Dark, Light and abolishing of duality

Today the sky is gloomy, mostly overcast with strong howling winds, coupled with terrible downpour. It was how the day started and it looks like it is how it will end too. It's not surprising to note that the sun rarely made itself visible, if at all, today. Times like these I worry about low lying flood prone areas, I pray that the people could take shelter to a safer and warmer place. Sadly, due to the imbalance in nature these strong category typhoons and instant flooding would be the norm. And of course, we are also in the midst of a pandemic, so sometimes I wonder how we can survive these almost impossible levels of calamities that befall our generation.

However, in this age of mute darkness we are somehow keenly forced to search and eventually appreciate the flimsy flicker of light. I remember in color theory (when I was still studying black and white photography eons ago) an object is called black/dark if it only absorbs light, while a white/bright object is known to reflect most colors. The theory suggests that in a setting of photography, there are three main players: the source of light, the object and the camera (which is our eyes). Hence, in this system the eyes only see the object in connection to the light it is reflecting. In reality, we cannot really see everything about the object, only how it plays with the light and it depends on our angle and distance from the object. In short, there are so many things at play in this setting, so many things to consider, photography is really not simple at all. It further explains that our brain and eyes are wired to see the contrast, we don't see what it is, we see what it isn't. For example, the room is bright, because there is absence of dark, taking this further, blue is the absence of yellow, green is the absence of red, hence there is what we call the forbidden colors blue-yellow, red-green. These color pairings automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, it is said that it is impossible to see them simultaneously because of the neurons in our eyes where red light exactly cancels the effect of green light (so with yellow and blue): try imagining reddish green or yellowish blue? Hope your brain won't go berserk.

However, visual scientists Crane and Piantida published a paper called "On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue," in 1983 they argued that these colors were realizable and even glorious to behold. They conducted experiments with artists who have integrity in color vocabulary and as a conclusion some of them perceived the combination of these forbidden colors, the answer lies in knowing how to look at them in the right way, but not everybody can achieve that. Those who successfully found the colors combined said that there was blurring of the boundaries between those two colors and that the colors seem to flood into each other. 

For others to experience such glorious color combination, there were a lot of scientific experiments dedicated to the refinement of method, but the scientists' ultimate answer is that it must be actually about abolishing the competitive cancelling of neurons between the forbidden colors.

I can't really explain this so well, but my point is our vision, based on scientific fact, can only go so far because we are largely basing it on the power of neurons which can actually cancel each other out. Maybe, to finally find the flicker of light in a space of darkness, we must try to cultivate something inside of us that can abolish the seemingly duality of color. That maybe, there was no duality at all, maybe it is all one and the same, but that largely doesn't fall easily to our rational brains. 

Okay, I might have lost my train of thought in this one, and it is actually difficult to make a thesis out of it, but what I am saying maybe is that darkness has a lot of potential for light, but we have to change/transform something inside of us to find that elusive holy grail of flimsy flicker of light.