There’s a black me. There’s a white me.

There’s also a white you and a black you, isn’t there? There is a black and white to everyone.

The white is for everyone to see, for small talk and school and business meetings. The white is everywhere. That’s all you see. That’s all there is supposed to be. Different shades of white. Yellowish white, grayish white, milk-white, steel-white, old white, fresh white. 6 billion shades on the face of this planet, and all must be in white. There must be diversity, there must be unique marks and differentness in colour. There must be strata and groups, and all of this must be in white alone. There’s white flowing between people, whiteness changing shades. Eskimos have 11 words for white. You see a thousand different whites doing a million different white things all around you, and there’s no confirmation from anywhere that there’s any black at all. You look at this for some time, then you take the hint and you become white for all practical purposes.

The black is not allowed to come out of the dark interiors of the skull. You’re not sure where it belongs, although amid this white-cloaked exteriors, there were some oblique clues in a few places that the black is disapproved. It just never was authorized. But the black won’t just go away, will it? You wonder how to get rid of it, where to put it down, and it’s just hard. The black writhes and swirls inside you and sometimes makes you do things. But you’ve embraced white so hard. Whenever you embrace too hard, you do it with your eyes closed. That’s what you have done. You have clasped your arms around white and you hold on, and you stomp down the black and fill yourself with white, trying to be a shade of white, your own unique shade, although you don’t have many colours to choose from. And your ‘white for all practical purposes’ self tries to simply get rid of the things that the blackness sometimes makes you do. You create mental blocks, and rules and private rituals, but sometimes you look for some blackness beneath the white all around you.

But mostly you try to be white, and think of the black in you as something you didn’t mean, and since you actually fail to explain it in more concrete terms, you try to send those thoughts to exile. If they go away, you’re lucky. You’re established. You can be your own shade of white in this white world, and send, receive and channel whiteness.

But if they won’t go you look for secrecy. You give up being white and try to justify being a little black, then being a little darker, a little more, till you are so black you can’t turn back and no longer have the courage to hope that you can blend in amid the whiteness again. Your ‘white for all practical purposes’ self erodes to a rudimentary thin external skin of white, in poster colour shades this time, for the sake of itself. You radiate a necessary whiteness but nothing more. You become black, and get further and further into it, unnecessarily, deliberately, forcefully getting rid of any remaining whiteness in you, because the Primal Condition was that black and white may not co-exist. That a thing is either white, or black. It had better be white, but there’s never any grey. You see it everywhere. In movies and books which are most popular. Either he’s a black guy or a white guy. If some want to make a difference by introducing a grey guy, it’s only to take you close to him in such a way that you finally like him, and you brain acknowledges him as being actually white.

Anyway, in your black world, chances are that you’re not at peace.

You’ve never heard of any justification for black, so you can’t find anything to justify yourself now, because you have become mostly black. And then you can do nasty things. Either to yourself or to others. If you do things to yourself, no one cares. If you do nasty stuff to others, you spill some black onto this white-coated world and it gets everyone’s attention and no one’s comfortable with it because it’s so prominent and loud and eye-catching against all the white. This is why there are procedures to prevent this spillage, to cover it up with white.

If you’re at peace in your black world, it means you’ve found justification for it. That directly implies that you have found the justification for white, too, because only a person who can justify black can justify white. And your world isn’t just black any more. You live in grey, and there are no clefts, no sharp boundaries between black and white. And you’ve done something rare. I have nothing more to tell you then.

And you realize that a world of just one colour must necessarily be without meaningful justification for that colour, because meaningful justification for one colour is nothing but the meaningful justification for the diversity of colours, which at one stroke justifies both black and white, and even other colours, which you haven’t seen.

This world of white is, therefore, a blind embrace. So fiercely must you cling that you must keep your eyes closed and not see what actually you’re clinging to. You’re clinging to opacity, to brilliance and light and surface. What you’ve given up is the darkness that comes with depth, that comes with invaluable emptiness and silence, that comes with the end, that comes with the Primal Void, the Circle, the principle that has built Everything.

This society tells you to avoid black. It is taboo. If you can’t avoid it, you are to be taken to secure facilities and concealed under white.

That’s still okay. We have measures for that. The only thing we have no measures for is the mixture of black and white. So please, please, keep them away from each other and sharply defined. There is to be no grey.

This is what makes us divide and go either into white (which is preferred) or into black. This is what makes us want to get rid of black if we are mostly white, or get rid of white if we are mostly black. This is what makes us want to drive at white in the first place. It’s not meaningful.

Keep your black. Just don’t tell anyone if you think there might be trouble. Keep it there. It’s all around, simmering, bubbling beneath the white.

And since there’s no justification for it and it still exists, it’s sort of more powerful than the white which leans on approval and authorization for its support. Black is everywhere. Everyone has it. One who admits to having it is stronger than one who has embraced white blindly. White people are stronger than black people because that’s the way the society is wired, but the universe, well, the universe is wired in such a way that greys are the strongest, because the universe is itself grey.

Keep your black. I’m telling you this because I worry about black more than about white. Keep it. And don’t isolate them. They’re grey, together.

Once you’ve done that, maybe you’ll find other colours that are neither black nor white, and haven’t been defined. It’ll be great. But please, please, once you find them, don’t try to make them black or white. Add it to the grey. It’ll look good. I hope you’ll be wise enough then not to make the mistake we’ve already made once.

1Life.