Imagine yourself out on the street in the middle of a protest. On the road are the demonstrators, protesting against this or that injustice. Across from them are the police, representatives of the hated government. In a street corner near the protestors are the “others,” those who side with the government, who feel that the protest has no merit. The air is thick with hatred; the tension is about to snap. Neither side will concede, neither will compromise; it is either me and my view or no one and no view. If I don’t take over, no one will take over.
This is where we stand today. At times, the hatred is more overt, at times more covert, but it is growing, bubbling under the surface. We cannot tame the hatred, but we can learn how to work with it, how to funnel it constructively. Today, it’s at a boiling point; if we don’t learn to channel it soon, it will erupt and destroy everything in its path.
There has always been hatred because there have always been opposite sides. Our fatal mistake has been that we have tried to demolish the other party instead of uniting over the disparities. We didn’t realize that destroying the other party meant destroying ourselves. We didn’t notice that everything in reality has its opposite because we can only discern and define anything against its backdrop, its opposite. For this reason, whenever we waged war against our opposite, we either lost the war and perished, or won the war and perished still because we didn’t have an opposite, so we, too, could not exist.
The only way we can exist is if we maintain balance with our other side. Unless we make room for all views in existence, there will be no room for any view.
The purpose of the contradicting views is not to determine who is right. They all come from the same source, from human nature, so how can one have merit if it denies the merit of the other one?
The benefit of having opposite views is that the conflict between them forces both parties to search for their cause, and then they realize their common root. Only then can they unite.
And when they do, they find that this is how all of reality works, and in that, they find the unity that pervades all of nature. And that discovery of unity is the reason for the initial oppositeness and hatred.
[Reuters: Demonstrators at a protest for racial justice march into the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., after stoping traffic on the Key Bridge, which links Virginia and Washington, on August 8, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Ten weeks after the police killing of George Floyd on May 29, which ignited an international wave of protests against racism and police brutality, demonstrations continued in Washington this weekend as the country passed 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA)]