The point I want to make in this article is that right and wrong, good and bad are joined at the hip. You can no more separate the good from the bad as you can have a right without a left.
I’ll start with a quote from the Taoist masters:
When everyone recognises beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;
When everyone recognises goodness as good, there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited; …
Before and after are in mutual sequence.
The late American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson also had something to say about this principle. Herer are some relevant quotes from his essay on Compensation:
Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate; for example, to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,–how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/compensation.html
It is the nature of things that as long as we live in the world of duality we can never have a good without a bad. And we will continue to live in duality as long as we suffer from the delusion that we have a self that is separate from the rest of existence. The only way to escape from duality is to become enlightened.
But since we are not enlightened and are not seeking to become enlightened what are we to do? Emerson offers a remedy to that as well:
Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. The man is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations,–What boots it to do well? there is one event to good and evil; if I gain any good, I must pay for it; if I lose any good, I gain some other; all actions are indifferent.
There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same ….
In other words seek your oneness with Being, with the soul.
Emerson continues:
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
So in sum, seek to realize your oneness with God and also virtue, wisdom, love, knowledge and beauty.
Read the essay on Compensation (link is above). I read it myself when I was a teenager. It is very abstract and the language is old fashioned but if you apply just one concept that you understand then it can transform your life. It will serve as a consolation when things are going badly for you or you suffer from the malice of people (and these are experiences that come to everybody).
I am speaking from experience. Reading this essay may have saved me from suicide at a time things were going very badly for me.
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