The Darker Mind

"The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness." — Nikos Kazantzakis.

The darker mind is a misleading term, as it implies singularity. The darker mind is a split one, always, with no exception. It isn’t to be confused with an evil one, those can be single-minded, just as the spiritual and kind ones can be. The dark mind is the one that left the game and watched their peers continue on with joy and intent, wondering, do they know this is a game? This kind of mind is cynical and dreams of complete self-sufficiency, yet depends on substances that alter emotions. They hate people, love women. A darker mind will struggle to sleep at night and beg for rest during the day. While with a partner, these people will itch at the thought of marriage as it screams constriction, but they’ll understand it on a one night stand. It’s a lonely life to be this kind of person; you’ll question your every decision and dance somewhere between art and practicality, and only have enough to give either side half their heart. The lucky ones choose, the really lucky ones find success, some even after death as is the fate of many painters. The musicians with the darker mind find the most success, they make the art form that is the fastest to affect the soul, but even then, some of them don’t see twenty-eight. The unlucky ones, the majority, have varied life issues such as addiction and many other predictable things. Some of them live and die in dead-end jobs and fail at home to create or care or feel.

Nobody quite knows what to do with these people, their friends laugh at their misadventures, and their loved ones choose to only see their good intentions, their potential. But the darker mind sees itself in multiple lights, a cold one and a golden one. The cold one is like the greyish light that paints everything in a mundane lacquer, this is the place of hangovers, regrets, worries, fears, and remorse. This is the place that they have conversations with themselves in the form of stress, a sour taste, aches, and pains. This is where they’ll reject last night’s epiphany and lay still, apathetic and changeless. These people are so aware of this figurative cold light and what it represents that they may find themselves altered entirely by an actual greyish light. This ‘cold light’ is often mistaken for depression; when this happens; medicines are prescribed, killing the cold light, and the gold with it.

The gold light is something to behold and has many different names. The regular minds will see it in others and call it passion or ambition, lust or vanity. It could hit you through the form of intoxication or when you orgasm and your aspirations flash before you like your past does before you perish. It could be waiting for you on lips you’ve never kissed or somewhere around ninety miles per hour. Some people like to see it as an alter ego, or simply, the ego. Some will think of it as higher consciousness or if they’re inclined toward religion, the devil's temptation. They might be right. What’s for sure though is there is not a single piece of art on earth that didn’t come from this gold light, some will feel it less than others but it has touched every creative soul. For those who don’t know, when it comes, you will feel the grey fade away like when a codeine high sets in at a slow rate, if you don’t know that either, you probably aren’t burdened with the darker mind. It can punch too sometimes, like the burn after a shot or like the dump of adrenaline you feel at near death. This light will tell you that you’re ten foot tall and holds back the cold light that intends to belittle you, but it can’t last forever although many have tried. A few are known as the Twenty-Seven Club.

The darker mind seems like a strange thing to call something that deals with these lights but I think the dark stems from the place in-between. The constant indecision is figuring out which part of yourself is telling you the truth, a mind at war. There aren’t easy answers, just people who’ll tell you there is, the false prophets and people with designs for you. It seems to be something that can only be worked out by the individual and has been, by some. After all the lights are mere perceptions, one made with the same matter as the other, just perceived differently. The oldest cave paintings ever found are over forty-thousand years old, located in Indonesia, people travel from all corners of the earth to see them. The humans who painted them were no different to us anatomically. We marvel at their art but rarely presume their personal struggle, but one would never have existed without the other. Maybe when we’re gone, all that matters is what we left.