🔮 The Cosmos

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Nothing can be fully understood without its opposite

Most people position themselves on one side of a divide and argue passionately that their perspective is the correct or most valid one. This is because of the left hemispheres tendency to isolate things and strip them of context (The left hemisphere sees things abstracted, isolated, and stripped of context). The reality however is that everything really interacts as part of a larger system. As Lao Tzu points out:

When beauty is abstracted, then ugliness has been implied; when good is abstracted, then evil has been implied … alive and dead are abstracted from nature. Difficult and easy abstracted from progress. Long and short abstracted from contrast. High and low abstracted from depth. Song and speech abstracted from melody. After and before abstracted from sequence.

Everything is defined by their context, as our right hemisphere sees it (the right hemisphere sees things in their context). A military historian may study war for their entire life, but he will never truly understand its horror unless he also understands peace. The value of good health is only really apparent to those who have been seriously ill. If you are blind to the greater context when you try to understand something, then you can never truly appreciate why things behave as they do. This is not to be taken as a neutral position, but rather, that both sides of the picture are necessary.

As William Blake once stated: “Without Contraries is no progression.” The conflict between these divides, he believed, is the fuel that moves the universe. Any view of the world must include them, because a universe without these dynamics simply couldn’t exist. To try to solve problems by favoring one side and dismissing the other is to fail to understand how the world works.

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Type:🔴 Tags: Philosophy Status:☀️

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