Do you like chocolate or vanilla? Are you more inclined toward the sweet or the salty?
Our minds are inclined to divide life into either-or, this or that. As we age, we develop a strong like for this, and we are clear about why we don’t like that. And, life gets difficult when we have too much of that and too little of this.
A spiritual way of knowing steps out of the either-or box. Beyond the dualist default is a spiritual part of the brain, that takes the either-or and transmutes it into a both-and. We touched on this in another recent post, Why Your Brain Thrives on Spirituality.
In my own story, back when my Meniere’s disorder was in overdrive, the many vertigo experiences I had were easy to put into the bad box. And then I started to notice how I was paying more attention to my eating and sleeping. I was tuning into my body much more closely.
Little by little, I lifted my Meniere’s with its vertigo out of the bad box. I saw that no box could contain what it meant to me. It was bad. It was wise. It was limitation. It was health-inducing. My reactive mind kept wanting to put it in a box. My spiritual knowing could hold it all in its complexity.
Spiritual knowing thrives on the both-and:
“To everything there is a season. a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted . . .” (Ecclesiastes 3).
“Yin and yang together produce the energy of creation and give rise to all things.” (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 42)
“Everybody has a little bit of the sun and moon in them. Everybody has a little bit of man, woman, and animal in them. Darks and lights in them. Everyone is part of a connected cosmic system.” (Suzy Kassem)
We are in a time when the conventional thinking is highly either-or-ish. Case in point - religion and politics are more contentious than ever. I faced this all the time when I was a church pastor. One of the hardest aspects of that work was rubbing shoulders and words with people who saw the world very differently from me.
And, this friction was also one of the most valuable aspects. It was a meeting place of various minds and perspectives. On our good days, we made extra efforts to listen to the other, because we knew them to be more than their politics or theologies. We knew their hearts, and they were good, caring people (of course, my either-or mind quickly found the “exceptions!”).
Beyond the either-or is an opened mind that is infused with heart. It sees the both-and. It gives the benefit of the doubt. It’s curious about difference. It’s not insistent on it’s own viewpoints. It loves the realm that the poet Rumi loved,
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.