On being human, embracing your dark side

The Dragon serves as a metaphore for who I am in the world. The dragon is extravagant, of mythical proportion and protects it's treasure. It has a scaly skin that protects him and a soft underbelly to cuddle up against. Huge wings to protect it's loved ones and a somewhat poisonous smoke rising from it's nostrils. According to Chinese astrology it's also lucky in love.

I identify. I'm an extraverted type of person, I enjoy being the center of attention and even my physical size is in accordance with my presence. I am fiercely protective of the people close to me and the poisonous smoke translates to my sometimes sarcastic wit. In love I am sure I am one of the luckiest people ever.

The relationship of the dragon with the rest of the world is often quite strained. Sure, some authors have written beautiful fantasies about man and dragon becoming united in purpose. Dragonriders of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey comes to mind as an attempt to combat the negative image of the dragon. For the most part though, dragons give the knight in shining armour a reason to bear arms.The knight cannot exist in a vacuum, it has to have a dragon to kill. If there's no real life enemies, we'll invent one.

All this makes me ponder the darkness and light in my own metaphoric relationship to the dragon. Do I also possess the strength, ruthlessness and killer instinct of the dragon? Would I too slay the knight who so boldly steps forward to claim my treasure? I believe the answer is yes.

Each of our qualities as a human being, under duress becomes a pitfall. All good intentions and wonderful deeds aside, we all have a mean streak as well. Sometimes we fail to live up to the high standards we set for ourselves. As much as we would like to deny it, we sometimes feel justified in our outrage. Even if we like to think of ourselves as non-violent, peaceful creatures, transforming righteous indignation into forgiveness is a daunting task.

When it get's right down to it we're willing to view someone people as monsters, we dehumanize them in order to get away from an uncomfortable truth: We all have the capacity for evil.
We divorce ourselves from our own dark side at great peril. Ugly things grow in the dark. By not embracing our own dark side we run the risk of polarizing, becoming dogmatic about our own view of good and evil and eventually we find justification for doing evil deeds. We kill the dragon for the treasure. In doing so we create a dark stain on our own soul. Whenever we refuse to own and recognize our own dark instincts, we actually feed the darkness. Embracing the darkness inside means literally bringing it to light.