Jul 11, 20214 min read

Where are you hiding your personal shadow? – ep. 3

The divisions we make are contractual. Where we draw the dividing line is simply a matter of convention within a given society or group. Divisions that we believe are true are not really internal features of reality. They are external. We add them, from the outside.

The dualism of our thinking

Let us take an example. How big is the sun? In other words, where does the sun end, and what does not the sun begin? We used to say that the sun is made of visible fire. The moment you cross the visible fire, you go to something that is no longer the sun, but an external space to it.

But you could also say that the sun is made of heat. It makes sense, doesn't it? Then, following such thinking, one would have to conclude that the Earth is contained within the Sun, and the boundary is somewhere further in space and begins where the heat ends.

We could, however, say that the sun is made of light. On this assumption, the Sun expands one light-year after each year of its existence and grows in each direction at 300,000 km per second.

So where the sun begins and ends is entirely arbitrary. There is no such thing as an isolated thing the "Sun". Restricting it, as is the case with a bee and a flower, is simply a way of thinking about reality, not an integral part of reality. And in fact, all the so-called "Things" can be viewed in exactly the same way.

Your skin can be seen both as something that connects you to the world and something that separates you from it.

What about separate incidents then? Let us take as an example the question of when you started. Was it the moment of giving birth? Maybe. Or maybe the moment of physical conception? Or the moment when a mischievous gleam first appeared in your father's eye? Or were these times when your parents or their parents were born? We could go all the way to Adam and Eve.

So you can see that the beginning or end of an event is also a contractual matter. In fact, everything is one, unimaginably large, interconnected, multidimensional, and continuous event. Moving like water in a river. What we think is a separate event is actually connected to everything else. It is convenient to cut the world into separate things and events, but nevertheless, nothing is separated from nothing.

The Life Game of White and Black (Good and Evil) - White must always win

So let's return to the Black and White Game. Once we are caught in the trap of dividing, we tend to divide things and events into two basic categories. The former contains "good", "right" or otherwise "white" things, while in the latter we put everything "bad", "wrong" or "black". Then its basic principle comes into play, which is "White Must Always Win".

When White - what we think is right, desirable, Good - "wins", we are happy, at least temporarily. But when what we put in the "Black" category wins, we feel unhappy and frustrated. If you stop for a moment and think for a moment, you'll find that most of your life - most of every human being - is about striving for White to win and avoiding for Black to win.

And here we touch on the fundamental problem of this game: White will never beat Black, although we play it as if it were necessary. Good must overcome Evil, we think. Life Must Overcome Death. Wealth must overcome poverty. Health should win over disease. What we want should win against what we don't want. Pleasure should win over pain.

You may have already noticed that just as a bee and a flower are connected, so are White and Black. In other words, "White" exists in relation to "Black". Without Evil, there would be no Good.

Without 'Evil' there would be no 'Good'

How would you know something is good if it wasn't bad? Good only makes sense when contrasted with bad. In the same way, life has meaning in relation to death, and wealth in relation to poverty.

The same is true for happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, health and sickness, clarity and confusion, here and there, empty and full, light and dark, and all the other pairs of adversity. They are all defined only in relation to their opposite. And they all exist only and exclusively together. You cannot have one without the other, just as it is impossible to have a one-sided coin.

In any case, you would not know about the existence of the white side if there were no black side. Just as you don't feel your stomach until something bad starts happening to it, or as you don't feel your eyes until spots appear in your field of vision. As long as the opposite does not come into play, things are invisible and unimaginable.

It is of course possible to have more than one side of the equation at any time, but it is not possible to get rid of the side that you don't want for good. Just like it is impossible to buy without selling or top without bottom. Try to do everything up in your home. This is not possible because the "up" and "down" go hand in hand.

Moreover, as I described earlier, where one of the opposites ends and the other begins is purely an arbitrary matter. Where does it end "at the top" and begin "at the bottom"? Where do Good end and Evil begin? They are actually one thing.