The eternal law of magnetism is that opposite attracts opposite and like repels like. In the electrical circuit the flow is the same: connect positive to positive or negative to negative and nothing happens. Yet in the world of man, or the world of man’s mind, like attracts like and opposites repel. How can there be two contradictory laws?
Man’s world is the world of his mind. His mind is the source of his personality, ambition, like and dislike, good and bad. In everything man is either for or against. He says there are two sides to every question but what he says is not true: there can only be two sides if personal interests, which means selfish interests, are involved. Otherwise something is either true or false, or the facts available at the time are insufficient to allow a conclusion to be reached.
If two people want to establish whether an animal is a cow they look at it and say, ‘Yes, this is a cow.’ There are only the facts of what a cow is. There are no selfish interests or opinions (man’s most treasured possessions). But if one of them says it’s his cow and the other says it is not, there is a difference of opinion. They are now in the world of mind where like attracts like and opposites repel.
The Hindus will tell you the cow is sacred. That is their treasured opinion and there are several hundred million of them. You may disagree. It is a case of for and against, a matter of opinion; but not a matter of fact because no mind knows.
In the mind-world no one knows all the facts so there is little hope of complete agreement. In the mind-world treasured interests and beliefs are anyway more important than facts. So issues invariably polarise into two opposing sides of opinions and beliefs.
Men would rather talk than act, so the air and their ears are continually battered with opinions that are seldom backed up with any action other than the automatic expression of them.
But the fact is that both sides are always wrong. The argument in favour could not exist without the argument against. Remove the arguments and there is no dispute. What remains is the fact; and you cannot argue over a fact.
Factions arise from looking at the argument — instead of looking for the fact. When two factions go to war it is to prove nothing but the force of their respective arguments, while the fact of the matter is left ignored and undiscovered. By the time the factions have finished fighting, the fact they failed to see at the outset is not only still invisible but probably no longer apposite. Every fact has its moment and now the moment and the fact have moved on.
No disagreement can be resolved except by action. Nothing is ever resolved except by action. Then the side that has the stronger means of arguing (not necessarily the correct argument) becomes the fact, if it matters. When you have the power you have your way.
But what always happens in the end? Julius Caesar fought some mighty battles. So did Napoleon. Where are their empires now? In 1945 after five years of war and millions of dead, the Allies proved the most powerful. Then came the cold war. Communist opinion was that their system would be good for everyone; the West disagreed. The most powerful always decides.
Do you see a pattern?
Where have man’s opinions been taking him since the beginning of history? Where are your opinions taking you?
Nowhere. Except towards useless conflict.
There is nowhere else to go.
While you remain mechanical, all that life demands of you is that you keep busy doing nothing so that life’s greater purpose (beyond your busy imagination) can be eternally served.
The eternal law, contrary to the law of man’s mind, is that heat attracts cold and cold attracts heat, until a balance or equilibrium is reached. This balance in creation supports life on earth between the cold of the poles and the hottest place on earth. Similarly, light attracts dark and dark attracts light until a balance is reached. If there was no dark in the light we would be blinded; and if there was no light in the dark something equally damaging and incompatible would happen.
You will notice that this attraction of opposites, each tending to cancel the other out, is a process of de-creation; but that it always stops arbitrarily at the point of balance needed to support life. If it were allowed to continue past that point, the opposites would eventually unite like desire and its fulfilment — and the creation would disappear. Nothing would remain except the state that existed before the creation began.
The precise opposite to this process is man’s self-centred creation, his world, in which like forces attract each other — like attracts like and hate attracts hate. Man’s world is an attempt to create something within the creation itself. This is a clumsy sort of reverse process that is self-propagating instead of self-cancelling, divisive instead of unifying. If man has his way, the ‘likes’ and the ‘hates’ will continue to grow and spread until the whole world condenses into immovable blocks of intractable opinion.
But man does not have his way: war and fighting see to that. In man’s self-centred, self-conscious world, war and strife are necessary equivalents of the violent function of nature in the natural world. They are life’s way of breaking down the monoliths and providing the breathing space for them to breed again.
As nature through the law of opposites uses violence and destruction to preserve and replenish itself in perfect harmony, so the discordant man-made world depends on war and strife to preserve itself in perfect disharmony.
In a very rude way, a summary of the law of opposites should be:
Thank you. I liked your metaphors.
And also the eastern philosophy of life. Alan Watts teached me.