The principle of Polarity: “Everything is Dual; everything has polarity; everything has a pair of oppositions; extremes are identical in nature, but different in degree; in duality truths are only half-truths; paradoxes can be reconciled.”
This Principle is nothing new. We all know, we live in a dual world. A world where all things and conditions have a resting point, an equilibrium, and beyond this point begins a road leading to the two poles.
Everything can be defined as a pair of opposites: good and evil, love and hate, light and darkness, heat and cold, up and down, inside and outside, minus and plus, thesis and anti-thesis. All these pairs are identical in nature, but differing in degree, quantity or intensity.
If we “open” our eyes to see and comprehend the substance of the universe, we realise that at the fundamental level, there is no polarity. There are only us, the humans, and our values by which we have defined systems of reference. That is why we observe how easily the polarities can transform one into one another.
Polarity does not exist outside of a reference system. And the reference systems are imposed by the laws of nature and of man.
Heat and cold are considered opposite one another. In reality, these are the same, depending only on the different states of matter, on the amount of heat. The man imposed a reference system that measures the temperature (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin) and which in our acceptance gives the measure of cold or heat. The coldness is only the absence of heat, just as darkness is the absence of light, the silence, the lack of sound. So, when we have no electromagnetic waves that generate heat, light or sound, we have coldness, darkness, quietness.
(Here I allow myself some philosophical toughts. Fundamentally there IS only darkness, coldness, quietness and the lack of space and time. This is the nothingness. Light, heat, sound, space and time are created. And yet, if these are created out of nothingness, then the nothingness is not so empty as it seems.)
This Principle also works on the mental plane. Let’s take “love and hate”, two seemingly totally different mental states. However, how can we say when one ends, and the other begins when we often saw how one transmuting into the other?
It is the same thing with “good and evil”. They are not absolute notions. They exist only in human psychology and arise as a result of free will; the ability to create and to destroy. What is right and what is wrong can differ from person to person, from situation to situation.
Generally speaking, we are all driven by good intentions and we all want to do good things to us and to others. But how do we know that our goodness is not causing, in the end, more harm? How can we know that giving to a beggar alms it’s a good deed? Maybe momentarily it could be, the beggar being able to ease his hunger. What if you knew that this alms is what keeps the beggar in his begging condition? What if your help annihilates any desire and possibility for him transcending this condition? I witness how the help, given from the heart, turned into something wrong for the helped person. From here arises the rhetorical question: what is good and what is evil?
Good cannot exist without evil nor evil without good. Just as neither death exists without life, nor life without death. Everything alternates, changes, fluctuates between the two polarities.
Everything comes and goes, everything is rhythm.
And this leads us to the next Principle, the rhythm.
27. December 2019 – text original by Diana