I have a vivid dream life. Long ago, I taught myself to fly, so I never fall anywhere. I often jump off of buildings because I can. Sometimes I jump UP on them. Not infrequently, I find myself fighting dark creatures. Often, I win; sometimes I am forced to retreat and regroup. Always, though, I fight. I never have the dream of running slowly while something pursues me, any more. They always meet my face.
Several nights ago, I had an interesting dream I will pass along in support of a larger point. I was fighting Lord Voldemort, from the Harry Potter books (I own all the movies, and probably watch one of them at least once a month). I was “winning”, but suddenly realized I was being stupid. I came down (I was floating), and hugged him, and told him “I love you, Tom”, and felt energy from my heart pouring into him.
(If I have any readers (an open question), some will part company here. So be it. It will likely be political again soon.)
I felt it. It was sincere. I looked at this spirit of darkness, and realized how hellish it was to be him. I was not so naive that I thought that he would suddenly change his ways, but the effort had to be made. I was not afraid of him. I knew I could defeat him. I was in no danger. (and in the event, he ran, and regrouped with another “Deatheater”, and tried again to attack, with no success).
Love is more powerful than anger, and you cannot permanently defeat the spirit of darkness with violence. Love, in this sense, is a type of aggression: you are sending out an energy that they cannot combat. This is, of course, the mythical symbolism that Joanne Rowling employed in her books.
Now, obviously, there are times when we need to treat other human beings, in effect, as objects to be disposed of. There are evil people who simply need to be ushered to the next world with as little delay as possible. There is no do-gooder idealism here.
At the same time, if the task is building a peaceful–yet energized, interesting–world, then we cannot meet hate with hate. [I will note, that this is different from claiming that you should not meet violence with violence. That claim is stupid. War solves many things; you simply don’t have to hate your enemy.]
As I thought about this more deeply, I got to thinking about the relative powers of light and darkness, understood as on some level empirical energies. We tend to think of the universe as mostly dark, since that is what appears to our eyes to fill the spaces between stars. The universe, in this imaginary picture, is a vast–infinite, possibly–space, filled here and there with motes of light. Much like an atom, actually.
Yet, it is a FACT that much of space is filled with all sorts of energies our eyes simply can’t process: gamma rays, x-rays, etc.
More importantly, it is a premise of Quantum physics that, as Richard Feynman put it, “one square meter of empty space has enough energy in it to boil all the oceans on Earth”. This is a postulate of one of the most successful scientific theories of all time.
Needless to say, this is counterintuitive. Yet, can we not hypothesize with some justification that LIGHT–energy–is the dominant presence in the universe, and darkness merely a misperception of reality?
Certainly, this is a claim that has been made by many.
Can we not view all the evils of the world merely as temporary errors, that will sort themselves out in time? This is a conjecture not readily amenable to proof–although I suppose we could falsify it in the near term by blowing substantial parts of ourselves up, or falling into the darkness of totalitariansim–but is it not on some level comforting? And to the extent it facilitates a mental state compatible with achieving that aim, is it not “true”, in the sense that it supports its own end?