reprehensible?
- What image does my darkness conjure?
Knowing what is down that dark alley or what monster lurks in the forest at night makes us more capable of managing it. Knowing our own dark selves and our own potential for evil is exactly how to avoid becoming it. And fighting the dragon of fear is precisely the training we need to cultivate our greatest selves.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” –Joseph Campbell
