THE LIGHT OF THE DARKNESS GAME FREE

He had successfully completed a drug treatment program and had maintained sobriety for more than a year. In Daniel, I could also see glimmerings of mature thought, of resolve, and of hope. But these realities did not tell the whole story. When I first met him, Daniel continued to throw temper tantrums whenever he was frustrated and appeared to lack the self-analytical abilities that one would expect in a twenty-year-old. One such thing was to “play chicken,” which consists of placing a lit cigarette in the bridge connecting two people’s forearms the first person to move his/her arm is designated the “chicken.” When Daniel arrived for his first session with me, he proudly displayed a rather severe self-inflicted burn from a couple of days earlier.Īlthough Daniel’s cognitive and physical development was that of a mature adult, his emotional and social development was clearly delayed. And although he had never physically hurt another person, Daniel often did things to inflict pain upon himself. On several occasions, for example, he had completely destroyed his parents’ home due to a sense of “uncontrollable” rage. During his first visit with me, Daniel said that he would, indeed, kill himself in two months, on his twenty-first birthday.Īmong the many things that I learned from exploring his history was that Daniel suffered from poor impulse control. For this reason, most of my patients were desperate and demoralized and some, like Daniel, were also acutely suicidal. Some years ago, a twenty-year-old Caucasian male, whom I will call Daniel, was brought to our outpatient clinic by his distressed parents because we handled cases of suffering that did not respond well to anti-depressive and mood-stabilizing medicines. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.

THE LIGHT OF THE DARKNESS GAME FREE

Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply… so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment… Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him.

The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. See during His historic travels to the West from 1911 to 1913, spoke about this reality of the human condition: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá 1 The eldest Son of Bahá’u’lláh and Head of the Bahá’í Faith from 1892 to 1921. Over the course of my career, I have come to appreciate more fully how the suffering that it gives rise to, while potentially devastating, also represents an opportunity for profound development.

As a clinical psychologist I often meet people who are facing existential stress. It is, perhaps, this form of stress that the world’s spiritual traditions have sought, most deeply, to address.

Unlike other animals, we experience stress related to events that have never occurred and will never occur we stress over the things that we have done or failed to do and we stress over the kind of person that we have become or that we wish we were. Quoting the Bible, a student of mine once said: “The light was in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” The wisdom embodied in these simple words often guide me when, in my work as a professor and practicing psychologist, I encounter people who are suffering what philosophers have called “existential stress.”Įxistential stress is specific to humans because of the complex inner world we experience through the reach of human consciousness.

The light of the darkness game