Today we ask you to consider how darkness can create light.

Normally one thinks of darkness as the antithesis of light.  Darkness snuffs out light.  Darkness is frightening.  It is an absence, a nothingness, an emptiness.

Emotional darkness feels bad.  Dark emotions include anger and despair.  Dark emotions are hot.  They are heavy.  They are sticky.  They may feel like a morass, a bog that you cannot escape, that drags you down and suffocates you.

But there is another way to think about darkness.

Good things happen in the dark.

Seeds germinate underground.  Life quickens in the womb.

One of the most magnificent things that happens in the darkness is the birth of a star.

Stars are born out of great, vast clouds of gas and dust.  The dust is dark.  It collects, it thickens, it becomes gravitationally dense.  It becomes hot, heavy, and sticky.  And it gets hotter, and heavier, and stickier.  

There is a sense of terrible pressure building.  Unbearable, suffocating pressure.  And it is dark in that dust cloud — so dark that all is blackness, and no stars can be seen.  

The dust swirls, and gets denser, and denser, until at last…

It ignites.  A star is born.

Darkness becomes light.  Light that blazes through the heavens.  Light that shines on worlds, and creates life.  Light that burns for billions of years, and can be seen across the universe.

That is how darkness creates light.

It is the same with human souls.  It is the darkness that creates light — the dark places, the dark emotions, the heaviness, the hotness, the stickiness.  This is all fuel for the great fusion reactor of the human soul.

Sometimes, when things get very heavy indeed, there is a chain reaction.  A human soul ignites, like a star.  This is what is sometimes called “enlightenment.”  It can happen to all of you.

So do not fear the darkness.  It is star stuff.