Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I remember, as a child, being introduced to the Christian concept of heaven, by my schoolteachers.
Heaven was supposed to be the ultimate reward for devoting one's life to Christian values.
A place of unending bliss, where everyone lives happily ever after.
When I tried to picture this afterlife, I imagined a land where the sun always shone,
the skies were always blue... everybody was very kind, gentle, and patient.
You could have anything you ever wanted at the snap of your fingers, without having to do any hard work.
But, much to my teachers' dismay, this idea did not inspire me with a particularly profound
desire to live my life in service of God. In fact, heaven sounded to me like a downright bore!
Intuitively, I must have sensed that something was wrong with this idyllic picture.
We human beings are ordinarily accustomed to a way of thinking in which we are preoccupied
with opposites. We like to look for differences in the world, rather than similarities.
We like to classify and categorize the world into a great number of distinct objects and
events, which is a way of creating divisions. We like to slice the world up into many little pieces.
We see that the addition of a positive number causes an increase, whereas the addition of
a negative number causes a decrease. We see that one pole of a magnet attracts, whereas the other pole repels.
And so, with every duality, we pick a side. We identify one side as good, and the other
as bad, and then we naturally seek one while avoiding the other. We want health without
sickness, peace without war, and pleasure without pain.
But what we don't ordinarily realize is the relationship between the two. We're so focused
on contrasting opposites that we don't realize that they share a common boundary. They are,
so to speak, two sides of one coin.
And, in the same way that you can't have a coin with only a front and no back, or wave
peaks without troughs, you can't have good without bad.
Think of it this way: to get anywhere in life, you have to take risks and make gambles. And,
with every gamble you make, there is both the possibility of winning and of losing.
You can't get a high roll without tossing the dice and risking snake eyes.
Hence, your only true power is your ability to support or reject this duality. You can't slice it in half.
Basically, your big decision is whether you want to live, and experience life as the union
of both positive and negative, or commit suicide and make it all disappear, whether figuratively
or literally. You can't change the natural balance of life itself.
So, the habit of judging two opposing sides and trying to get one to win and the other
to lose creates a crazy battle inside your own mind.
On the one hand, your attraction to the good draws you closer to life, but on the other
hand your aversion to the bad just pushes you back away!
If you're afraid to fail you'll never try to succeed.
My solution is to embrace the duality of good and bad as a whole. To realize that joy and
suffering meet at the boundary of happiness. That all of the ups and downs of the universe
are one positive vibration.