The unity of opposites

This is about a view which is important for the next thought, but is not intuitive to understand, and I have yet not thought of any way to explain it, but I hope to create some intuitive understanding and hopefully agreement that it is so. In other words it is about yin and yang.

As the title suggests this is about how there must be an opposite of something in order for us to know the thing. For example to have white there must be black, to have smart there must be dumb, to have something there must be nothing. This is of course not a new idea, and certainly not my idea, but it is a very important idea that people usually don't consider.

If you already know or feel that it is so, there is no need for you to read further, but for everyone else I will try to convince you.

Lets start with this example, you are reading this on a computer, which you probably own, let say it is rather new computer you bought. Hence if you are happy about owning your rather new computer, that happiness comes from the memory and feeling of not having this computer, that is this happiness of having necessary comes from a not so happy feeling of wanting but not having, and without feeling of not having, there would be no happiness of having, and therefor those two things go together, you can not remove one without also loosing the other, because if you never wanted a computer, never needed it, then you will not get happy when you get it.

Lets take another example, a sharp knife, what is that? Well one answer is a sharp knife is a knife that is not dull, and we see that there must exist dull in order for us to have sharp, if there were no dull knifes we would not have sharp knifes, we would only have knifes, and there would be no concept of sharp or dull.

Hot and cold, dark and light, smart and dumb, green grass, small shoes, strong rope and so on and so on...

Examples are endless since for everything there is an opposite of that, otherwise we would not be able to think about it.

For example consider everyone are drinking water, and if we did nothing else with water we would just call it drink, we would say "I want to drink" without the need to specify water, because there is nothing else, we have to specify drink because there is a state where we are not drinking, hence reason for existence of the concept drinking is the opposite state of non-drinking.

Then let say someone found a second source to drink from, first one was a regular well and the new one is somewhere close to volcanic activity hence is heated. Then there would be a need to distinguish between two sources for drinking, one would say give me a hot drink or give me a cold drink. Before discovery of hot drink, the cold drink did not exist, even thou the drink was cold there was no cold drink because the drink was always same temperature and there was nothing else to drink.

Well then let say someone finds some leaves he or she dries and pour hot drink on them, and then it taste totally different from the original drink, and they might call it tea, but to have tea there must be something which is non-tea, just that what we did drink originally, and lets call it water, hence two drinks started to exist, hot and cold water, and tea. But then someone didn't drink the tea right away and it got cold hence there is now hot and cold tea.

And so on, I feel it is easier to understand the concept when constructing as above, instead of just saying that there is no green tea without black tea, it would just be tea, and there is no tea without non-tea and so on.

One should now understand how it is necessary that opposite or negation of something exists in order for that something to exist.

For something to exist without negation or opposite of itself it must then both exist and not exist at the same time, because basic negation of any thing is non-thing. And if there is such thing that does exist and don't exist on the same time, then everything else must be IT, because if something is not IT then that is a negation of IT.

Hence one thing is the unity of two opposites.

Meditation

There are many instruction videos on the internet about meditation, how to meditate, why meditate, and so on. This is not about some new technique or some new purpose of meditation, there is too much of that online already, instead this is about the basics.

There is one thing that everyone will agree separating meditation from sitting with closed eyes or sitting and stirring at something, and that is no thinking during meditation. To achieve that there is techniques like chanting, mantras, bells, drums, breathing and so on. Also there is also one thing that is usually described as the goal of meditation, and that is to be here and now, in the moment, which is harder to understand, and people spend endless hours meditating to achieve that without success.

As you might have guessed already, both above are closely related. If you never tried meditation, try to sit for 10 to 40 minutes, in such way that you can not fall asleep, and you will notice that the mind is never in the present time, it is in the future, planning, guessing outcomes, or it is in the past doing things differently, imagining what could happen if you did something differently, or it is solving problems, or it is somewhere else doing something else. Hence your mind is never here and now.

Why can't you be here and now and still be thinking? Well what do you have to think about when you are sitting and doing nothing? That's right there is nothing to think about if you are doing nothing, if you are thinking then you are not here and now where you do nothing but somewhere else in some different situation where thinking is required, which is often the future, what will I do when I am done meditating, well I must eat, for that I need to go and buy bread, and then I must, and so on.

Hence being here and now which is often described as being the goal of meditation, to feel that moment, necessarily implies not thinking about anything, since there is nothing to think about.

And as we know majority of the techniques of meditations (except some crazy ones), ultimately try to teach you to stop couscous thought.

And now it is obvious what meditation is, it is circular reasoning,
1. being in the moment --> no thinking,
hence
2. no thinking --> being in the moment.

What is unsaid but understood is this: no thinking <--> being in the moment, but for it to be true, both of the above must be true.

While first is quite easy to motivate why it is so, the second is not so obvious. It is also probably the reason for why people keep chasing this moment with endless hours of meditations and never seem to get there. But there are only two options from here, either:
no thinking --> being in the moment, then people are there in the moment all the time (assuming they mastered the no thinking part) without realizing it (perhaps because there is no conscious thought to think about it), and keep chasing it.
or
no thinking -|-> being in the moment, but there are still some people claiming to have experienced something special while meditating, feeling here and now, in the moment. Then being in the moment is something different and not connected to no thinking. This has two consequences first, there is no need to meditate to feel that feeling of being in the moment, it will just happen of it self if you are lucky, and second is what is then the point of sitting and not thinking about anything?

Hence:
No thinking <--> being in the moment, and everyone who is able not to think for a period of time has experienced that "moment of zen" but do not realize it.
or
?? --> Being in the moment
Being in the moment --> no thinking
no thinking --> ??
which simply is:
?? --> being in the moment --> no thinking --> ??

By looking at different kinds of instruction movies for meditation on the internet one can see which views on meditation they have, some believe in <--> relation claiming that by clearing you mind and keep practicing you will experience that moment of zen sooner or later, while others use second one and fill those ?? with love, cosmic energy, chakras, karma e.t.c.

Which one it true? I don't know.