Happy New Year! May it be a good one for you and confound all gloomy predictions.
Often in an extreme can be found its opposite. As atomic physicist, Niels Bohr said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” Items can seem to have several contradictory characteristics.
Light behaves either as a wave or a stream of particles depending on the experiment—two apparently mutually exclusive properties.
Bohr also said, “everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real” meaning everything we experience involves sub-atomic particles with a dual nature of mass and energy. In other words, all is not what it seems. Our senses deceive us.
For us…
When faced with an argument, the useful question is often not which “truth” is right, but what makes the opposite truths whole; what is the picture in which they both co-exist?
It’s profoundly liberating to stop trying to choose between competing truths and instead hold them both in balance.
What changes in your life if you decide there is not one right answer to a question but two opposite ones? How much energy can be saved from pointless arguments either as participant or onlooker?
You’ll find…
It’s a fundamental change in attitude—and experience—to expect two answers instead of one.
Even in ourselves, we often know deep down the opposite of our own argument is also true. Yet we make others play the other part in our own debate, and they will. They’ll give us back the argumentative energy we put out.
We can choose a different way…
We can reconcile our own inner conflict. Then we will be whole and peaceful in ourselves and experience a world around us that is balanced and calm. And that in fact is the only way. It’s an energy thing.
Saving our world, if that’s not too strong a word, can only start within—with our own return to wholeness.
And we can see pointless arguments for what they are.
All the best for 2012.