Not many people know this fact, but there are no such things as black or white colors in our world. By true scientific definitions: black is the absence of color; white is the blending of all colors. While we, humans, consider them to be colors, they do not exist in nature.
Of course if we go a little deeper, then we'd see that nothing is as we perceive it. But it's not as if our perception is wrong either.
Take a pen and turn it so that you can only see its tip - that would be how most people perceive life, universe, existence. As we turn the pen sideways, we see how much we aren't taking into consideration, how much we are missing.
But I went a little off track here.
As I see it, this duality we seem to have adopted thousands of years ago and are still practicing, is the primordial sin spiritual teachings talk about. (I view the Bible as a book of metaphors and not true stories.) The apple of knowledge Adam and Eve consumed, thus getting banished from Eden... Knowledge of WHAT? This has baffled me for years. Knowledge of WHAT?
And then I realized: dualism. Creating these polarities. Taking a whole and splitting it. Separating that which cannot, may not and shall not be separate. And for that they were "banished" from Eden to a world of humans' own devising - the dual one. Unless we learn to perceive the world as a whole - we will not return to Eden.
Maureen Murdock says: "We live in a dualist culture which values, creates and sustains polarities - an either/or mentality which locates ideas and people on opposite ends of a spectrum. [...] We separate spirit from matter, mind from body, science from art, good from evil, life from death, women from men, fat from thin, young from old..."
But when does young end and old begin?
We cannot separate our physical body from spirit, because they are one. Is it bad? No. Is it good? No. It just is.
'tis only thinking that makes it so... But our thought is shaped by tradition. That is not so bad thought.
ReplyDeleteBut back to the whole! The whole is nice but it is always nothing. The whole is a good thing to go back to, but it is not something we can live with or in. We need to divide things up to make them comprehensible. And it is only when things are comprehensible that we know to eat bread and not poison. (Or something like that.)
But going back to the whole is a good exercise. I think back to Nietzsche and the transvaluation of values. We need to go 'beyond good and evil,' back behind those classifications, and see all as a whole. Then we can divide the whole again in a new way. We can re-value, or re-classify, things. We can step out of the way that tradition has taught us to see the world and see it anew. We need not see it as a whole and stay in that whole-- it would leave us helpless and hopelessly unable to navigate in our daily lives. We need to carve it up in a new way. We need to leave behind what we can and carry on with what we can't leave behind-- certain moral convictions and biological realities. We may get back to the whole and see things like marriage in a new way that allows us to redefine it. Mental illness as well. We can reshape a lot if we go back to the whole and redefine, re-divide. But things like murder, rights and sustenance we will likely need to hold to tradition on.
The whole is ground zero... It is a place where we can go back to to start a new creation. But we need to create from that zero ground and build up and out by dividing and defining. And in that act we can recreate a new world that we can live better in.
Good point on the "tradition" thing. Duality is something that's already in our blood, it's been taught to us since we were kids.
ReplyDeleteBut, I have to disagree on the "bread vs poison" thing. That's not dualism, but mere differentiating one from the other. As seeing light and dark. We DO see light being different from dark. Thinking dark is the OPPOSITE of light is what I'm talking about.
Men and women do have different physic, we see that, we have no other choice but to recognize that. But thinking that one is better than the other... These things are not opposites, but a part of the whole. One cannot survive without the other.
Bread IS different than poison, but it's not its opposite. Life CAN and DOES survive without murder, that's why seeing it as right and wrong is not dualism, that's why we do uphold the "tradition" as you put it. One is not part of the other. Right and wrong are different from good and bad.
You are right about the need to redefine and reevaluate and rearrange how we view the world. Taking what we learned and throwing away what we don't need. I think we're on the way there, don't you?