Tao Te Ching 2

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
__________________________________________________

We are trapped in dualistic thinking. We have divided and categorized people and things on the basis of this conventional thinking. In so doing, we fail to realize that one side of the dualism cannot exist without the other side. If you have one, then you have the other.

Picture holding a coin. The “other side” of the coin is never seen; we see only the side that’s facing us. We’re incapable of seeing both sides at the same time. But, just because we can’t see the “other side” doesn’t mean that the “other side” isn’t there. If we turn the coin, we see the “other side” – but in so doing, we lose sight of the “other side” that we saw just a moment before.

For example, that which we call bad also brings good; that which we call good also brings bad. We can only rid ourselves of the bad by ridding ourselves of the good that accompanies it, because good is on the backside of bad.

Danny’s death is the worst experience my wife and I have endured – the death of a child is as “bad” as it gets. With it, however, came an explosion of “good” in the form of personal growth and altered perspective that has changed how we experience almost everything in the world around us. We are better people now, by far, than we were on March 15, 2002.

We have another choice – we can rid ourselves of the self-created ideas of “good” and “bad” and realize that something simply is what it is and that in reality, as opposed to in the conceptual world that we’ve constructed in our mind, our categorizing of some thing neither adds to nor detracts from what that thing is. The death of a child is the death of a child. We shouldn’t try to add to or detract from what is, because it’s a futile effort that creates nothing more than the illusion of truth.

If the truth will set us free, then we shouldn’t settle for truths that are relative, conventional or provisional in nature. We should seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the whole truth.