Sometimes it occurs to us that maybe somehow we can eliminate the negative side of life. And perhaps we even question why it would be there in the first place. To put it in theistic terms, why would a loving God allow suffering and negativity in the world?
The more I've hung out with this question, the more it's occurred to me that the world can't be any different than it is. That it must contain both the negative and positive, both the light and the dark, both the up and down, both the hot and the cold. All the opposites.
Why? Because they come into existence together, like pairs of shoes. The spinning of planet earth, for instance, is one phenomenon that creates what we call the opposites of "day" and "night."
Another example: Can we create a mountain without creating a valley at the same time? No, we can't; they arrive together.
Physicists say that an electron and a positron come into existence together, and that when they collide they then annihilate each other and go out of existence together. Perhaps they're actually two faces of the same thing, like "day" and "night."
And perhaps the same notion applies to "good" and "bad," "right" and "wrong," "light" and "shadow" and so on. Can we stand in the sun without creating a shadow at the same time? The light and the shadow exist together. Perhaps existence itself can't exist except as this unending series of dualities, or what seem like dualities to us.
Does that mean that we just shrug our shoulders when we see suffering in the world? Not at all. We do whatever we can, we do whatever spontaneously comes to us to do, but without the stress of condemning the world, condemning God or condemning each other.
In fact, a deepening understanding of the necessity of duality in life opens the door to falling in love with the world as-it-is, while still doing whatever it is that we do to help out.
—jim sloman, summer 2000 for Dec 27
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