Chapter One — The Body Lives in Darkness

I want you to close your eyes for a moment.

Now imagine your body from the inside.

The heart beating, the blood flowing in the blood vessels, the lungs filling with air, the brain working without pause, and the billions of cells that make up your body.

Is there light there?

No.

All of these actions take place inside darkness.

We are used to thinking that we live in a lit world. We open our eyes in the morning, we see the sunlight, the people around us, the colors, the shapes, and everything that makes up the world we live in.

But our body does not live in that light.

Our eyes allow the brain to see what takes place outside the body. They pass information to it about the surroundings so that we can understand where we are, identify dangers, choose how to act and conduct ourselves in the world.

But the light we see does not illuminate our internal organs.

The heart goes on beating in darkness.

The liver goes on performing its functions in darkness.

The kidneys filter the blood in darkness.

The brain processes information, creates thoughts, stores memories and activates the body, and it too is inside the darkness.

In fact, even before we opened our eyes for the first time, our body already knew how to live.

It began to develop in our mother's womb, in a dark environment, where the first organs were formed and the mechanisms of life began to operate.

The body did not need to see the world in order to develop.

And even after birth, when the eyes opened and we began to know the light, the body's inner world remained mostly dark.

This thought intrigues me.

We invest so much time in looking at the world around us, but we almost never think about the world that exists inside us.

An entire world that works without pause, even when we sleep, even when we close our eyes, and even when we are not aware at all of what takes place in it.

Now I want you to imagine something more.

Imagine a great, dark sea.

The waters move within it, currents pass from place to place, and every part of the sea influences another part.

That is how I imagine our body.

An inner sea that lives in darkness, and within it a constant movement takes place.

When all the systems work in a balanced way, I imagine this sea as quiet and calm. That does not mean there is no movement in it. On the contrary, movement is part of life itself.

But there is a difference between balanced movement and a storm.

Our body works all the time to maintain inner balance. It regulates body temperature, sugar levels, the amount of fluids, and the activity of many other systems.

We do not need to instruct the heart to beat or remind the lungs to breathe.

The body knows how to perform these actions on its own.

And here begins the thought on which my theory is based.

If the body lives inside natural darkness, and if it works without pause to maintain balance, what happens when something that comes from outside disturbs that balance?

After all, we do not live inside a closed world.

We bring food, water and air into the body. We are exposed to different substances, and at the same time we experience emotions, hear words, are hurt, moved, angered, frightened and gladdened.

All of these become part of our life experience, and some of them also have an influence on the processes that take place in the body.

I wonder what happens when an external influence does not benefit us.

How does the body respond to it?

How does the soul respond to it?

And is it possible that some of these influences continue to accompany us even after the event that caused them has ended?

Out of these questions I began to imagine what I call "Shells of Darkness."

But before we try to understand what those shells are, it is important to me that we remember the starting point.

The darkness inside us is not a bad thing.

It is not an illness, it is not fear and it is not danger.

It is simply the environment in which most of our body's life processes take place.

We can stand facing the sun, look at a lit sky and feel the warmth on our skin, and at that very same moment our heart will go on beating in darkness.

The eyes will see the world outside, and the body will go on sustaining its world within.

The body lives in darkness. And in order to understand my theory, we must begin precisely with the understanding that this darkness is a natural part of our lives.

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.