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.
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