Apr
The Polar Bear Principle
Another of the classes I wrote and taught was called “Polar Bears.” I would draw a cartoon of an igloo, a polar bear, seal and penguin a’ la “Chilly Willy” on the blackboard. The class was usually given to people learning to live without alcohol and drugs. They were shaky, so I kept it simple.
The lecture had nothing to do with Polar Bears. Its intent was to teach something else. The “polar” was more about opposite Poles. If you have been involved in esoteric studies for any amount of time, you are familiar with the concept of Polarity. It is the concept of reciprocal extremes, such as Hot and Cold, Hard and Soft, Male and Female, Dry and Wet. Polarity is so much a part of our thinking that symbols of it abound in the everyday world. Take fountains which are round, and have a rising obelisk or spire in the center. Look at the long pointed windows and round rosette windows in Gothic architecture. The Tree and Well are another instance of Polarity.
Though the class gave a description of Polarity, that was not its main intent. The idea was to think between the extremes. An example I gave in Volume I of The Road to Bifrost is a perfect illustration. I tell you an amount of temperature: 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I ask if you think it is hot or cold. Had you answered “cold”, I reply, “But what if we were freezing water? Too cold or too hot?”
If you replied “hot,” I reply, “ But what if we were baking bread? Too cold or too hot?”
Many times the nature of a thing is not an absolute, but a matter of context. A given temperature may feel warm or cold to the human hand. However, the judgment of hot or cold mostly depends on the situation at hand. Giving a task such as freezing water or boiling oil, we have a parameter for deciding if it is too hot or too cold.
The example opens the way to the larger lesson. One of the things that hinder understanding is the tendency to see things only in their extremes. Colloquially, this is known as “seeing things in black and white.” The way it works is that any given thing is either one extreme or the other. If it is one thing, it cannot have any of the other. That sort of assessment only gives two possible conclusions which are always diametrically opposed. There is no room for compromise. To use a more recent expression. There is no “wiggle room.”
Life itself does not present itself in such stark terms. Our everyday experiences tend to place most things as varying shades of gray, rather than absolute black or white. Thinking in extremes may be convenient, but it does not give us the chance to consider other options. Instead, black-and-white thinking only gives us Yes and No, Good and Bad, etc.
The Havamal wisely tells us that no man is too good nor too bad. The best of us have our faults, and the worst of us have our assets. The same can be said of many things. We need to remember that much of what we encounter is a blend rather than an extreme. Of course, there are those situations that require a black-and-white decision. We need to be able to appreciate both the extremes and those situations that demand a look at the gray areas in between.
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In our current time, the ability to appreciate the shades of gray is needed more than ever. We have seen polarization to the point where political parties cannot work together for the good of the nation. Our nation has become inundated by opposing factions in everything from politics to social issues to entertainment. The reason our economy is a mess and we are deadlocked in Iraq is the unwillingness of the various parties to work together. Rather than compromise for the collective good, they each hold to their own ideals with all the adamancy of granite.
