Darkness and Light

Monday I had a safe place to go deep into a childhood memory that had been triggered last week. I realize now better why I have always been so shaken by the scene with the rats in Orwell's 1984. It isn't rats, specifically, but self-betrayal.

When I came out of the memory I had a sense of a tiny star in my wounded hand. And I wondered how much the world of such deep pain and evil is the same world as the world of deep spiritual experience. Do those experiences happen in the same place in the inside landscape?