eThoughts : The Art of Reversibility

Part of the series It’s All Been Said Before™ (© 2006), a division of Book-In-A-Drawer Publications.™

From a movie to an email. I recently received an email from someone that noted a moral philosophy is one thing, the application of morality quite another.

Yep, that seems like a good revelation to me. But what do we expect except difficult transitions from the formulas mind-set to the world of ambiguities when we’re taught that knowledge means having answers? It’s as though we are breeding dogma, and the subsequent “right” to begin labeling as psychotic, whether benignly or malevolently, other dogmas, or even a world of ambiguities. That’s the disaster, and it shows.

In any case—and this is the point of this bit of thought—it seems to me that most of the universe exists in paired opposites and there is always a system running things. And it seems to me that the ability to identify the reigning CEO directing selective attention and to question those directives, marks emotional, cognitive, and “spiritual” intelligence. Thus it appears that the application of habituation, sensitivity, and the corridors in-between are the landscapes of awareness and the bases for quantum leaps of consciousness.

However, humans seemed predisposed towards attending to one part of a paired opposite as opposed to the other, as though we’ve got to pick one of the pair and go with it. To change this mind-set will likely upset our ecology. It’s not that such change is inherently negative, but that changing habits and acquiring sensitivity or moving sensitivity to habits, is inherently dangerous to some degree or the other, requiring increased attention to monitor the changing internal climate. After all, one does not necessarily want to put on new running shoes before running a marathon, even if those shoes are better.

I laugh about this, as I seem to forget about it. I recently changed my exercise regimen once again and was so energized by the change that I inadvertently over-amped myself with the infusion of energy. It was great when I was doing it, but my being needs transitional periods (duh) and I forgot to honor that. The result was that I became sick, though not badly. I was pissed at my idiocy, because I’ve been here before. But coming face-to-face with such positive energy as I was encountering duped me into more forays than I was capable of handling. Too much light can be just as blinding as too much dark.

In Piagetian terms, I needed to keep in mind reversibility—as in getting ready to climb a tree, one must be aware of the need to come down. The problem with this is point-of-view. If a six-foot tall person is standing on the ground and wants to climb to a point 20 feet up from the ground, that point is approximately 14 feet from one’s point of view. But when one gets to that point 20 feet up, the ground, from one’s point of view, can be as much as 26 feet down. The individual’s point-of-view difference of 12 feet can have a major psychological/biological impact when the actuality of going up and coming down are not considered together.

Since much of the universe works in paired opposites in rushing off in one direction, we might do well to consider a paired opposite as a component of the equation as opposed to considering the paired opposite as separate.

Oh the ramifications in traversing our habits and sensitivities!