Krishna: The Darkness Behind the Light

            My Painting - Janamashtami 2026

Every year, on Janmashtami, millions celebrate the birth of Krishna. There are songs, temples, midnight prayers, decorated cradles, butter, flowers, lamps and the familiar image of a beautiful blue child with a flute. We know Krishna as the mischievous child of Gokul, the lover of Radha, the friend of Arjuna and the teacher of the Bhagavad Gita.

But what if Krishna is not merely seen as a person who was born in history? What if the symbolism of Krishna’s name itself points towards something far more fundamental about existence?

The Sanskrit word Krishna is traditionally associated with darkness, blackness or that which is dark in colour. The word Shyam or Shyama also evokes a dark, deep, blue- black appearance. At first, this seems strange. Why would the divine be represented as dark? Our minds have been conditioned to associate light with goodness and darkness with ignorance. Light means knowledge; darkness means confusion. Light means life; darkness means fear. We illuminate our homes, our streets and our temples because darkness, psychologically, has acquired a negative meaning. But perhaps we have misunderstood darkness. Perhaps darkness is not necessarily the absence of truth. Perhaps sometimes darkness is what remains before the mind begins to divide reality into light and dark.

Think about deep sleep. Every night, something extraordinary happens to us. The entire world that we experience during waking disappears. The house disappears. Our relationships disappear. Our successes and failures disappear. Our worries disappear. Our name, profession, possessions, ambitions and even our sense of being a particular person disappear. The mind becomes quiet. The dream world also disappears. There is no mountain, no river, no family, no country, no enemy, no friend. There is simply no familiar world to interpret.

And yet, when we wake up, almost immediately, we say, “I slept very well.” “I had a deep sleep.” “I slept peacefully.” Something happened. The waking mind was absent, yet we do not ordinarily say, “I was destroyed.” We say, “I slept.” 

This is one of the great mysteries of consciousness. When we are awake, consciousness is filled with objects. We see, hear, touch, taste, think, remember and interpret. In dreams, the mind creates another world and experiences it as real while the dream lasts. But in deep sleep, the projections of the mind are temporarily unavailable.

There is no person sitting inside the darkness saying, “It is dark.” That distinction is crucial. We often imagine deep sleep as a black screen because the waking mind retrospectively interprets the absence of experience as darkness. But darkness itself is an interpretation. There is nobody in deep sleep standing outside the mind and reporting, “Everything is black.” The mind is simply not operating in its usual subject-object mode.

And perhaps this gives us a beautiful metaphor for Krishna: not darkness as ignorance or as evil but darkness as the unmanifest. The vastness before anything has been differentiated. The silence before thought. The space before perception. The ocean before the wave knows itself as a wave.

The Darkness of the Universe 

Look up at the night sky. What do we actually see? Blackness. Against that immense darkness appear stars, galaxies and nebulae. But the darkness itself is not an object sitting somewhere in space. It is the vast background within which objects become visible. The universe, as we ordinarily perceive it, is overwhelmingly dark. Light occupies only particular regions and reaches us from particular sources. The vastness between those sources appears black to our eyes. And this gives us another fascinating metaphor. The darkness is not necessarily something against which light exists. It is the space in which light becomes visible. The same idea appears in Krishna’s imagery. Krishna is traditionally portrayed as dark or blue-black. Yet the same Krishna is associated with extraordinary luminosity, as the light of consciousness, wisdom and love. This apparent contradiction may actually be the point. The source and the manifestation are not two different realities.

Why Does Krishna Appear Blue?

There is another beautiful symbolism here. Look at the sky. It appears blue. But there is no enormous blue ceiling covering the earth. The atmosphere scatters sunlight in such a way that the sky appears blue to our eyes. The blue is not an independent substance floating above us. It is a colour produced through the interaction of light, atmosphere and the limitations of human perception.

Now look at the vastness beyond the atmosphere. It is dark. From our geographical position on Earth, the universe appears black, while the atmosphere through which sunlight is scattered gives us the blue sky. This offers us a wonderful metaphor for Krishna. The dark and the blue can be seen as two expressions of the same vastness.

The dark represents the unmanifest. The blue represents the manifest. The infinite appears dark when there is nothing for the mind to differentiate. The same infinite appears blue when light interacts with a medium and perception begins. One is not necessarily the opposite of the other. They are two ways in which the same mystery can appear from different reference points. And perhaps this is why Krishna’s traditional colour is neither simply black nor simply blue. He is Shyam, a colour somewhere beyond our ordinary categories, like the deep blue-black of the sky just before dawn.

Then Comes Awareness

Now let us take the metaphor one step further or should I say backwards. Imagine the universe as an immense field of darkness. Then something becomes visible. A star appears. A galaxy appears. A planet appears. A tree appears. A human being appears. And eventually, within one of those human beings, something extraordinary happens. Awareness becomes aware of itself. 

A human being begins to ask: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is this universe? What remains when thought disappears? What was I before I became this person?

