There is an apocryphal story of a man who went to heaven and not long thereafter committed suicide. At first the absolute perfection of heaven was intoxicating. He made a hole-in-one with every golf swing, won every card game and tripled his money on every stock trade. This perfection soon became a curse; he became so oppressively bored, he could no longer take it. Even the people in heaven became difficult to deal with they were all “so perfect.” Perhaps this is why Billy Joel sings, “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints…” Even in heaven you need a little contrast, also known as polarity.
This fable illustrates why the law of polarity is humanity’s greatest gift. It affords you the opportunity to understand your life. The law instructs us that we experience our world through the existence and comprehension of opposites: good and bad, right and wrong, right and left, day and night, etc. Neale Donald Walsch says it best: “In the absence of what you are not, what you are is not.” Read this sentence until the wisdom of it becomes clear. It is an important principle to internalize.
Prior to the Big Bang, the universe (one-verse) was smaller than the head of a pin. The big bang thrust us into the experience of opposites, and opposites are a prerequisite for understanding life.
Suffering ensues from our unhealthy relationship with the law of polarity. Psychologists call this phenomenology negativity bias. Evolution has conditioned us to focus on the negative aspects of a situation. This predisposition had significant benefits in the hostile environments of our prehistoric ancestors. From a survival perspective, it was always better to be safe than sorry. Every situation had to be looked at from a worst-case scenario perspective to ensure survival. As we lifted ourselves out of the stone age, this negativity bias was intermingled with our religious, cultural and philosophical stories. This pervades our thinking to this day in the form of “what’s wrong” questions. Thinking is a process of asking and answering questions, and this process is heavily tilted toward the negative.
Here is the paradox, and why negativity bias should be discarded: Entropy, the great law of physics, states that closed systems will always tend to move from an ordered to a disordered state. Yet humanity, in the aggregate, is becoming more and more orderly. Knowledge is accelerating and growing exponentially, doubling every 12-13 months. Standards of living are rising rapidly. This rapid, orderly progress is the opposite of entropy: it is rising complexity. We live in a rapidly expanding, safer and more ordered world. This is all happening on razor-thin margins of physical law, environmental factors and social stability. The negativity bias that facilitated the propagation of our ancestors is no longer relevant, except in the most extreme circumstances. This survival feature is now a bug. It must be discarded in favor of accelerating expansion.
Without the understanding of suffering, there could be no joy. If we forget this, we can think that life is suffering. With accelerating expansion as your guide, you can keep suffering as a distant memory to experience more happiness. Recognize opposites as your gift to experience life. Remember that they are tools, so don’t make the tool your reality. Your ultimate truth is expansion. Focus on the expanded version of you in every situation. Concentrate on the positive way forward and bless the negative moments as your gift for understanding.
