I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this concept, and I just cannot accept it.
It seems completely against human nature.
As you’ve pointed out, Steve, we all contain a dark and a light side. We are all both good and evil. And we’re all sort of vacillating between the two impulses all the time as we try to figure out how to be happy and how to live our lives. This polarization idea seems to be saying that the best way to get stuff done is to pick a side and stay there. It says that if we continue to vacillate, then the strength of our energy will be greatly decreased and we won’t accomplish great things.
That’s the part that rings true with me – and it’s the reason that I am still sitting here trying to work this out. A big part of me wants to jump on board with it and say, “YES!! I am outflow girl. Bring on the outflow and love and my life is going to be freaking amazing from here on out! No worries about how I will make a living because the universe will take care of me. Ice cream for everyone!”
But. The other part of me will not let myself jump on board, because it seems, on the other hand, completely insane and contrary to how we are made, as people. People are social animals – we want to help each other. We NEED to help each other. Put any individual person out in the forest by himself and he would have a hard time surviving. But put a group of us out there together and we can do things like, build bows and arrows, form tribes… and we become a force to be reckoned with. We thrive on connection with other human beings. We want to feel useful to each other and part of the group. In other words, our species is almost biologically designed for outflow.
And then on the flip side – we are obviously ANIMALS. We are biological organisms that seek to gratify ourselves in a myriad of ways. Soooo…. In that sense, we are biologically designed for inflow as well. We’re going to want things. More food, more money, a better car, a good mate, nice children, etc.
I think all of that is in line with what Steve is saying…. We all have both sides imbedded within us. And I agree with that. What I don’t agree with is that it is a great idea to pick a side. I am inclined to say that he could be right that if we pick a side, we’ll get more done that we want to get done. It looks as though Mother Theresa picked her side and helped a lot of people. Adolf Hitler picked his and murdered six million people. If those two hadn’t picked a side, then no…. they wouldn’t have gotten as much done. I suspect that Steve would say that Hitler, in fact, didn’t really pick his side. He haphazardly stumbled into it (with little self-awareness) and wasn’t prepared to pay his karmic debt, which is why he wound up being defeated. Ok fine.
But! The struggle between the good and evil parts of myself – this is so imbedded within me. I don’t think that it is in my nature AT ALL to embrace inflow and wholly reject outflow nor is it in my nature to embrace outflow and expel inflow. It is in my nature to be aware of both the inflow and the outflow and to try to balance it as best as I can with a heavy emphasis on different situational needs (in other words, certain situations may do best with inflow, and others with outflow). I may wind up treading water a lot of times by doing that. I may not get as much done as I want to get done. But I feel both sides within me so strongly (as part of the very essence of myself as a human being) that trying to become polarized seems like the ultimate self-deception. Intense love and fear – this is part of life. It seems ridiculous to try and assert otherwise. It seems like an enormous lie to myself.
Imagine the person that you love most in the world. Imagine that someone, a God-like omniscient figure, told you that if they died, then the world would become a better place, as a whole. In other words, for whatever reason, that individual (through no fault of their own) is more of a drain on the world than a help to it. The outflow person would say…. “Oh sure, go ahead, kill him/her.” Right? The inflow person would protect them at all costs.
I don’t think that it’s possible to pick a side completely. And I don’t really believe that anyone has ever successfully picked one side and rejected all aspects of the other side at all times in every situation of life. Not even Steve. Or Mother Theresa. Or the Emperor in Star Wars.
P.S. – you know that a man writes the blog when Star Wars gets referenced about seven times.
