Good/bad, right/wrong, up/down, in/out, positive/negative, night/day, truth/falsehood, us/them – we feel ever-increasing polarisation in our lives and society, and growing concern around this phenomenon.
Yet it is we who create and nurture this polarisation, we who relish its game.
The finite can never comprehend the infinite. Being finite, our mind has no faculty to grasp Truth and Reality, which are infinite. So the mind is forever taking strands of what it perceives, weaving these strands into models of ‘truth’ in the form of ideas, theories, suppositions, superstitions, beliefs and opinions, then labelling and claiming these culled fictions as reality, arguing for and defending these apparitions as though its very existence depended on them – until it changes its mind and supplants one fantastic model with another.
Secretly aware of its own incapacity, the finite mind nurses inherent insecurity, which it masks with the bluff and pretension of being in control and knowing all.
To buttress this bluff, the mind must have an answer for everything. Nothing threatens the mind’s certitude like the unknown or unknowable. That which cannot be defined, is instinctively denied, denigrated or applied with any stick-on label – no matter how obtuse, unlikely or absurd.
In search of understanding and control, the mind sits apart from the world in judgement, scrutinising people, events and phenomena with its feeble flashlight of analysis, doubt and suspicion. Thus the world becomes objectified, and the heart’s love, empathy and concern fade. The mind sees no foothold in blissful oneness: walling itself off from the ‘other’ in its tower of self-righteousness, the mind needs differentiation, breeds and feeds division to sustain its illusion of supremacy.
Polarisation is not the root, but the inevitable bitter fruit of the tree of division: an invariable outcome of a universal problem – our minds’ assumed autocracy.