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Bill Cottringer

“Three things cannot be long hidden: The sun, the moon, and the truth.” ~Buddha. 

     One such truth is the awesome power of threes. Just consider the influence of the threes in pyramids, the Christian trinity, colors of traffic lights, a tri-fold dinner menu, the times of the past, present and future, the Bill of Rights with the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and even Freud’s personality divisions of the id, ego and superego.

    One other important three is the three main conflicts we all face throughout our lives—these pervasive conflicts are between us and life, us and others and within us and ourselves. Ironically, we have three choices as to how to deal with these three main conflicts—with our instinctual pleasure-based Id, our ideal superego moral conscience, or our adult ego reasoning.

     And even these three choices involve the three other flavors of fight, flight or passive indifference with the three motives of competing, cooperating or compromising. And further, we can anticipate three different sets of outcomes, including one where everybody loses, another where there are some winners and losers, and even one where everyone wins.

     Now let’s drop down to certain realities that appear in twos.  We are born into a dualistic spiritual split in a world of Yin and Yang polar opposites, with a purposeful design behind the sense of having a distinct existence of ourselves separate from everything else in this life. Our sense of separation kicks in very early as babies, as we learn to cry for something we want or need, driven by the two primal needs of pleasure and pain.

    As we mature in our personal development, we begin to see that of all the polar opposites of the experiences we can have in life—darkness and light, passivity and activity, hot and cold, and male and female—can lead to further dualistic judgments of right and wrong, desirable or undesirable, valuable or invaluable and true or false. Escaping from this dualism is the door to genuine spiritual awakening. But how do we find the right door with so many seemingly available?

     The belief in a separate self, able to escape from the trap of dualistic thinking, is virtually impervious to change. This is because all behavior, including beliefs, are driven by the strength we feel in the truth of the belief. And this one is particularly hard to see past because it is an exceptionally compelling and persistent illusion, just like time convinces us of the reality of a past, present and future.

     Now here is another irony. In changing an unproductive belief into a more productive one, its strength of feeling true can only be weakened by a more compelling experience with its dualistic polar opposite. Our spiritual split begins to heal when we stumble upon two important realizations: (1) The dualistic world of opposites is very real and necessary, and (2) the further dualistic judgments of the real Yin and Yang's of this life, are artificial and unnecessary. In turn, this insight tells us that all opposites—the real and artificial—are simply two different sides of the same coin. And here we are back to moving towards union and away from separation.

     It may seem as though this path is extremely difficult to find and even more problematic to navigate. But there is much to learn in our failures that get us derailed in this journey of healing our spiritual split. One important traveling insight is to work towards balancing the airtime we give to Freud’s three parts of our self—the id, ego and superego, and learning to let each speak loudest at the right time and place.

     For instance, when the ego sees is no harm to self or others, why not let the id indulge itself. Or sometimes it will be okay to let your ego dominate the seen when you have both the most to gain and most to lose. While other times, it is important to get out of your own way in managing the unproductive aspects of your ego. And there are always a few situations that bring tears to God’s eyes, where tough moral choices have to be made by the superego taking charge.

     Now here is the really good news. The process of healing the spiritual split is built into life’s design and it will happen sooner if you let it but even later if you insist on fighting it. More good news is that we seem to be making the turn away from a win-lose competitive mentality model to a cooperative, win-win one, which leads more towards spiritual union than spiritual separation.

Awakening is not changing who you are, but discarding who you are not. ~Deepak Chopra.