Chapter 07: The Madness of a Complementary Reality

The difference between sanity and madness lies in the degree to which others share our interpretation of reality. Although we might collectively perceive an individual who does not acknowledge a similar construction of the world to our own as being mentally unbalanced, that same person may also possess a view of the universe that is far more accurate than what the rest of us may think we comprehend. Such views may threaten our way of life, and we are therefore inclined to attack or dismiss anything that causes incongruence in our thinking. Historically, it was not unusual for individuals who deliberately or incidentally challenged the commonly held creeds of their times to have been persecuted or ostracized. Given this, it should not be surprising that we routinely negotiate our publicly perceived rationality by adopting the allegedly recognized beliefs of our resident societies or persuading others to align their interpretation of events to our own by filtering or fabricating evidence and guiding the precluding rationale of preconceived judgments.

Unfortunately, there is nothing absolute that we can rely upon as being undeniable proof except by direct experience, but even our perceptions can be inaccurate or misleading. Indeed, we can and we do offset our uncertainty through measurement against endorsed standards and the recording of our observations and expressions for future reference, but the information we collect needs to be fall within an acceptable margin of error or pass an established threshold for what we deem to be valid. Although we can cast doubt on anything and everything that we think or witness, we must inevitably act on what we can adequately confirm as true or probable. However, the greater our discomfort with uncertainty, the more many of us tend towards certitude or conviction to compensate for our disquiet. Moreover, we need a strong incentive to examine facts that may threaten our worldview. Without a willingness to challenge our assumptions or question our current knowledge, we will neither explore the boundaries of our reality nor reconceptualize what we experience.

We do not respond well to the sharp incoherence of the contradictions we perceive in life, which we unconsciously bury in our core beliefs without realizing the nebulous source of our restless and anxious instability. We are taught how to interpret our surroundings and the salient occurrences that enter into our experiential field, but we do not always learn to distinguish between the conflicting messages of the world that we need to resolve and the essential construct of duality that enables us to decipher our intelligible universe. Since we find ourselves often holding opposing thoughts for extended periods, this constantly leaves us teetering on the edge of madness. Without basic guidance through life, we segregate our beliefs into untouchable rationalizations that make us appear to be garrisoned and indisputably stable on the outside while being fragile and predictably eruptive on the inside. However, this vulnerability is easily exposed by an impermanent existence that changes in a way that turns the strength of our regularity into the weakness of our rigidity.

As we walk along our varying paths to find the enlightened simplicity of the universal truth, we encounter the obscure complexity of reality that tests the frames we fabricate and assemble to navigate through our lives. As a starting point, we naturally come to appreciate its dualistic nature that has philosophically persevered over the millennia in our teachings and has ultimately embedded itself in the digital space of computing. The reason we consider all properties we define in the world against their opposites is that they are complementary in nature such as existence and nonexistence. The base distinction is always whether something is present or absent, just as we would use in a binary system where we count something as either one or zero. We extend this to whether or not something is real, but the point is that we inherently divide the world into two mutually exclusive states and pair them together to define an attribution we can apply to the world. This is the dichotomy of the truth, expressed as polarity, which is reflected in the classic example of lightnessand darkness, and often depicted as positive and negative. They come as a package because we only understand one by comparison against the other. We cannot describe light or dark alone without experiencing them in contrast to one another. This is the ancient notion of codependent origination because they emerge and function concurrently without any critical need to attribute causation unless we wish to assume that it is bidirectional.

This basic sense of dichotomy is native to our thinking, and hence, to discount this is to remove a foundation for meaning in our thoughts and paralyze our capacity to comprehend the world. We cannot have explain up without down, front without back, long without short, or deep without shallow. We cannot use any description that does not have an opposite or something with which to contrast. There is no foreground without a background, and no message or content without a context. It is always relative to something, which is why this primordial sense of duality is encoded in each of us. However, while it is essential to how we think and entertain our perception of reality, it also creates many opportunities for us to confuse our lucidity with our delirium. We can only treat the principle of duality as a mental base from which to manage the focus and scope of our thoughts. If we do not grasp the fuzziness of the truth that subsists between the two polar ends of the spectrum, we risk ignoring the grey universe that permeates our existence and this can potentially endanger us as well as others.

