It is the opposites that make a whole thing whole, by balancing each other. Every good has a bad in it that we are not aware of, and every bad has a good in it that we are equally unaware of. Because we see partially, we notice only one of the two, and we praise it or condemn it accordingly, and we are quite certain afterwards that we have understood the thing.
Happiness is incomplete without sadness. That is not a consoling phrase to be produced at funerals, it is a plain description of how the arrangement works. Somebody who cannot be reached by sorrow cannot be reached by joy either, because it is the same door and it opens both ways. People close it for years, and what they get in return is not protection. It is a life in which nothing arrives at all.
The same holds everywhere once the looking begins, and it becomes difficult to stop looking. In every selfishness there is a selflessness that has not been noticed. In every selflessness there is a selfishness that nobody has examined, least of all the person being selfless, who is usually the last to see it.
The sorting happens before we arrive
Our minds are trained to judge everything as right or wrong, good or bad. This is not a habit that could be dropped with effort. It is much closer to a reflex, and it works before we are aware of anything at all. By the time a thing reaches us consciously it has already been placed somewhere, and we experience the placing as perception rather than as an act we performed.
And once a thing is placed, we stop examining it. That is the real cost and it compounds over a lifetime. A thing filed as good is no longer looked at, so its other half remains invisible indefinitely, sometimes for forty years. A thing filed as bad is not looked at either, for exactly the same reason, and whatever was in it goes permanently unrecovered.
So we are surrounded by objects and people and events that were assessed once, quickly, on very little evidence, years ago, and have not actually been seen since. The file stands in for the thing. And everybody is extremely confident about all of it.
What imbalance does
The imbalance comes from appreciating one part and condemning the other. It seems harmless enough and it is what everybody does and what everybody has been taught to do. But it means we are always relating to half of something while treating that half as the whole, and then being genuinely surprised when the other half eventually turns up.
The person thought to be entirely good does something that cannot be reconciled with the file, and rather than the seeing being revised, the person is revised. They are moved wholesale from one category into the other, in an afternoon. The person did not change at all. The view was always half, and now it is a different half.
The same thing happens with events. Something everybody was certain was a disaster turns out, ten years later, to have made something possible that could not have happened any other way. Almost nobody concludes from this that their judgement is partial and that verdicts should be held more lightly. They conclude that they were unlucky and then lucky, and carry on judging exactly as before.
The question underneath
Here is the question that keeps arriving and cannot be got past. What will anybody do when they become aware, and can see the good in every bad and the bad in every good, in the same thing, at the same time? Will they still be able to appreciate one and condemn the other? On what basis, and with what?
Nobody knows. There are moments of seeing both at once and they are disorienting rather than enlightening, which is not what anybody expects of them. The praise stops working and so does the blame, and what is left is a thing simply being what it is, without any of the handles things are normally held by.
Nobody stays there for long. The sorting comes back within a day and everything is comfortable again and the comfort is a relief. But the comfort is now known to be manufactured, and the categories are known to be ours rather than the world's, and that is not knowledge anybody can put down once they have picked it up.
