Every human being has a shadow, a dark part within; and every nation, too, has a shadow. Just as an individual’s shadow lies in the personal unconscious, the shadow of a nation appears in that nation’s unconscious and in its unreflective actions. The boundary between darkness and light does not pass between human beings but through every human heart; likewise, this boundary does not pass between nations but through the heart of every nation.

Because our history as Iranians has been filled with despotism and upheaval, we have very dark and dense shadows that we must become conscious of and from which we must free ourselves.

We have a long way to go in understanding the corruption, despotism, self-centredness, overgeneralisation and grand statements, superficiality, flattery, destruction of elites, enslavement to the cult of personality, pessimism, feelings of inferiority and, at the same time, grandiosity that inhabit our national shadow. If tomorrow it were proven that every invention in history, from the needle to the printing press, had been created by Iranian genius, it would make not the smallest change either to what we are today or to who we will be tomorrow. Art is not possessed only by Iranians, and we are not the most intelligent people in the world. Nor is there reason to take pride in our past empires simply because they expanded their territory; if territorial extent were itself a source of pride, the Mongols could stand beside us in boasting of it.

Whatever Iran’s past was, it has passed. Even if, like Osiris, we once brought wisdom into the world, today that wisdom is underground and blind. Building a statue of that wisdom and bowing before it will create no greatness. We must go to war against our own dark side and overcome the darkness within. We must confront our national shadow and then descend to the underworld, giving our ancient and now-blind history of thought the modern, seeing eyes of the present.

The past can never govern the present. It can, however, look through the eyes of today, connect the generations of yesterday to tomorrow, and help us judge our own history.

All of us come from somewhere: from a family, a neighbourhood, a city. That family could have been any other family, that neighbourhood another neighbourhood, that city another city, that country another country. But my family, my child, my father, my neighbourhood, my city, and my country exist within my world. This does not mean that I own them or that they possess greater intrinsic value than anything else. It means that if I try to improve something in this world, what lies within my world is likely to take priority, and I am in a better position to improve the world that is mine.

For me, Iran is not a geographical territory. Nor is it the ruins of history. For me, pride in the past has come to an end. Iran is a world of thought buried beneath the vast darkness of the shadows of Iranian peoples: a tremendous force in history that has kept us alive and connected, yet has still not been properly discovered and articulated. Until it is discovered and articulated, something will remain unsaid in the geography of world thought.

For me, Iran is a perennial wisdom connecting Zarathustra to Bayazid Bastami and Nasir Khusraw, and Suhrawardi to Rumi: individuals in the history of our thought who discovered a world that can be discovered again and again.

If we can give the modern eye of the world to cultural Iran and to this perennial wisdom, the philosophy we revive could bring a new civilisation into being within the Iranian world, connecting our past to our future. Such a cultural resurrection and liberation, continually renewing itself outside the cycle of earthly power, can give culture the ethical authority to remain a guide, protector, and judge for future generations of a people.

Iran, for me, is a middle world whose hidden forces can restore to humanity its destroyed individuality and its stolen freedom—but only after we recover our own national individuality and reclaim it within ourselves.

After being destroyed and rising again many times, and after passing through so much darkness, we stand at the end of a dark tunnel where a light can be seen. Many of us may have lost hope, but sometimes, at the very moment we think the caterpillar has reached the threshold of death, an astonishing birth awaits it.

Aydin Areta