A PARADOXICAL TRUTH ABOUT A FUZZY WORLD

Although we know that reality does not actually express itself in a strictly dichotomous manner, we nevertheless try to perceive it through a dualistic lens. This is because we couple our desire for facility in the face of hardship with our impatience in taking unfortunate shortcuts to obtain immediate yet fleeting rewards at the expense of a more sustainable outlook, which can withstand recurring cycles of extreme highs and lows that trap us in the great riddle we call life. Dichotomies make things appear simple, but render us susceptible to severe black-or-white thinking that results in an infinite bifurcation of the universe. These cognitive processes are simulated and reinforced by a digital nation of smart devices that divide the world into endless sequences of 0s and 1s to depict it as precisely as they can because it is the simplest way to express information in a technologically advanced culture.

However, the limit of our perceptual field is restricted to the physical range and precision of our instruments. When we cannot measure or compute a difference any further, we categorize things as being completely present or entirely absent as they are black or white. But even if we could measure something with increasingly greater accuracy or mathematically describe variances with imperceptible orders of magnitude, it would fail to hold any personal significance to us and we would simply group such cases as being the same once they reached some almost arbitrarily assigned number. We tend to establish commonly agreed upon standards or scales of evaluation in order to more broadly label things or events and remove the fuzziness that we regularly encounter. But as we purposely dismiss the infinitely subtle degrees of greyness between the absolute bounds of our counterintuitive universe where nothing really stays still, we are able to rationalize a consistently solid structure to our lives and secure a fictional sense of stability against a fluid reality that we cannot grasp.

When we perceive any shade of grey, we can say that we are essentially detecting some combination of black and white. Moreover, the longer we examine what we see and the more precision we apply, the more complex it becomes and escapes our comprehension. It is complicated even when we focus on ordinary objects that we typically label such as a chair, a fruit or a bird. For instance, does a chair cease to be a chair if one leg is severed off or do deem it broken or altered based on its original state? How do we even decide what constitutes a chair? Does it depend on its shape or function, or both? We seem to have templates or models that likely change over time and this includes a set of conditions that we might set only after we ask ourselves a question. For instance, how many bites can we take from an apple before we no longer consider it to an apple? Alternatively, when do we stop referring to flightless birds like penguins as birds? Although scientists and scholars expend great effort and engage in considerable debate to distinguish between things categorically, every one of us develops constructs of everyday animate and inanimate objects with various concrete and abstract qualities loosely associated in our minds. And whether we initially imagine a bird or an insect when we think of a creature that flies may depend on our own experience, we know that we are constantly adding to the complexity to our conceptions while leaning towards recognizing the most common or salient characteristics over time and place.

We obviously know that the truth is not literally black or white, but we are prone to perceive things to be mutually exclusive and even collectively exhaustive until experience and education adds to our knowledge or challenges what we think we know. We are often misguidedly taught that there can only be right answers or wrong answers that are neatly divided into truths or falsehoods. Unfortunately, many of us are also instructed that we must always attribute blame, whether it is to ourselves or to someone or something else. We live in a socially constructed order that does not tolerate ambiguity, and where every problem has a matching solution that can be rationally derived. In addition, many of us are strangled by stress and anxiety because we feel confined to a space that leaves us with very little room for error because as we feel pressured to fill the void of time, which must serve some function, regardless of how transient or frivolous it may be in its fulfilment. This is because we would otherwise find ourselves in states of depression or hostility.

We do not appreciate the tyranny of an absolute world. We do not see how our inclination to know with unequivocal certainty affects our ability to learn relationally. Ambiguity merely reveals the complexity of relationships that define an expansively changing truth and that align without being contradictory. While reality seems to send us mixed messages, we can describe the truth as being paradoxical. The incoherence we sense is a product of our minds and there are no contradictions to be found except in what we believe or in what we are told to believe. However, we cannot understand the weirdness of existence through absolutes, and accepting ambiguity is our only escape from their cognitive oppression and the confinement of knowledge. As we confront the obscurity of our reality, we begin to see the relativity of the truth in how it can be accessible and unattainable as well as objective and subjective while things can be simple and complex just as there are perfect and imperfect. It essentially depends on its context, which is why absolute statements are problematic without clear points of reference or declared assumptions. The truth may be absolute, but our knowledge of it remains relative. The great paradox in attempting to analyze reality is that the truth becomes clearer only to become equally obscure. We briefly grasp it only to lose it again. It is like trying to collect water in our hands and watching it slip away. But if we can embrace its ambiguity by letting it go, then we will loosen our hold on its individual parts to see the whole.

