Have you ever noticed the similarities in the kinds of people who live in towns at the end of a long peninsula or island chain where the road ends? Places like Key West at the end of the Overseas Highway, Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, or Homer, Alaska, at the end of the Kenai Peninsula. These places tend to attract eccentric and artistic people who are seeking something. Perhaps remoteness, tranquility, natural beauty. Perhaps they are trying to get away from everybody else, from the “mainstream” people and traditional way of life. Perhaps they could be characterized as extreme people who go to the extreme, to the end of the road, because they feel that that is where they belong.
These examples of dead-end places illustrate some characteristics of one-way living. There seems to be two ends and only one way between them. There don’t appear to be any other options and so it usually means that people stick to one end or the other, and they don’t much care to associate with the people at the other end. This is the conundrum of dualistic thinking. A common illustration of dualistic perspective is seeing everything as black or white; in this mode, we ignore that there are more than a hundred shades of gray in between.
We live in a dualistic society. It’s been that way in the Western Hemisphere for centuries. We see almost everything as having two sides. We view things as good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, safe or threatening, possible or impossible. We tend to categorize each other as normal or abnormal, winner or loser, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, citizen or foreigner. We are not very open to other perspectives or the possibility of a spectrum of categories or options.
If we live in a polarized world, it is because most of us have moved to one of the poles and refuse to have our view compromised. When there are two opposing sides, there will always be opposition. We will always find ourselves in one-on-one conflict. We are not interested in living on the equator because then we would have to accept or sympathize with everyone’s view. This predicament seems to have infected the religious as well as the secular.
The healing that we need to overcome our current state of affairs will require a retreat from this pattern of dualistic thinking. It’s natural to think that our faith traditions require judging everything as good or evil, sinful or virtuous, sacred or secular. However, Jesus himself gives us the power to overcome dualisms. We see examples of non-dualistic consciousness throughout the gospel message.
Jesus, the Man-God, exemplified the union between seemingly incompatible opposites, being both human and divine, holding together both the sacred and the secular. It seems that Jesus came to facilitate the transition between the legalistic Old Testament era and the love-first New Testament times, as demonstrated in his response to almost every challenge or accusation from the Pharisees and other religious leaders. Jesus was always saying things that turned our categories on their head: “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” “Blessed are those who are persecuted,” and “Love your enemies and be good to them.” Paul also destroyed our dualisms, such as when he said, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile…”(Romans 10:12).
We should open our minds, re-examine our assumptions and “separation” way of thinking, and dispense with our dichotomous classification system. Instead of relying on our antiquated “either/or” way of seeing, which always leads to division and conflict, we need to adopt a “both/and” perspective. We can’t have open minds if we don’t have open eyes. Only with a transformed and unified consciousness will we be able to reconcile the differences between us and accept all as belonging to Christ, whom “through all things were made” (John 1:3).
In His hand,
Doug