The Darker Side Of Darkness...

The dark blurs not just the senses and our responses , but also our principles and code of ethics.

The darkness of the night brings its own brand of intoxication. As the day's pressures relax, your defenses are lowered.Darkness brands you with a sense of obscureness,and you are more likely to say or do things that you wouldn't in full daylight. At night as you binge watch a TV series,read an exicting book,work on projects,chat with a friend , your decisions or responses are not likely to have the same sharpness as at daytime.

Your sense of discipline, your principles and your code of ethics- all seem to take a blury edge as the mind and body dull with the darker hours. Your alertness and performance are influenced by exposure to light and are dependent on the bodily circadian rhythm. Your amount of wakefulness, fatigue levels and your mind's alertness all have an impact on not just decision making but also on your strength and ability to stand on your principles.

Darkness gives us a sense of anonymity that promotes unethical behaviour.Not all can stay as true to their moral compass when there is lesser fear of discovery.Darkness fools our minds into believing that we are unseen,invisible.An experiment conducted to study if dishonesty increases in the dark concluded that it does promote morally questionable behaviour. The experimenters explained that when people experience impaired vision due to darkness.they conclude others also find it difficult to see them.

In a variation of the same experiment,dark glasses also affected the ethcal behaviuor of those wearing them.Their darkened vision led them to believe others couldn't see them clearly either.

Nighttime was never meant for communication or for work.It is the time when all defenses down,you are safe back home among people you trust and who believe in you .As light lessens, the body's master clock,which receives direct input from the eyes,tells the brain to inrease the production of melatonin,a hormone that makes you feel sleepy and to lower core body temperaatures.It is the time to let the day's stress slide away and relax into the darkness for rest and rejuvenation. Your defenses are down.

That is how it is with animals and was with humans as well till we discovered that we could create light to dispel darkness.And now,technology enables us to work at full optimum during night hours too .As the body struggles against its natural cycle, our brains may not yet have deceloped the new abilities needed to navigate darkness. In the dark hours our body struggles to work at full optimum.And so there are as many reasons to fear the dark as to welcome it .

Darkness exists only when there is no light and is dispelled the moment we switch it on . Meditation encourages you to seek light through the act of closing your eyes( which create darkness) . When the light of peace and happiness shines, quite often we respond by closing our eyes in prayer. In the light of God , we shut our eyes in reverence to assimilate that light within us.