The Perennial Path: Two

The single dot becomes a line. From the one emerges the perception of dualities - light and dark, heaven and earth, good and evil. Nearly our entire childhood is formed around creating categories from which we try to understand the world. Foods we like and dislike, kids that become friends or enemies, behaviors that result in reward or punishment. This is a necessary process for human development, but some of us never grow out of these over-simplified dualistic categories. We steal from the tree of knowledge of good and evil before we have the wisdom to handle that knowledge with nuance and humility.

Every binary framework we construct will reveal itself to be much more complex if we care to look close enough. If we travel far enough north, we eventually find ourselves heading south. While these binaries may be easier for our minds to process, we often find ourselves at odds with those who live outside of these constructs. This is especially true when we lay the ultimate dualistic categories of good and evil on top of our binary constructs. The moment that we moralize and force people into rigid either/or constructs - conservative vs liberal, believer vs unbeliever, friend vs foe - we loose sight of the essential oneness that unifies the entire cosmos. The food we rejected as a child is forever labeled "bad" without ever giving ourselves a chance to taste it again. And one negative experience with someone different than ourselves prevents us from ever stepping outside of the echo chambers of folks who look and think just like us.

Between light and dark there is the dawn. Between left and right there is a middle. Between birth and death there is life. Between you and I is a shared breath and spirit that animates the entire world in an infinite cycle of inhaling and exhaling. To see the world only through the lens of duality is to miss the invisible forces that draw us back together. Love, when unleashed on the world, will shatter the dualistic categories that we cling to. Like the birth of a child, pain and joy will merge together to transcend the categories. One becomes two, two become one.

As it is above, so it is below.