The meaning we derive from the viagnostic narrative depends on seeing the forest emerge from all of its trees. Since we cannot know one thing without the presence or recognition of the opposite other, the big picture cannot be seen without its composite images being seen as well. This is why we need to immerse our lives in its rich detail to appreciate how things relate to one another. And it is through the duality of our experience where we can understand one universal truth or the underlying order and which is expressed in one form or another through ancient and modern interpretations that seem to converge on a paradoxical truth about a fuzzy world. This is not a paradigm shift as much as it is a return to an awareness of what was already recognized long ago.

TWO COMPLEMENTARY REALMS OF REALITY

The universe itself is composed of bits of information that inform all matter and energy what to do in a spectacular display of regularity that vacillates between order and chaos as if always being in the chaotic state of transient misalignment to motivate itself back into its original harmony. These bits are complementary in nature to reflect the universal truth. Everything must fit together in a perpetually fluid manner where all things are constantly in the course of finding their complementary parts. The truth is merely the choreographer of a great cosmic dance, which divulges its significance through the movement of change and in the process of moving into alignment. And this alignment can be loosely described as being fundamentally governed by dual tendencies of existence such as gravity and entropy. They complement each other and act in unison as one unifying force to enable things to change, and therefore, exist. Without this constant existential push and pull, nothing would change and nothing would exist. It is the inclination towards balance or alignment that is briefly but regularly achieved between instances of imbalance or asymmetrical states.

Since things are always changing, we can never really appreciate the truth fully except in the moment of witnessing its movement. Life is movement founded on the galactic and quantum pieces that are in perpetual motion regardless of how solid or inert they appear to be. This is because there are two types of change. One is vibrational and recurrent in that it is oscillating back and forth like a wave, and the other is transformative and emergent in that it is evolving from one level of complexity to the next. But we can also see the combination of these two modes of change in the biological notion of metamorphosis as the relationship between the caterpillar and the butterfly can beautifully exemplify. Change is at the core of our existence and the meaning of life. We often take this for granted and so preoccupied with getting a particular state or a preferred set of circumstances that we forget the meaning lies in the current of change itself.

This extends to how we experience the world as well because we have a sense of knowing and unknowing that occurs simultaneously. It evokes an uncertain, yet enlightening state that makes the truth both thrilling and calming, and our excited interplay with reality equally joyful and terrifying. It elicits a feeling of humility and reverence with a faith in the veracity and possibility of things, and this leads us to the second component or tenet of the viagnostic system, which is recognizing that there are two complementary sides of the truth. This divides into two realms of reality: what is known or perceived and what is unknown or mysterious. We can refer to these two domains as (a) the epistemic realm, which is the world we know or perceive to know, and (b) the enigmatic realm, which is the world behind the world we perceive that we do not know. These two realms are separated by an imaginary line separates experience between the foreseeable and the unexpected, and whose position moves ceaselessly as we progress through our viagnostic discovery until we either pass away or cease to be actively engaged advocates of life itself.

The epistemic realm represents the world of experience that we are able to interpret. It is the impression of things, real and not real, that we sense, discern and respond to as part of our need to carry on with our existence. It includes what we generally consider to be measurable, explainable, and predictable. We may know of it without direct confirmation, but the knowledge we possess can only predict or explicate a limited set of events. By contrast, the enigmatic realm represents the real world of experience that we cannot fully perceive or explain. We may sense it but we do not comprehend it, or we may not notice it at all because there is an unseen order outside of our awareness. It is possible that we may observe and even sometimes anticipate it, but we cannot identify the underlying pattern or control it. This includes what we treat as incalculable, perplexing and spontaneous. It does not align with what we understand. And this drives us deliberately and unconsciously to either better comprehend recurring events and their anomalies or to evade questions that challenge our current knowledge and beliefs. Hence, while the epistemic side of the truth creates a false sense of order that ultimately reveals its disorder as we continue to confront reality, the enigmatic side expresses everything that is missing in our sense of order to make it whole.