These questions are not merely intellectual questions. They are the beginning of the inward journey. The world we normally experience is already filtered through the mind. Colour, sound, shape, time, space, memory and identity are all experienced through the instruments available to us. The mind takes the enormous mystery of existence and turns it into a world that can be named. This is a tree. This is a person. This is my house. This is my body. This is happiness. This is suffering. This is light. This is darkness. Naming is useful. Without it, ordinary life would be impossible. But naming also creates boundaries. And Krishna, as the infinite, cannot ultimately be contained by a name. We call Him Krishna. We call Him Brahman. We call Him consciousness. We call Him existence. We call Him God. We call Him the Self. But every name is an attempt by the finite mind to point towards something that is beyond its categories.

Krishna as Sat, Chit, Ananda

Vedanta gives us perhaps the most beautiful pointer of all: Sat Chit Ananda. Existence. Consciousness. Bliss. Krishna is not merely an object existing somewhere in the universe. He points towards that which is fundamental to existence itself.

Sat - that which is.

Chit - consciousness or awareness.

Ananda - the fullness, peace and completeness that is recognised when the restless movement of seeking comes to an end.

And suddenly Janmashtami acquires another dimension. We usually celebrate Krishna’s birth. But perhaps the deeper celebration is the birth of awareness within us. The historical Krishna may have been born in Mathura. But the symbolic Krishna is born every time consciousness awakens to its own nature.

Every time we stop for a moment and observe a thought rather than becoming the thought, Krishna is closer. Every time anger arises and we see it without immediately becoming angry, there is a little more awareness. Every time fear appears and we can watch it without allowing it to define us, something has shifted. Every time we recognise that the person we call “I” is itself an appearance within consciousness, the flute of Krishna seems to become a little more audible.

The Midnight Birth

There is something especially beautiful about the fact that Krishna’s birth is celebrated at midnight. Why midnight? Perhaps mythology gives us a historical answer. But symbolism gives us another. Midnight is darkness. There is no brightness of the external world. The senses are quiet.

The ordinary activity of the day has withdrawn. And in that darkness, Krishna is born.

Could this be pointing towards an inward truth? The deepest recognition of consciousness does not necessarily begin when the mind becomes filled with more information. It may begin when the noise becomes quiet, when our accumulated identities become less important, when our endless commentary pauses, when we stop trying to become something and when, for a moment, we simply are. The Krishna of midnight is therefore profoundly different from the Krishna we construct in daylight. The daylight Krishna is an image. The midnight Krishna is an inquiry.

Who am I when the mind is quiet? What remains when the story of “me” temporarily disappears? What is present before I name it? What is present before I divide existence into this and that?

That is where the journey begins. Perhaps Darkness Is Not the Enemy. We spend much of our lives trying to escape darkness. We fear uncertainty. We fear not knowing. We want answers. We want definitions. We want certainty about tomorrow, relationships, money, identity and the future. But there is another possibility. Perhaps the inability to know everything is not a defect in existence. Perhaps it is an invitation. The unknown is vast. The mind is small. And the moment the mind understands its own limitation, humility begins.

This is where Krishna becomes especially relevant. Krishna does not tell Arjuna merely to acquire more information. He takes Arjuna through action, knowledge, meditation, devotion, detachment and ultimately self-knowledge. The journey is from confusion to clarity. From identification to observation. From fragmentation to wholeness. From “I am this limited individual” towards the recognition of a deeper identity. And perhaps that is the real meaning of bringing Krishna into the world. Not merely placing a beautiful idol in a cradle, but allowing awareness to be born inside the human being.

The Darkness and the Light Are Krishna

Perhaps we have spent too long dividing existence: darkness against light, matter against consciousness, body against spirit, world against God, human against divine. But Krishna’s deep blue-black form quietly challenges these divisions. The darkness is Krishna. The blue is Krishna. The light is Krishna. The silence is Krishna. The thought is Krishna. The observer is Krishna. The observed is Krishna. The universe appearing before consciousness is Krishna. And the consciousness in which the universe appears is Krishna.

This does not mean that every object is literally a deity in the ordinary sense. It means that the apparent multiplicity may have a deeper unity. The waves are many. The water is one. The colours are many. Light is one. The experiences are many. The awareness in which they appear may be one.

And so, on Janmashtami, perhaps we can celebrate something more intimate than the birth of a divine child in a distant age.

We can celebrate the possibility that the Krishna who appears to us as a dark, beautiful figure is pointing towards the mystery from which everything emerges. The darkness before the stars. The silence before thought. The stillness before the mind begins to interpret. The consciousness that remains through waking, dreaming and deep sleep. The infinite appearing as the finite. And perhaps the most beautiful part is this:

Krishna does not have to be found somewhere else. The search can turn inward. Sit quietly tonight. Let the mind settle. Let the world disappear for a few moments. Do not try to create an experience. Do not look for visions. Simply notice what remains when thoughts come and go.

Then perhaps Janmashtami becomes more than a celebration of Krishna’s birth. It becomes a celebration of our own awakening to what was never truly absent. The darkness was never merely darkness. The light was never separate from it. And behind both, perhaps, is the mystery that Krishna was always pointing towards:

Sat. Chit. Ananda.

Existence. Consciousness. Bliss.

The eternal Krishna.

Happy Janmashtami.

PS - My tribute to the ultimate awareness this

Janamashtam