Dividing Reality into Opposites

As fate, and synchronicity, would have it, shortly after reading Bruce's last post, The Alchemical Mix of Differences, Tom opened up a new book by Byron Katie, "A Thousand Names for Joy," and came across the following:

Commenting on Lao Tzu's words, "When people see some things as good, other things become bad," Katie writes, "When they believe their thoughts, people divide reality into opposites. They think that only certain things are beautiful. But to a clear mind, everything in the world is beautiful....

"If you don't separate reality into categories by naming it and believing that your names are real, how can you reject anything or believe that one thing is of less value than another?... The mind's job is to prove that what it thinks is true, and it does that by judging and comparing this to that....

"By it's very nature, the mind is infinite. Once it has questioned its beliefs, it can find beauty in all things."

Taking Katie's lead, Tom and Bruce might do well in their efforts at learning to dance with their respective differences to realize that their thoughts about their differences are just that -- thoughts, and not reality. And reality, if we can say anything about it, is beautiful, with no part being more beautiful or valuable than another.

A way of dealing with all things disagreeable, including differences, that Tom likes to employ, which is essentially what Kaite is pointing to, is mindfulness. When faced with the unpleasant, the irritating, the frustrating, if one can be mindful, i.e., free of thoughts and judgments and simply aware, then one is immediately delivered from the unpleasant, as the unpleasantness of anything does not inhere in the thing, it lives in the think, the thoughts about the situation or person. Mindfulness brings us into direct contact with the thing, minus our thoughts about it being unpleasant or irritating or whatever. And then we simply deal with the thing as it is, free of our thoughts about it being negative in any way, there is no problem. There is just what is.

Another approach Tom likes to take, if he can only remember it at the time, is to regard all that happens, particularly the stuff he doesn't care for, the aggravating stuff, as teachers or teachings. "What can I learn here in the face of this disagreeable event or person or whatever?" Very humbling approach, and very useful.

The common thread in these various approaches to the "negatives" in our lives is the side-stepping of the ego. It is the ego which compares, and judges, and generally demands that life be a certain way, and resists or argues with life when it doesn't show up as desired. To meet everything just as it is without all our thoughts about how it is or how it should be is to gracefully dance with life in all its beauty and grandeur. This is peace and the end of suffering. This is enlightenment.