Although it is important that we appreciate the two domains of this totality we call existence, we should remember that we are always one with the world. It may be our natural and required inclination to separate ourselves from our environment, but the universe does not make that distinction because our individual lives and our surroundings are part of exactly the same thing. It is our own consciousness that creates perceivable partitions out of necessity because this helps us steer through the events of our shared universe. However, effectively navigating our lives depends on the constantly changing differentiation between what is known and unknown. The world, on the other hand, is able to change and exist due to the pairing of two fundamental tendencies that keep the cosmos in moving and in balance. There is only one underlying order, and its duality reveals a more coordinated function behind the chaos and opposition we seem to experience. But it is these two complementary realms of reality or dual sides of the same universal truth that delineate the existential struggle between our sanity and our madness because there is a fine line that is often difficult to draw between veracity and delusion. It is for this reason that we need an approach to life that permits an honest relationship with the truth, and especially with ourselves.

THE MEANING OF BEING VIAGNOSTIC

Everything we know can only ever be an imperfect account of reality, but it is nevertheless an approximation to the universal truth. The truth may never be fully accessible or describable, but we can align ourselves to its direction since it does convey a basic set of instructions for us to follow as if they were our own commands. Since it is not a thing or a concept that we can capture or possess, we have to learn to receive it or enjoy its company by assuming we are old friends. This is because the truth is built into in us. We are part of it, and tapping into our essence is about accessing the verity of life. We do this through our narratives, which are those incomplete representations we paint of our sentient existence because we ourselves are imperfect. This knowledge is fundamental to our capacity to live our lives. Our purity can only arise from being what we truly are, and not from trying to achieve an unreachable ideal. Furthermore, most ideals are also illusions of perfection because we construct them. They do not depict an untainted view of the world, and seeking them will not lead us to our utopia. Often, they imprison us in the inferno of our own minds because they are merely attempts to deny or escape what we really are instead of trying to transcend who we have become to illuminate what we truly are.

To be faithful to ourselves is to strive to be faithful to the veracity of existence since we reflect a unique sliver of the universal truth, which we are meant to live through our stories. This is the meaning of being viagnostic. Despite our inherent limitations, we can approach the truth because we can intuitively sense its universality by living our lives as an enlightened veneration for its sacred mystery. We express this through our daily observance as reporters or curators of the truth as well as its pursuers and confidants. As we already know, to be viagnostic is to recognize that the universal truth belongs to everyone and yet to no one, and that we are all equally free to seek its true meaning in life. Given this, we do not confine its pursuit and discussion to the empirical and analytical domains that define our formal disciplines of study because it goes beyond what an exclusive club of scholars and scientists have to offer to include artists, poets, designers, builders, healers and anyone in the service of others or who push the boundaries of human endeavour. It is inclusive of everyone who aligns with life through the ingenuity, commerce and ethics of our personal and social progress as well as through art, science, religion and the humanities to which philosophy, history and literature make significant contributions.

Being viagnostic is to acknowledge the most basic identity that any of us can have as living creatures, and this requires us to strip away every false layer of our personalities and the complexes that enshroud them in order to return us back to our natural form. This means behaving sincerely in the observable and metaphysical search for truth that possesses a moral or spiritual quality while reconciling religious feeling with secular rationality. A viagnostic system of life liberates us from fruitless discourse and brute conviction so that we may seek a meaningful life in both the outer and inner realms of our existence. We want to rise above our ignorance and dig beneath our consciousness in order to learn the untold lessons and conceive the unseen possibilities of our stories. And although we have an essential capacity to question what we know or believe, it does not mean that we should pretend that we do not have any beliefs or that we do not influence others in accordance to what we know, believe or especially value. We know it is impossible for any of us to make a statement that does not affect what other people think on some level. Even declaring that we should have no beliefs or recommending that we should refrain from telling others what to believe or do is also an expression of belief. Since we cannot escape this reality, we should therefore focus on applying what we understand while exploring what we do not to meaningfully develop and participate in our narratives.

