Acharya Prashant (AP): We have a fear of darkness. Being the physically evolved creatures that we are, darkness has always been a threat to us in the course of evolution. A part of our primordial psyche continues to remain afraid of darkness even to this date irrespective of our technological progress, irrespective of the control we exercise over day and night, over energy and power; human beings are still nervous when it comes to darkness and we are not talking of little babies here. Even grown-ups are never very comfortable with absolute darkness. The reason obviously is body identification.
The most important physical sense that we have, the sense we are the most identified with becomes dysfunctional in darkness — the eyes. And if the physical sense becomes dysfunctional, the body-identified creature feels that his very identity has become defunct.
In our ancient mind, our physical well-being is directly related to our ability to defend ourselves against aggression and to be able to look around for opportunities of all kinds and gather food. None of which can happen without the aid of eyes and without the aid of light. That's why in our vocabulary, darkness continues to remain an unpreferred word.
Those of us who would like to venture into the psyche of man might be getting a hint regarding the origin of racism here. The more body identified you are, the more darkness will threaten you. The more body identified you are, the more unsettling will be the word ‘dark’ to you.
As things stand, unfortunately, most of us are not only body identified, we are only body identified. All our other identifications are actually branches of the root ‘body identification’. You might be identified with a lot of other things as well, but if you will go into those identifications, you will find that fundamentally they come from your feeling that you are the body.
