The Law of Polarity November 17, 2006
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Emotions, Society, Personal Growth, Beliefs, Words , trackbackI consider myself to be a very balanced person. Most often such an expression refers to moods and emotions, but I would take it even further and also refer to my neutrality in issues like good/bad, right/wrong and true/false. There’s something about my open-mindedness that both wants to understand the world, but also leave the backdoor open for potentially improved and more accurate understanding.
One of the big questions I’m pondering is whether to believe in duality/the law of polarity or in non-duality. Duality can mean a lot of things so that’s why I prefer to use the word polarity. It states that all thinkable things or actions have two opposites - like up/down, hot/cold, open/closed, black/white, dead/alive or love/hate.
Since I’m very strongly of a thinking personality on the Thinking - Feeling scale I’ve somehow convinced myself that my high level of emotional mastery is better than having an internal rollercoaster of feelings on a daily basis. But I soon noticed that if I neglect tapping into my emotions, then I will end up dismissing both the good and the bad feelings all together.
For instance, at some point very early in my life I decided to never use the word hate. I literally banned the word from my vocabulary. I simply assumed that if I throw away the word, then its meaning will never appear as an internal emotion as well. And you know what, it never has. But what I didn’t intend to do at the same time was to abolish its opposite - love. Now in Finnish and Swedish, the languages I use daily, the word love isn’t used to the same degree as in the American culture. There’s something about the overall rationality and neutrality of the Finnish culture that somehow makes such a word as love too strong to use in daily matters. But that shouldn’t stop me from being different.
Another aspect on the law of polarity I’ve encountered is what we choose to allow entry into our reality. I can choose to close my mind from seeing worldwide hunger, poverty, diseases, wars, fear and catastrophes, but at the same time my ability to help others is shut down as well. However, the way I help people needs to be congruent with my strongest abilities. So I might have a greater effect in improving the world by running a website like this, rather than cooking soup for homeless people. I still have at least 50 years ahead to improve my abilities and the impact I make.
Without getting too far off topic, I’ll go back on evaluating the law of polarity. I thought about the following idea. Maybe I have an underlying assumption, which I’m not even aware of, that you can’t get the good thing without accepting the bad. Could it be possible to improve one’s life without confronting the bad habits? With this questioning I’m once again turning towards the notion of how beliefs appear. I should probably use this model again to try and break the law of polarity by believing that you can invaluate your reality without confronting the bad things in life.
Then again, people have so very different perspectives on which polarity of an issue is good and which one is bad. This is where subjective reality has pushed me slightly in a clearer direction. If the concept of it is totally unfamiliar to you then don’t worry. I’ll write an article about that too when I’m more accustomed to adapting and using it.
This article just ended up as a mental rambling and scrambling of thoughts and I didn’t expect it to reach any given conclusion in a few hours of brainstorming and journaling. But as such, all that I write, every entry that I publish, helps me find and take note of one more piece to start getting closer and closer to seeing the bigger puzzle of life that some people want to solve, while most are totally clueless of. I assume you’re a seeker like me and also want the universe and your consciousness to improve and make more sense for each day that passes.
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Comments»
I came here for your WordPress articles and stayed for the metaphysics
I, too, barred the word “hate” from my vocabulary a long time ago, but for different reasons. It was my observation that people use the word “hate” in a very lazy fashion. They say they hate things or people or situations when they really mean someone/thing is annoying, inconvenient, frustrating, slimy, confusing, difficult, etc.
When you’re mentally lazy and just say you hate something, you then don’t have to do anything else. You hate it, it’s to be avoided or eradicated and that’s the end of the story.
But if you ask yourself what your real objections or negative feelings are, there’s work for you to do. If you “hate” something because it’s confusing, then the onus is on you to figure it out until it’s not confusing, find someone who can better explain it, or accept that you either couldn’t be bothered learning or aren’t capable of learning.
Similarly, if you “hate” something because it’s dirty, the onus is on you to clean it, and so on.
By choosing to “hate”, what you’re really doing to choosing to be lazy and not take responsibility for how you’re feeling, or responsibility for those things around you that you can change or influence.
So what about things like war and violence? Is it OK to say you hate them? Well, what is it that people don’t like about war? The killing and maiming of people? More people are killed and maimed every day in car accidents than in war zones, but we don’t say we hate cars. Then we hate the waste? The feeling of loss of control? These all have analogies in our every day life where we don’t say we hate those things (I’m running out of time here, so trying to make a point quickly).
What about people? Can we hate people? Individuals or whole groups of people? Do we hate Osama bin Laden or do we simply want to fly in a plane without the threat of it being hijacked? Do we hate pedophiles or just not want them to act on their aberrant urges? Do you really hate your boss, or would your just prefer he took a holiday so he didn’t take his stress out on the staff?
I think that when people say they hate things or other people, they are just using a one word shorthand to mean that there are aspects of or results of a thing or person that they don’t like for specific reasons. But by using that shorthand, we actually rob ourselves of an opportunity to understand something new, or an opportunity to act on something that we can do something about.
By saying we hate something or someone, we’re switching off our thinking capacities, putting it into the too hard basket. Then when someone comes along with an agenda, and don’t want people to look to hard at what they’re doing, they appeal to the “unthinking hatreds” that people have and get them to join their cause. If you choose not to hate, then you can’t be manipulated in that way.
So how does that fit into your notions of duality/polarity? Well, to my mind, the opposite of love is ignorance. And by ignorance, I mean both the naive not knowing of something, and the active ignoring of something.
But then, what would I know? I also believe that no-one does evil things. I believe that everyone does the right thing. We all do what we think is right. The problem is that what we consider to be the right thing can vary greatly. We also vary in how often and how much the “right thing for us” is done, as opposed to “the right thing for everyone else”.