Judging and evaluating, comparing and taking sides define the human condition. We exist in a world of opposites. Remove the concept of darkness, as for example in the Dark Ages, the concept of the Age of Enlightenment is impossible to define. Take sickness away from our earthly existence and you cannot desire to be healthy since you would never have been sick or had ever experienced sickness in others. Health would be an incomprehensible, unreal and abstract concept. A heavy cast iron skillet only conveys its weight to us in comparison to a bag of feathers, not on its own.

Yet, when we take sides, preferring one over the other, judging one as “good” and the other as “bad,” wanting only what’s “right” and not what’s “wrong,” we only accept half of the picture. Reality is both, must have both, does not exist otherwise on this earth in the material realm.

Hence equanimity and contentment arise out of accepting that abundance and poverty, hunger and satiatedness, generousness and stinginess must coexist, and only together are One. One aspect cannot be wished or manipulated away in favor of more of the other. That’s banging your head against the wall of how the universe functions. Besides, everyone has a different definition of “good” and “bad” and we are now entering sticky philosophical terrain. The murderer obviously did the only possible thing in that crucial moment, and it was the “right” thing at the time.

Spiritual development begins with the acceptance that what we encounter and experience just “is,” and it is “good” because there is no “bad” or “wrong.” They both cannot exist without the other, and by necessity are part of the package we signed up for when we came upon this earth.