duality
Posted by mansoor on 23 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: soul searching
over the last couple of months, i’ve spent considerable time soul searching. living in islamabad does have it’s benefits, cheif among them being the time i can spend with myself. i’m thinking of recording the results of this search here, in the hopes that maybe someday, they might bring me more clarity.
this post deals with the topic of duality. one of the things which has helped me considerably during my professional and personal life is the ability to keep both sides of an argument in my mind. what i took as a natural ability and something common to humanity, i’ve discovered that it really isn’t.
what most people that i’ve run across do, is to generate a point of view and then perpetuate that point of view during the course of their lives. this view can be as simple as a food choice or as complex as state of the national economy. ofcourse, these views are built up on the basis of bias and experiences the person in question has gone through since their childhood. this is the reason, especially in our part of the world, that many people get into heated debates over seemingly nothing, because it is their worldview which is challenged when another view is presented.
how did i steer clear of it? well, for the most part, it has to do with my grandmothers. yes, the virtues of having grandparents who are still alive and well (mashallah) are many and they’ve taught me a great many things from their life experiences, what i call pearls of wisdom. we often downplay the stories our grandparents tell us for idle chitchat or their need for reliving memories, but these memories are truly priceless to the right mind.
anyway, back to my grandmothers. while growing up, i was at one point in time, intrigued with my name. what did it mean, what was the origin and so forth. the name ‘mansoor’ fortunately doesn’t really have a single well established meaning and in my formative years, that was a great source of confusion! afterall, in the mind of a child wrestling with making sense of the world around him, how could this crucial detail be so confusing when everything else was absolute? afterall, i eat because i’m hungry, i sleep because i’m tired and i talk because i want to say something. back then, everything was clear, simple and straightforward. the elders had the answers and they were, largely, the same answers. but my name, that was another story altogether.
so what does my name actually mean? while i had many connoctions suggested to me, according to one grandmother, my name meant the ‘bringer of happiness’ and according to the other, it was ‘bringer of pain’. you see, they were basing it off the literal meaning of the word ’soor’ which meant pain and happiness in two different languages. other variants were ’success’ and ‘the one who gives peace of heart’ etc.
as you might imagine, i struggled for quite a few years to understand how or why could something as simple as my name have two so opposite meanings! and to top it all off, which meaning should i be selecting? somewhere along the line, however, i accepted both!
in terms of logic diagramming, i was posed with the dilemma of the ‘exclusive or’ where it can be one choice or the other, but not both. my solution was rejecting the ‘exclusive or’ and making it of ’and’ logic, where it would have to be both, or none at all. so now, my name means, atleast to me, the bringer of both pain and happiness, complete opposites yet as one.
how did this happen, and who taught me this, i dont recall, someday maybe i will, but whoever gave me this ability has bestowed upon me the greatest gift of all. from something as simple as knowing the meaning of my name, i’ve applied this concept to a myriad of other problems over the course of my short life. being able accept many sides of a given situation, from the simple choice of good and bad to the more complex shades of grey in between, i value myself as being free of bias and being able to look at things in a more objective, non personal way. even though i still get into heated debates defending a point of view with various people, the ability allows me to be able to get into heated debates on both sides simultaneously!
and yes, the fact that i can think in duality might also be just my point of view, and may not be really true. many have argued with me that i just take the opposite side to whatever argument is presented to me, and that i take the negativity as duality, which leads me to think that their argument is also true, which means i’m able to think in duality in the first place!
yes, life as me is so much fun. that’s it for soul searching for this time.. if you’re thoroughly confused by this post, dont worry. it’s not supposed to make sense in the first place.
