• Home
• Previous Stories

My Blogs

Will We Ever Evolve Past The Dichotomy?

dictionary.com defines a dichotomy as:

When I ask the rhetorical question "Will We Ever Evolve Past The Dichotomy?", I am referring specifically to our inherent nature to automatically polarize and catagorize everything we think. In nearly all aspects of our lives and in nearly every culture, human beings seem to naturally break things into a minimum of two catagories; the first two ofcourse being Good and Evil. But the natural tendency of the dichotomy does not stop there. One just has to take a simple look around to see it lurking in every corner of our lives.

You get the idea...We cannot escape the dichotomy. It is somehow engrained in our brains. It's in our nature. It may even be part of the fabric of the universe. Can one exist without the other? Can good exist without evil? Are the two different things we percieve really just two halves of ONE thing? Will we ever evolve our mode of thinking to a point where we can see beyond the dichotomy?

The paradigm of the dichotomy has been around for eons. It may even be what the story of genesis is trying to convey to us. As the story goes Adam and Eve partake of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In doing so, they begin to perceive the world as good and/or evil. Their minds were released into a dichotomy of thought. They could not escape this cycle of judging and catagorizing all things as either good or bad. Prior to the partaking of the fruit, one could surmise they had no knowledge of good and evil; thus they perceived their world as one thing.

1) A symbolic mentality.

I have had this argument with friends many times. The analogies fly around as we each try to disprove each other. Immediately we polarize into opposites. We fall victim to the dichotomy without even being aware of it.

Person 1) Animals do not perceive good and evil. They do not dichotmize their existence. They just exist. They simply percieve reality as it is. They do not question their existence. They simply are. Humans question everything. We judge everything as being good or bad or being lesser degrees of good or bad (shades of grey). We catagorize everything in our existence and invent elaborate systems of symbols to help define the reality we perceive. Examples of such systems would be language, math, and the periodic chart of elements. We further break down atoms into protons, electrons, and neutrons which we break down into quarks which are theorized to break down into superstrings.

Person 1) Just because the dog feels bad does not mean the dog perceives it or judges the feeling as bad. We can surmise the dog does not like the feeling of being hit but we cannot equate the dog's aversion for being hit as an understanding between what is good and what is bad.

Person 1) What is good and what is bad is purely a judgement call. Some people like to be hit. They think it is good. Thus, the feeling they equate with being hit is good while the same feeling the dog equates with being hit is bad. What is good to some is bad to others. No one can say with absolute certainty what is good and what is bad. That is why as humans we are not supposed to judge others....but we do anyway. In doing so we get sucked into the dichotomy and the polarization of existence.

Will we ever get to a point where we don't have to polarize? Can we evolve past the dichotomy? Are we meant to? Or is the dichotomy hidden deep within the fabric of the Universe and thus will always be present in our lives?