“What’s the difference in being smart, being wise and being cool?” — a teenager.
Forget adjectives, focus on verbs for a moment. Focus on Force, Emotion, Feeling. Understand first that the world revolves around the truth of duality. That’s the hidden principle that governs all our lives. Remember your high school physics? Isaac Newton?
He said that all actions invite an equal and opposite reaction. That’s duality in the physical world of tangible objects. Every force in the universe invites a mirrored response. Likewise the mind swings like a pendulum from one set of opposite emotions to another, providing a balance between desire and abstinence, resolve and weakness, contentment and desperation.
That’s the principle of duality in our lives. The moment you feel happiness, the seeds of misery are already sown in the fertile soil of your heart. You will continue to push the happiness graph upwards till it can sustain no longer — till it starts bending into frustration, despair and eventual misery. You fall in love, lets say. The first emotions are elation, jubilation, deep shoots of thrill. Within days, possession has taken over — now you want to control what she wears, who else she sees, what she writes on her wall — and just about everything else. The emotion of love pushed the seed of possession into your mind, you could even say the emotion of love carried the hidden seed of possession within itself and the seed didn’t take very long to grow into a powerful tree that blocked the sunlight of love from most parts of your relationship. Could you have prevented the seed of possession to take root? No way. Your emotional life is like the swing of a pendulum — one moment you will feel love, another moment jealousy, the next moment contentment, and soon enough, back to rage. That is the equilibrium of love.
Surprisingly, it’s only when we establish the swing that relationships become stable. Pure undiluted love is difficult to sustain — just as constant endless quarrels between lovers is impossible to endure. You figured that out? Now to the adjectives. Smart. Wise. Cool.
Being smart is understanding that your life is stuffed with duality in everything you do, feel, think and experience. Being wise is figuring out why it happens, seeing the hidden principle of life working with Newtonian precision — almost like a physics experiment. Being cool is becoming able to slip out of the rat race of emotions — stepping out of the pendulum, letting the world swing yet refusing to swing with them. In short — busting the equation. So if you can feel love without possession, happiness without desire, contentment without fulfillment — you are all three — smart, wise and super cool.