Blog #88--We Must Take The Bad With The Good
I really enjoyed the original Star Trek television series because it opened my mind to new possibilities. I was in college when it first came on, and some of the shows gave me exciting things to think about. I remember especially the 1967 episode “Who Mourns For Adonais?”
In that episode, the Greek God Apollo was exiled to a planet by himself, and he wanted the Enterprise crew to worship him as a God. Before that show, I had assumed the legends about Greek and Roman gods were myths. After all, many humans have great imaginations. This television show was the first time I considered the possibility that ancient legends might have a basis in fact, and visitors from other realms might have accounted for them. It was revelatory for a young mind to ponder.
I never became a Trekkie, but I admired the kind of society the various Star Trek series represented. They had minimal crime, in large part because they had no need for money. Everyone had all their basic survival necessities available to them, and they were encouraged to explore their potentials as humans. It was a kind of utopia, similar to the idealized dreams of many cultures. It gave hope to those who struggle to survive at the expense of the greedy and self-centered. Maybe someday Earth can develop a culture like it.
However, life has reminded me daily how such a utopia is highly doubtful if not entirely impossible. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, so I have no doubt others have similar problems accepting it. Those who try to create perfection, from their perspective, must limit their world to a select few, alter the brain chemistry of those who disagree with them or kill them off. This is true both for utopias like shown in Star Trek or dictatorships that have occurred numerous times in Earth’s history.
The Catholic church has a bloody history of killing those who didn’t submit to their authority. The Inquisition was perhaps the most recognizable, but the Crusades and the individual dictates of various popes over the centuries are all examples of this. Hitler tried to eliminate Jews who didn’t accept a fascist philosophy. Tin horn dictators in many third world countries both throughout history and today are notorious for their attempts to kill all their political enemies. None have been continuously successful despite extreme motivation. Even the Dark Ages, which lasted for approximately 1000 years, were eventually replaced by a renaissance.
The fact is, our entire universe functions to maintain a balance between opposite polarities. We cannot have one extreme without the other since both exist in equal quantity. The more one polarity accumulates within a given territory, the more it attracts its opposite to recreate an equilibrium. I discuss this in great detail in my book “It’s a Secret, So Pass It On: a Toolbox For Life.” The so-called “Balance of Nature” is a truism. Cycles occur where imbalances are created, but they are all eventually reversed.
Humans love to pass judgment on what is good and what is bad, but they can’t agree on which ideas exist within the two categories. What is good for one person may be bad for another, and vice versa. For instance, a mother and her two teenage children visited our bookstore three times before we realized they were con artists and thieves. The mother kept us occupied with friendly banter and multiple questions while her children cased the place and deposited select items into their large pockets. We considered that bad and asked them never to return, but that is how they made their living. They considered their life’s work a good thing, at least for them.
We experience good weather some days and violent, destructive weather on other days. We benefit from the warmth and the vitamin D we produce when exposed to sunlight, but we also may experience sunburn and skin tumors if the exposure is excessive or our skin is sensitive to the sun’s rays. Some of us believe our religious and political preferences are the right ones for everyone, but there are plenty of others who disagree with us on both counts. On a more universal level, we exist due to a complex chain reaction that produced our world, and yet the whole process will eventually reverse itself and return to its origin. We can’t have one without the other.
Our bodies and minds work through an interaction between opposite polarities as well. We have to have a relatively equal mixture of + and – ions within us to be in balance and thus healthy. There are plenty of stories written about how we have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and they are fighting over our souls.
In a manner of speaking, this is true since opposite energies within us produce opposite perspectives that must be balanced for everything we do. We tend to prefer one over the other and try to block the influence of the one we judge to be bad for us, but both must exist for us to survive. The angel and devil must both let go of their selfishness and unite for mutual benefit.
When we use only our indirect mind, our direct mind fights back to survive. The opposite is also true. I remember a relationship I had with a person who wanted me to behave her way only. I would try my best to keep quiet about things she disliked when in public, but the more I blocked that part of myself, the more likely it was to come out at the most inopportune times. I don’t remember a single time where I was not attacked for embarrassing her with something I said or did upon returning from a party. Obviously, for my own peace of mind I had to break off that relationship.
And yet many people work diligently to shut up or kill off one half of who they are. Short of suicide, it doesn’t work. But they spend their entire lives denying who they really are and judging others who demonstrate tendencies they dislike about themselves. This limits their potential, causes stresses that result in illness and injuries and creates problems in their relationships.
As a species, we try hard to have only what we personally consider good in our lives. We are in reality doing the equivalent of hitting our heads against a brick wall, but still we wonder why we have so many headaches. If only we could accept that both good and bad must exist, both within us and in the world around us. If so, we would find that the bad is not necessarily as bad as we think it is, and the good is not always as good as we prefer. But together, we are at our best and are our perfect selves.
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