A positive, and in particular a romantic, fantasy can be easily visualized as a tunnel or cave entrance filled with bright light. It draws you toward it with the life inside that is illuminated so brightly. They are truly beautiful. If you approach one in your mind, you can step inside, and for a moment be surrounded by the light and life that is promised to you. Pay very careful attention and you will be able to see if there is anything dark inside. The fantasy itself will appear in no way dark, but it contains something of a shadow at its edges. If you do not notice one, try your hardest to make the fantasy as real as possible. Live in it, and see what your days would be like if it came to pass. Make it so real that you can for a moment believe you are there. If you can do that, you will find that it does not fulfill the deepest desires of your heart that at first inspection you thought that it would. There will be something missing or something empty and devoid of meaning. That is the darkness that you had not yet seen. With practice, you can become better at seeing the darkness from the start.
You may wonder why so many fantasies should contain such darkness. Why can they not be pure and and wholly good? The answer lies in the fact that your heart and mind are unlikely to be entirely undamaged or infallible. Your heart like any other part of you can be damaged, and though it always seeks what it knows will make it whole, it does not know the path to that wholeness infallibly. It is as likely to go down the wrong path as the right one in the pursuit of its very right goal. This happens because your heart has to rely on your mind to rationally formulate the directions to the destination and the very conceptualization of the destination itself. It is your heart which can be damaged by negative experiences, causing it to journey toward wholeness, and it is your mind which from those same experiences can learn the wrong ways to travel. It is the function of your mind to create and fill in the details of your fantasies in such a way that most attracts your heart toward what it believes to be the light. And the brighter the light, the more darkness may go unnoticed or ignored.
Even though your fantasies may have dark elements, it cannot be denied that they feel bright and full of life. This is for the simple reason that they are. They are still so much better and more beautiful than what you may have yet experienced in reality, that the darkness that is there can be missed or overlooked. You may also have grown accustomed to darkness and so are no longer looking very carefully at the edges of the light to discriminate which parts of the darkness are part of the fantasy and which are part of your existing model of the world. The fantasy then is in and of itself a worthy goal because it contains the clearest image of what you at this time can believe would be a better place. It provides something which the heart knows to be truly worth seeking. It is your goal to pursue the fantasy and learn to distinguish between what is good within it and what is dark and to be avoided. Your direction, however, is undeniably toward the fantasy.
Once you accept this, you have a positive direction to move toward, but there is then the obvious concern of whether you can trust yourself to distinguish between what is light and dark within the fantasy–and to have the strength to reject the darkness even if it means that some of the light may be diminished in the process. You want to be reassured that things will work out, that you will find what you desire, and that you will not fall into the power of a dark fantasy and be consumed by it. There is sadly no assurance which can be given in your situation. If you cannot trust your own mind–and no one is saying that you should–there is simply nothing which you can do from within your mind to correct the problem. A deceit is always possible, yet you must still make decisions and act in the world. The only way to avoid this is for you to withdraw from the world and life. You must not do this.
The only way forward for you is to navigate toward whatever light and beauty you are capable of seeing, understanding that you cannot trust yourself to not fall into the darkness of a fantasy. There is no promise in life that you will avoid Hell, but you can be sure that you get there in an honest and courageous attempt to find the light. Then you can at least find peace knowing that your intentions were as pure as it was possible for them to be. And if you do discover that what you thought to be Heaven was really a hellish fantasy, you will also find that with a modicum of honesty, courage, and pure intention, that even the darkest of Hells can be transformed into a more heavenly paradise than your mind could ever have imagined.
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