While culture enriches us all, it can also be our greatest barrier to the truth if we abandon our pursuit of its honest expression by adopting the scientific and political orthodoxy of our times without question. Since we can always find others to treat as ignorant or evil to justify our worldviews, we tend to overlook the deficiencies and contradictions of our beliefs and practices. But when we realize that we are promoting a convenient dogma for the sake of fictitious order however rational it may appear, we need to return to our core principles and rebuild on their foundation to actualize our potential instead of being servants to social status. We know that our narratives all have at least one dividing line representing a critical impasse to overcome or an important goal to fulfill that offers us the chance to demonstrate who we really are and to add a distinctly new element to existence and its reality. Being viagnostic enables us to recognize that our essential state of imperfection not only guarantees the inevitability of our struggles, but also generates our opportunities to immortalize meaning through our impermanent lives. Our viagnostic narratives become sources and carriers for this meaning, which is the perfection that is already within us and expressed through a significant transformation in our lives or in the lives of others.

THE PERFECTION OF AN IMPERFECT EXISTENCE

It is only in our false image of perfection that we find unnecessary imperfection. By this, we mean that while imperfection is a natural reality of our existence in terms of our limitations and the mistakes we inevitably must make to modify or adapt to our circumstances, imposing an exact notion of the truth or describing an ideal condition is not only invalid, but also futile. Since the world is always changing because it must in order to continue existing, there can never be a static situation worth desiring. Arguably, it is the desire itself that will lead to our own misery or to the suffering of others. Our discontent begins with false expectations that perfection falls outside of us. Although there are more than a few of us who see ourselves as the sole example of perfection in the universe, this delusion is merely a perversion of a fundamental truth that it exposes.

 We think of perfection as an ideal state of being, which is really a fantasized or projected form of what we most desire. But while the desire may be real, the perfection we seek does not exist and we truly cannot imagine it any more than we can fully know the wholeness of the truth. But in the same way that we come to intuitively know the truth by working through its fallacies, perfection is actualized by going through the process of being imperfect. By letting imperfection run its course on its way to purity, we learn to respond more and more effortlessly to our blunders until they no longer appear as imperfections, or rather until our changes begin to unearth the essence of our being. The same holds true of our consciousness as it moves towards the genuine perfection of the universal truth, which we can neither articulate nor prove in absolute terms.

In addition to our incompleteness, our imperfection is revealed through the impermanence of life. Our imagined autonomy is confirmed by our brief presence along the temporal scale of the cosmos.  We are essentially imperfect vessels sailing through the passage of time that both extract from and contribute to the reality we encounter, but it is through change and alignment that we witness perfection. We do not achieve this purity we seek by exceeding our limits, but by submitting to the current of nature that we cannot avoid. Attempting to evade imperfection or impermanence is like trying to stop breathing or remaining still indefinitely. It is only by allowing for the deficits, errors and changes of experience that we counterintuitively reach a perfect state of stillness or timelessness.

However, perfection does disappear or dissolve when we attempt to separate even a single iota of existence from the rest of the world because it cannot endure autonomously on its own. It becomes incomplete by means of segregation, which is why we are all imperfect when we are more or less isolated from the rest and compared against some unreachable or unsustainable ideal. Even when we are described as perfect, we are being measured against some biased or arbitrary standard that we impose on one another as an inescapable dependency. Hence, while we can only appreciate perfection as a totality that is itself complete and independent, we also discover that it can only exist in the context of imperfection for it to have any meaning. This fundamentally reflects the paradoxical dichotomy of existence, where there simply cannot be perfection without imperfection and imperfection without perfection. In order for there to be perfection, the world must introduce imperfection. We could not exist without being imperfect, and without originating from or being part of a perfect whole. This suggests that a perfect, underlying order requires an imperfect, chaotic system to be embedded in its immaculate function.

The universal truth manifests as an infinitely perfect system, which stretches from its indivisible inner base to its elastic outer edge of all existence, and serves as the source of boundless possibilities. But within this perfect unity, we uncover countless expressions of imperfect systems that are dependent upon it to exist. These limited entities all have built into them the same exact blueprints as the whole of existence, which suggests they are inherently programmed to seek perfection, whether we find them across the starry skies above our crowns or in the fertile ground beneath our feet. This perceived perfection translates to a desire for complete and permanent autonomy that is not at the mercy of any external determinants. However, while these entities are self-organizing and self-governing organisms, they have an unbreakable relationship with the whole system that enables them to be self-sustaining and self-generating. And their complexity arises out of an indispensable codependency with their ecosystems, which allows for their relative independence to persist. But when these imperfect entities come together and align to form a much greater system, we see a world as a whole that has no flaws. We see perfection.

