Much has been circulating through my brain, and there is a lot that I've wanted to blog about, but haven't blogged it because I have been heavily editing myself. The usual me picks out hypocrisy in real-life situations and demands to know why/how people can live in a state of contradiction and still get up in the morning and act as if there isn't a speck of incongruency in their lives. My instructors at school tell me that much of people's "dis-ease" in their emotional lives comes from being incongruent between what we think, what we feel, and what we do. Balance between these three things means we're emotional, mentally, and spiritually healthy.

So maybe picking out hypocrisy should be reframed as: I see this incongruency within you. Why do you think that is? I may even get this printed on a T-shirt along with: I will differentiate! I will control my anxiety!

I started reading a book called Paradoxes of Group Life (yes, an actual required book!) that says paradox is innate to all group life. We generally avoid acknowledging the paradoxes because to confront them means conflict, and we're all conflict avoiders. (All conflict is is the recognition of difference existing between two or more people in relationship. Conflict within self gets back to the differences between the what I think, what I feel, and what I do triad being out of balance.)

Our country has become very polarized since around 2000 with conservative and liberal experiencing a kind of radical continental drift that serves to keep growing an ever increasing rift between them. The national consciousness is being split into an "either/or" mentality. It's all black or white with no room for gray. This is the nature of fundamentalism—a strictly dichotomous way of thinking that eschews anything unlike itself. This type of thinking is very rigid and poor at adaptation. If anything is to survive it needs to be flexible, dynamic, and open to influence to change. To summarize, fundamentalism is indicative of a unhealthy state of being. It is self-destructive and self-defeating. If it is to continue it has to open itself up to influence and adapt.

So here were are down in this bog of dichotomous thinking with a vicious power struggle being waged between the opposing factions of conservative and liberal. Pause and reflect that one cannot exist without the other—this is inherant in the nature of dualities (opposites). Light exists because there is dark, and vice versa. Good needs bad, and bad needs good, and so on. Thus, power struggles between opposing sides is really futile. The objective should be to find a balance, respect the need for both to exist and share the power.

Getting back to Paradoxes of Group Life, the authors suggest a reframing of "either/or" thinking to "both/and" thinking. This promotes the balance and fluidity of peacefully co-existing with opposites, and to my understanding, leads to a transcendence of dualistic thinking allowing the perspective of the Bigger Picture.

"Both/and" thinking acknowledges the difference, but gives both sides the right to exist simultaneously. There is a symbol that embodies this: yin-yang. Rather nifty, isn't it?