"The Island didn't bring them together; they did" or "my final thought" by chalovak

"What if I told you that, somewhere on this island, there is a very large box and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it when you opened that box, there it would be?"

In the end, LOST is a very beautiful, kind and pure show.

The End helped me understand everything we saw during this amazing 6 years.
Before the Finale I looked at things as a man of science. I was able to come up with all the answers I needed and I was completely satisfied. I walked into "the End" without questions only waiting for the final revelation. And there it was. And I was struck by it. Struck so hard that for the second of my "faintness" I flashed back all the episodes seeing them in an absolutely new way, in a new light. I looked at things as a man of faith: "And what I saw there...oh...was beautiful".
Having explained everything through the prism of rational, logic and then through the prism of faith completes the great story the LOST told us. Now I can let it go. =)

The epigraph I have chosen is intentional. Keep in mind these Ben's words, because it is the answer to everything.
But before I explain things I want to add some more thoughts:
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".
There is a belief (and I'm sorry for such an example, no offence, if you feel any): If a woman thinks that all men are selfish untrustworthy bastards she will meet only such kind of men in her life. If you put this woman in a room with hundred men, 99 of which are great kind-hearted guys, and only 1 person is our selfish untrustworthy bastard, guess what guy our heroine will approach? It will be that bastard guy. But even if she approaches any on 99 she will make him to become that bastard in the end. Because that's what she believes. And that's what she gets. What you get is what you think.

Well.. back to our LOST. Back to our island.
The story of LOST is a story about LOST people. People, who see no joy in life, people who stuck with their problems seeing no way to solve them. LOST is a story about people who are alone.
You know, each one of us had desperate moments of our lives, moments when we just want to run away from anything, to lock ourselves up in a room, so nobody could reach us. What we do there is looking not for a solution, but for a way to face the problem, for a way to find the strength inside us to go outside and deal with it.

Our Losties were so desperate they were screaming inside for help. They needed the "room" where they would understand themselves, embrace themselves, find the meaning of life. And they found it. Their room became the island.
And here is the first thought: Island didn't bring them, it didn't summoned them, neither did Jacob. It was them, Losties, who brought Island in their lives, who brought themselves on the island.

When they crashed on the island they saw it as it was: a simple uninhabited island, with something unknown in the jungle. Little by little the survivors began to add little details on the island, they began to craft its history, its nature, its properties. Survivors' beliefs, thoughts, fears, memories, feelings became the source of all things.

(note: I don't want to say, that everything on the island appeared like something magical, with "poof" or something. It was always there, waiting for the right moment to be revealed to our survivors. Remember the great dialog between Jack and Hugo when they found the lighthouse:
Jack: How is it that we've never seen it before?
Hurley: Guess we weren't looking for it.
I want to periphrase him: "guess we weren't ready to see it".)

The survivors were "Jacobs", it was them who summoned all these things to the island and these things appeared on the island at different times.

Jack and Locke were emotionally strongest people on the island. Their inner conflicts and the conflict with each other influenced island most of all. Pay attention: through the first 3 seasons man of science was leading. That's why most of things were rational, logical. But as the Jack's stubbornness was fading away, as Locke's faith in the Island was growing stronger; strange things began to happen.

And still Jack's wish to leave the island, to leave the room without understanding himself was stronger than anything. He got the chance. But he had to pay for it: the island disappeared in front of his eyes. The possibility to change himself had faded.

The life on the mainland became miserable, you had seen it. Oceanic 6 lost their connections with each other. They faced their previous lives, their own problems. It began to destroy them from inside. They became alone again. Locke, feeling without specifics the reason, the purpose of the island, decided to sacrifice his connection with the island to help the closest people he had ever had.

Oceanic 6 came back to the island. Jack's false attempt to change things leaded him to a glimpse of realization. He began to feel that island was important and everything outside wasn’t ("And when they get here, their past doesn't matter"). His destroying mirrors in the Lighthouse was pretty symbolic - it was his own good-bye to his previous life.

Jack was changing (and other characters also), island was changing with him. The definition, the idea of "light" appeared. This light BECAME the connection between people, it's the connection between Losties, the connection which was established the moment they got on the island. The island became a sacred place, their own place that was needed to be protected; the place that preserved the light, the warmth inside people, inside Losties. With this light, this warmth people helped each other. But everything can vanish under the weight of fears, doubts, worries. That’s what smoke monster was.
Island helped Losties to get rid of all dark things they had, so they had to keep these bad things on the island. If it went outside, if it left the island everything would be in vain. Hence, the need of protection of the island.

Still being a human, with a need of the rational, the tangible, the material explanation (just an idea wasn't enough) of this protection appeared: The story of two brothers was born.
One is light. One is dark (smoke monster). Jacob is what losties became (the candidates), his brother is what they left behind.

After all: "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress." The progress Jacob was talking about was the Losties progress. They succeeded. They were able to find themselves with the help of all these events on the island, all these challenges they'd created.
And once it was over, they could move on.