Finding Light Within the Darkness

Knowing that the world will always be burning, our choice is whether to settle into despair, or to use our energies and abilities to work for what we know to be good and right and kind.

The world is dark. It’s winter here in Boston, but it’s not just the skies that are dark these days. Wars, climate disasters, refugees displaced from their homes, and divisive politics seem to be everywhere in the world. The antidote? Most spiritual traditions have holidays that celebrate the light. Up and down my street, many people have left their beautiful holiday lights on in January to dispel the darkness.

This time of year, Buddhists, too, celebrate the light – quite literally, celebrating the Buddha's enlightenment. But this celebration is not about decorations and happy songs. It's about a man who went through hell. The Buddha left his privileged home and wandered for many years, seeing sickness and war everywhere he went. Overcome by so much suffering, he looked for spiritual teachers who could alleviate his pain. After years of wandering without finding answers, he sat down under a tree and resolved not to get up until his questions were answered.

The Buddha had hit rock bottom. As he sat under the tree, his mind did what happens to all of us when we sit still with no distractions -- his mind went wild. He was visited by every torment that his brain could muster. Sadness, rage, sexual longing, boredom. And the Buddha just sat through it all. Just sat there, unmoving. Finally, as the morning star rose, the Buddha experienced deep insight. His first words were, “Together with all beings, I have awakened.”

What did he wake up to? He discovered what’s there for all of us to see when we sit still and watch what our minds throw at us. He discovered that many of our demons dissolve with time, that there’s much more good in the world than we believe based on our narrow focus on what’s wrong, that most of the darkness eventually passes, and that most of the suffering is of our own making. And at the most fundamental level, he discovered that we are completely interconnected with everyone and everything, and that the separateness we feel is a painful illusion.

What Buddhism celebrates is the Buddha's descent into his own inner hell and his ability to see his way through that darkness. But what does this story have to do with the climate crisis, or rising hatred in the world, or the feud you’re currently having with a colleague at work? When problems seem overwhelming, our first impulse isn’t to look right at them. We search for distractions like parties and Netflix and doomscrolling on social media. And why not? Who would sign up to enter the hell realms that the Buddha experienced?

Yet the Buddha’s story reminds us that suffering is our most powerful teacher. Our despair about the world falling apart is exactly the place where we can see light inside of darkness. When we let ourselves really look, we see so much more than the narrow content of our tiny skulls or the sensational clickbait of media designed to paint the multicolored world with one brush. In the midst of wildfires and war, we see people being kind and decent to each other. The same aches and pains that we complain about can remind us how miraculous and unlikely it is that we exist in the first place. The challenge is to hold it all. Not just the darkness of cruelty and suffering, but the light that’s right here in front of us, right next door, right underfoot.

And then we have a choice. If light and darkness are always present, what’s our response? When the Buddha had his awakening, he considered keeping his insights to himself. Instead, he chose to devote the rest of his life to sharing what he knew, to make the world better. For forty years, he taught what he had discovered, passing on a way to live in a world filled with suffering that continues to offer healing and courage to this day. Knowing that the world will always be burning, our choice is whether to settle into despair, or to use our energies and abilities to work for what we know to be good and right and kind.

On the eve of what many believe is a new era of darkness, our choices about how we’ll go forward could not matter more.

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