No Such Thing as an Opposite

Are there such things as opposites, truly?

Start with the absolute, the basis to all we know and live: existence. The “opposite” is non-existence. But that’s not a totally different thing. The inverse of existence is simply the absence of existence. All other supposed opposites follow.

Then move to the most basic existence: light. There is no such thing as darkness all on its own. There is just the absence of light.

Love, goodness, peace… Truths like light.

There is not hatred, evil, and chaos. Where there isn’t love, goodness, peace, we may experience or see hatred, evil, and chaos as the names of the absence of Truths of Nature.

When asked to fight evil, to let go of hatred, and to bring divine order to chaos, we are really saying to step into good acts or words, to relax the nervous system and remember love, and to create where structure in uncreated or disturbed. Love, goodness, and peace are states we can choose to remember and use as fuel.

Not one is evil or bad. There is not an inevitability of war or fighting. Light casts shadows where there are objects. If we believe the shadows are their own entity, separate from their completely dependent relationship with light, and even have their own qualities separate from light, we give shadows a power they do not naturally have.

It’s one of the hardest things to do to look at a major perpetrator and rights-violator and say that they’re not inherently bad. It’s a radical thing to do, in fact, to say a killer or generator of genocide isn’t evil. To many, it sounds like that’s letting them off the hook for their sins, which is unacceptable. What if, though, instead of giving energy to this made-up creature called evil, we said “They are absent of goodness.” I sometimes question if an organism shaped like a human that executes millions of men, women, and children is human at all because if its so devoid of love, goodness, and peace, could it be that there is no human soul? Are they rehabilitatable?

Knowing there isn’t such a thing as evil on its own won’t answer these questions. But what it will do is help people detach themselves from the emotional hooks around fighting sides: winning, losing, must stop, must kill, must avenge. Evil wins when we give it a form to fight us in. Evil loses when we recognize it as a void, a gap, that in we can all radiate that which we always have: the endless, creative forces of Truth.

Act from love. It will ring True.

If acting from needing to fight and end hatred, the energy of that comes from an illusion, and so it is ultimately exhausting and irresolute.*

_{*Acting = actions. Actions that come from being connected to love, goodness, and peace can look like picking up a gun and stopping someone from hurting someone else. It also can look like being willing to die to stay true to nonviolence. Each and every human can choose for themselves what their path is when they have connected to Divinity and thus know their unique expression and dharma for their life.}