In spite of all the shit talking I do about how much better life would be if we’d just get over our hand-me-down hang-ups I always try and avoid thinking in terms of our lower-selves vs. higher-selves or our animal-nature vs. human-nature, or any of that insufferable out-dated black-and-white-thinking bullshit. Those thoughts just take that us-against-them battle we have with the world, and internalizes it. ‘Us’ becomes the thoughts we call good and the ‘them’ becomes our impulses we call bad. And really, who want’s to be a victim of their own Madonna/whore complex? Especially when we have the option to be a sacred prostitute.
Rigid dichotomous thinking is a trap we all fall into from time to time, the problem though, comes when we can’t find our way out. In psychology all-or-nothing thinking is called ‘splitting’ and contributes to depression and is a sign of both BorderLine and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and trust me, if you like having friends, you want neither of these.
I don’t know if it’s our culture or something innate that makes us think we have to choose between things like; having a strong body or a strong mind, toughness or sensitivity, the spiritual or earthly, athleticism or intelligence, straight or gay, good or bad, Hell, even Eastern Religion’s war between duality and non-duality is the exact same fucking game!
Unless you’re in grade-school, or serious denial, you know that life is never either one-hundred percent or zero. And paradoxically, that over-simplification of the world only complicates life even more. If that’s the way one sees the world they find themselves having to throw away otherwise perfectly good; friendships, jobs, relationships, and anyone or anything that shows the depth, and complexities, that are the shades of gray that can’t be allowed in a black-and-white life. Things would be a lot easier of there were hard and fast rules that took all the judgment and guesswork out of decisions, easier and painfully dull.
Trying to cleave all of creation into opposing halves is an insult to the beautiful intricacies of Creation itself, and leaves you living is a stark world were you are either a total success or complete failure. Where either a person is pure and perfect (and boring) all of the time, or they’re evil. And where things are either entirely perfect or an absolute disaster. This is part of what Voltaire meant when he said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
When we kid ourselves into thinking of the in world terms of stripped-down binary opposites we reduce ourselves right along with it. Instead of being full and nuanced people capable of dealing with all varying shades of the shit-storm life rockets at us, we feel the need to choose between things we tell ourselves are incompatible. Picking sides in a game we can only loose.
No, you’re spirit and flesh don’t really hate each other, they are each other. The most intelligent are also caring, because they know how interconnected we all are. The truly powerful are also tenderhearted, because they aren’t afraid of being hurt. You’re neither introvert nor extrovert, you’re a hybrid. If you let yourself lean too much one way or another you’re limiting what you, and your life, can be. All disconnections in this world are just illusion. The things we think are contradictions are just contrasting colors, in a spectrum, on a Mobius Strip.
‘Or’ thinking really is a trap, it convinces us things like, our job is on one end of life and what we do for fun is on the other, and never should they meat. It tells us that if things are important we shouldn’t joke about them, that creativity and rationality are at odds, and people are either good at the microcosm or macrocosm.
Fuck that! Don’t let anybody, not even yourself, pressured you into OR (I don’t mean Operating Room but don’t let anyone force you into one of those either). Things almost never have to be all or nothing, this or that. If you try, I bet you can get a little of both, you can get an AND instead. Balance.
( Ick. I can’t even write these words without breaking into song.)
Life is a burning tightrope. If we think were supposed to lean to the left, or to the right, or even stay centered, it can only end in disaster. If you’ve hung out with the amount of circus freaks and performers I have you’ll know the way one keeps ‘balanced’ is quite literally, dynamic. When walking a rope you’re always in flux from one extreme, to the other, then the middle, and back again in random order. The talent comes from knowing just how to be off-balanced – in the right amount, and the right direction. That, of course comes with practice, and practice is just the word we use for a series of failures that we’ve finally overcome. The more we fail, the better we get.
When Nietzsche was describing his perfect person, his Übermensch he said, ‘In him all opposites are together into a new unity.’ So take Nietzsche’s advice and be both cool and hot, laugh until you cry, admit that you sometimes hate the person you love, that honest people sometimes lie, and that you can have more than one seemingly paradoxical emotion at a time. These things aren’t mutually-exclusive, you and your life will be better the more depth you can see in the world and yourself.
(I intentionally left out the man/woman dichotomy because, other than physically and socially, I don’t really believe there are such things as feminine traits and masculine traits. Nor do I believe that the sexes are opposites or have to be at odds.)