Sanity in exile!

We are visual animals. Our sense of vision by far dominates all of our other senses. Day and night stand apart just because our visual sense diminishes by sunset!

Our eyes and only our eyes have partitioned time to day and night forever. Millions of years of an affair with our companion star (sun) has adapted our vision to its light and that has created the ever, day and night divide in our lives! But why is sunshine also so important in our mental health? Why the happy shining days and lonely black nights? Why light is life and darkness is death? One wonders if there is a biological link between life and light? Photosynthesis ofcourse comes to mind. But isn't that just for the plants? One thing is clear that in the cover of night everything blends together and for sure we lose our perception of colors and "colorful" is a word loaded with happy sentiments. But that hardly answers the question. The religious influence on our psyche can not be ignored in this case as any other. The phrase "let there be light" comes from the third verse of the book of Genesis : In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form, and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters and God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Culturally, wisdom and light have been in tandem as much as darkness and ignorance. But there could be a much deeper sense that light and life are interwoven together and that is in a cosmological sense.

We know to the best of our theories that after big bang the cosmos entered a dark epoch (dark ages) that lasted few billion years. The first ray of light had to wait for the first generation of stars to be born out of clouds of hydrogen gas. Life as we know it, also depends on chemical elements such as carbon that could only be made in the core of stars and so it had to wait for their birth. In that sense there would have been no life without light!*

* Bible didn't get this quite right!