Transformation is not an accident; it is essential to ongoing progress in the physical world. Abdu’l-Baha makes this clear, “Change and transformation are necessities of the contingent world” but “not of the Essence of Divinity.” Only in this temporal realm of the ever-changing physical world, and in the inner world of consciousness, is transformation necessary and repeated many times over; in the eternal realm of the spirit it is not, due to its “indivisible oneness.”

Thus, it is within our human capabilities to merge such opposites, and restore them to the hidden whole they already are. Recognizing that wholeness is the nature of Reality, we move along a continuum of awareness in steps and stages.

The essential oppositions, and the nature of transformation itself, can best be narrowed down to the core opposition of light and shadow. Light, an ancient symbol representing the qualities of radiance, sanctity, love, justice, and every spiritual attribute that emanates from divinity, is central to the world’s sacred traditions.

As it is said in the Bhagavad-Gita, “The Light of Lights He is, in the heart of the Dark shining eternally;” in Genesis (1:3-4), “And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God divided the light from the darkness;” and, in the Qur’an (24:35), “God is the light of the heavens and of the earth.” We are most in need of acquiring the attributes of light.

Though we have light all around us, and within us, we live in the shadow world, and the shadow world lives within us, too. Shadow, in the psychology of C. G. Jung, represents an archetypal image of the hidden, repressed, or unknown, which heightens even more the level of adversity we face in this world of illusion. Universal shadow tendencies (violence, crime, cruelty) exist in everyone. But only when “the creative interrelationship of light and shadow is accepted and lived as the foundation of this world is life in this world truly possible for man.” The shadow is “the paradoxical secret of transformation itself.”

            Both parts of the whole—light and shadow (or grace and adversity)—are necessary for transformation. Things are most sharply measured or defined by their opposites. Would we recognize what it means to be healthy if we knew nothing of sickness? Would the Easter story be complete without Jesus’s betrayal at the hand of Judas? Would poverty be an injustice without the existence of wealth? A conscious life finds meaning in these contrasts that impact and even transforms us.