Mike Zang - All Beautiful Places Are Prone to Natural Disaster

An Overview on Polarity: Namely Happiness and Suffering

"The Pain then is part of the Happiness Now."
and likewise
"The Suffering Now is part of the Happiness Then."

The other night in McMurran 213 we discussed this concept of happiness and suffering/pleasure and pain, and how the two are fundamentally, if not inexorably interwoven. By this point, it should be no wonderous discovery to any college student that these two polarities are binary oppositions, that is, they revolve around one another, in fact, in essence, create one another.

The idea began jumping out at me during high school and solidified after about a year or so into college. One side of emotion cannot exist without the other. Beyond emotion, I might add, NO aspect of anything cannot exist without it's diametrical opposite. This genre of thought pervades Taoism and other eastern philosophies, especially exemplified in the yin-yang:

"Being and non-being produce each other./Difficulty and ease bring about each other/Long and short delimit each other./High and low rest on each other./Sound and voice harmoinze each other./Front and back follow each other." (2.6-11.)

Looking at it from a more empirical level, an infinite amount of polarities exist throughout the universe: male and female, cause and effect, subject/object, the concrete and the abstract, good and evil, etc. Each side is interdependent and constitutive of it's opposite. But what is the purpose of this polarity principle?

Guy Merchie, in his book The Seven Mysteries of Life, holds that polarities feed off one another mutually. In reference to the quote from In the Shadow Lands, Guy Merchie states,

"one should think of adversity as a kind of growth hormone at the opposite pole from, yet absolutely essential to, spiritual development" (484).

Together, these dualities create a whole. And more interestingly, perhaps the universe uses these vacillations between antipodes as a way of cosmological communication. It is our trials and tribulations that help define our triumphs, and our triumphs that stand to define our hardships, but we should not necessarily connote them as good and evil. They are two aspects of the same ultimate whole that fosters change and transformation. They create life.

Another quote to let float around your skull:
"In the process of life, all things must be severed outright."
^rapper/poet DoseOne on umbilical chords...