Are Extremes Real or Artificial?

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The world is seldom the extremes we are presented.

There are many reasons why this is so, but the extremes of our world, the polar opposites, are seldom where anyone or anything actually exists.

I believe that a lot of the emphasis on the extremes is because they seem easy. Either/or situations can be made to feel simpler than having more choices on the table. What’s more, when we have these extreme opposites presented to us by those supposedly “in power” they create more lack and scarcity that can be used to further disempower everyone else.

It doesn’t matter what the opposites are that we are presented. These extremes get employed in order to define broad strokes of the world we live in. This gets applied to both tangibles and intangibles.

Unsure what I mean by these extremes? Here’s a few to consider:

Fat/Thin
Good/Evil
Short/Tall
Republican/Democrat
Light/Dark
Love/Hate

For the most part, people and things tend to fall somewhere between the extremes. I generally refer to this as the grey or colors between black and white.

What this amounts to is recognizing that placing people on opposite ends of the extremes is generally artificial, creating not only disempowerment, but more lack and scarcity in our world.

Why does this matter? Because most of where people, situations, and actions fall in the world are between the extremes.

For example – how do you define short/tall? Let’s say short is an adult under five feet, tall a person over six and a half feet. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of people in my life fall somewhere between these extremes.

This applies to intangibles, too. Most people I know are not truly good nor evil, but mostly somewhere between one or the other.

The extremes are divisive

Presenting the world in terms of either/or is a great way to create divisions. Look at politics, for example. The blanket policies of the two major parties in the United States are not one-size-fits-all for the vast majority of people they supposedly represent. I may lean mostly liberal, but that does not mean I don’t hold a few conservative views as well.

Why? Because I live in the spaces between the extremes, as do most people. Yet creating labels for people makes it easier to keep them separated and on opposite sides. Without the extreme labels we get as created by the extremes, we bridge the gap between them, which is truly where most people exist.

I cannot deny that there ARE situations and people and things that do meet the extremes. But in reality they are few and far between. Why? Because as individuals, we are each unique in how we think, feel, and act.

A one-size-fits-all notion, in light of more than seven billion people living across this planet, seems pretty silly and simplistic to me. These extremes on opposite sides of the coin often are less realistic than the grey and colors between them.

The extremes may not even be true opposites

Recently I have taken a deeper interest in the Buddhist philosophy. One thing that has quickly come to light is the notion that the opposite of a thing may not be what we think it is.

For example, let’s say you believe that the opposite of love is hate. What if, instead, the opposite of love is the absence of love?

Isn’t hate the absence of love? No, it’s a wholly different emotion, and one could even argue that it’s still tied to love. It is entirely possible that the opposite of love is its absence, a non-existence of the idea and feeling of love in place of love.

Taking this a step further, if the opposite of a given extreme is the absence of that extreme, rather than the widely-accepted opposite, doesn’t that lend more credence to the notion that most people do not exist at the extreme ends?

I believe it is further proof that the world is seldom the extremes we are presented. The world is those colors and greys between the black and white extremes…or the white and absence of white.

Why does this matter? Because these extremes get used to create divisions in the world. Whether tangible or intangible, they divide us. Muslim and Jew, Brown skinned and white skinned, liberal and conservative, man and woman…they are used to keep us split, and in competition and conflict.

What if when we are mindful of this, we can be empowered, and disallow the divisions created to keep us disempowered?

We are not the extremes

We are more than the extremes, whether opposites, or an idea and its absence. People are made up of greys and colors and ideas, thoughts, feelings, and innumerable material and immaterial bits. We are all perfect and flawed, and we are all capable of feeling tremendous joy or intolerable pain and suffering.

When we are mindful of this being true of everyone, and the artifice of the extremes, we have a powerful tool to do and be better for ourselves, consciously create our reality, as well as make the world better.

Do you see that the extremes are less real than that which exists between them?

This is the three-hundred seventy-seventh entry in my series. These weekly posts are ideas for, and my personal experiences with, walking along the path of life to consciously create reality. I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world along the way, and empower myself and my readers with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-blog and share this.

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