Time divides all things into white, black & gold.
White is the beginning. Life has a solid structure. Ideals are clear & shining. There is a road that leads to the place one is going. Life is pure. You look ahead of you and see that things will stay pure forever. You are a good person.
Black is the middle. Nothing makes sense anymore. There are roads, but they are tangled up and none of them lead anywhere. None of them are pure. Your moral structures, your ideals, none of them shed any light on the choices confronting you. You are lost and forced to choose between poisons as you wander in circles.
Gold is the end. The road did lead somewhere after all. Now you look back. You can see the meaning of the black and of the white. Your journey is over but you have gained something you will keep forever. What began as idealism has turned into wisdom. Wisdom is the place where ideals and reality meet. You will take this wisdom with you to your new beginning, when you go back to the white and start to dream again.
These three phases exist in all things and circulate through our lives on a micro and macro level. All three phases must happen for evolution to occur.
But sometimes people get stuck in the white. They don’t want to leave purity behind to wander in the muck. You see this in Christians and Romantics.
Christians try to control their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions, their actions, their sexuality. They believe that if they entered the black there would be no end to it- nothing on the other side. They don’t want to leave the purity. Sometimes they choose death over dirty hands, believing they will go to heaven this way but they won’t. Because heaven is gold. Unless you wander in the darkness you will never get there. You will simply be reborn right where you left off, in white- the world of beginnings.
Romantics are the same. They love the purity of a love that is shiny and new but shrink in horror from a love that has been touched by shit and grime. But this cannot be. Nothing can live in the white world for long. There is no sustenance there. We get our food from killing and money from playing games. We deceive and destroy to survive. If we are unwilling to do the dark deeds ourselves we attach to those who will do them for us. Then they touch us with their dirty hands. Nothing can stay clean, not even love. Not if it wants to live.
But the Romantic cannot bear this. They discard their tarnished penny and search for a shiny new one. They are trapped in white. The world of endless repetition.
There are dangers in the black world as well. In the white world, we were guided by belief structures. When these crack and we are wandering directionless, it is tempting to reach for darker beliefs. But this isn’t the time to build new mental structures because they will only reflect our pain, not the truth. In the dark world all roads are twisted. You see only a few feet ahead of you. You have to keep struggling, fighting, digging. This is no time to make sense of it all. You have no distance. And if you allow dark structures to be erected in your mind these can keep you trapped in the dark world forever. That is hell.
Gold has dangers too. You don’t want to reach it prematurely. Gold is the harvest- once you reach it, the time for growth is over. Think of artists struggling to create under the weight of being star, icon & hero. Think of the person so dignified they can hardly move. Gold is a fixative. The journey has ended and now it is safe to sit in comfort and extract the lessons from all that has happened. But until enough experiences have taken place there will not be much wisdom to extract.
Another danger is to skip to the gold phase altogether. To start a war, to fight it, then immediately to start the next one. There has to be a pause. A time when you look backwards to process all that has happened. Now the game has ended and you can see how all the pieces fit together. What was worthwhile & what wasn’t? When a person actively sifts through their experiences, their next new beginning will start at a higher level than before. Gold causes us to ascend. It forms the stairway to heaven.