Once darkness went to see God and implored, “Lord this sun of yours is out to get me. I am exhausted. He starts chasing me at dawn and only after much trouble leaves me alone in the evening. What wrong have I done? What kind of enmity is this? Why is this sun following me and harassing me? I barely manage to rest after a hectic day when once again I find him standing at my door at dawn. Again I have to run for my life, again I have to escape. And this has been going on since eternity. I have run out of patience. I can’t take it anymore. I beg you, please make him understand.”

It is said that God called the sun and asked, “Why are you after darkness? What wrong has he done you? Why the enmity? What grievance do you have against him?”

“Darkness?” asked the sun. “I have been wandering the universe since time immemorial, but I have never come across darkness. I don’t know who darkness is. Where is he? Please bring him before me so that I may ask his forgiveness. come to know him, and stay out of his way.”

Infinite time has passed since this incident took place and the matter is still pending in God’s files; he has still not been able to bring darkness before the sun. He never can, and it is never going to be resolved. How can you bring darkness before the sun? Darkness has no positive existence of its own. Darkness is merely the absence of light. How can the absence of the sun be brought into the presence of the sun? No, darkness can never be brought before the sun. How can darkness be where there is light?

How can death be where there is life? Either there is no life at all, or else there is no death. Both cannot be true together. We are alive, but we don’t know what life is. And this ignorance makes us believe in the certainty of death. Ignorance is death. The ignorance of life itself becomes the phenomenon of death. If, by the grace of existence, we could come to konw the life that is within, a single ray of that knowing would destroy forever this ignorance that one die, or that one has died at some time in the past, or that one will die at some time in the future.

We do not know the light that we are, and we become scared of the darkness that we are not. The question is only of life, there is nothing like death at all. When one knows what life is, only then does life exist, but when life remains unknown there is only death. Either we know we are life, then there is no death, or we do not know we are life, and in that case death alone is, there is no life.

Parable told by Osho from https://www.osho.com/