Although perfection is like the truth in that it is not materially accessible, we consent to a belief in its coexistence with imperfection, just as fallacy is part of the truth and chaos is part of order. This means that we are imperfect creatures within a perfect whole. We could suggest that every individual thing including ourselves is perfect by virtue of being what it is, regardless of whether or not we like it, but in the context of the whole, each thing is incomplete and therefore imperfect. It is this sense of imperfection that drives what we are seeking to be as being the perfect notion of what we are not or what we have yet to become, which may include any entity, event or condition we have observed that it is not. We are always striving closer to that ideal or to be something better than what we think we are. It does not matter whether or not we succeed, or even consciously try to be better because we are all naturally seeking out our complementary parts and partners, and jointly addressing each other’s deficiencies by harnessing each other’s strengths to settle ultimately on a satisfactory state that meets the elementary conditions to be what we really are. We look to the other to find what is missing in ourselves, and see in the other what we are designed to complete. Perfection merely guides imperfection to close its gaps and bridge its discontinuities, and hence, much like the need for meaning, perfection exists by its own necessity.

This notion of duality that pervades our existence expresses the essence of our reality. Although it does not require us to formulate a logically derived and all-encompassing mathematical equation, it does demand our recognition that a fundamental order underlies the potentially infinite layers of order and chaos. The universal truth at every level of being divides into two seemingly opposed, but complementary tendencies that merge into one unifying force. If stability and disorder are part of the same original foundation, then the interplay between order and chaos is the cosmic engine that keeps existence in motion. Balance needs imbalance to bring it into balance or into alignment. This is the perfection of an imperfect existence. In the same way that chaos and imbalance move towards order and balance respectively, imperfection shifts towards perfection and perfection back into imperfection. This polarity establishes an existential flow that keeps moving because perfection is never achieved except by maintaining its flow to perfection, order or balance. It must be in the process of becoming so that it becomes what it already is, and chaos is the vital ingredient for making that process possible. Chaos is not distinct from order; it is an integral part of the great order of existence. It hides behind the unknown and pours out from its cleft whenever and wherever there is imperfection. Chaos is our sense of what is missing, and what we feel is missing is what we seek.

CAUGHT IN AN ARTIFICIAL UNIVERSE

We can always find a good reason to challenge our imperfect understanding of reality. Yet despite our limited knowledge and flawed beliefs, it is doubtful that we will do so unless reality fundamentally and consistently misaligns with our expectations or wishes. Since our views and wants are instilled in us from early age with a narrow set of predefined paths to success made available to us,   we are more likely to congratulate or blame ourselves for our wealth or misfortune, respectively. And given that none of us can be faulted for mistakes incurred based on commonly held beliefs, we tend to rationalize every anomaly when things do not run according to plan. However, when the plan stops working, we are more inclined to redirect responsibility to some other individual or group to act as a scapegoat rather than scrutinize our customary way of life. This is understandable since it is far more threatening to us if we had to question the very foundation on which we live our lives.

When we are boxed into a fabricated world that is reaffirmed by the rest of society as being the scope of our existence, reality is reduced to a simplified arrangement of mutually dependent mistruths. These sacred lies are mislabeled as facts to underpin our allegedly contemplated choices and supposedly honest preferences, and legitimize our fake identities that replace who we really are. When we couple this with our unspoken industrious god of abundance and convenience, we believe there is nothing we seek that cannot be conceivably purchased, earned or taken. While some of us will venture into the inner and outer domains of our reality purely out of curiosity, we will not learn the genuine lessons of life without experiences that transport us outside of our synthetic reality. Unless we undergo the severe suffering of being deeply betrayed by our own prescribed values or find ourselves sufficiently out of tune with our listless societal practices, we have no incentive to scrutinize our culture, peel off the skin of our personality and unravel our overconfidence so that we may face the daunting mystery of life and uncover its meaning.

The epistemic and enigmatic sides of the viagnostic system guide us through our relationship with the universal truth as we disclose the meaning hidden in our narratives. This is because the unknown triggers and broadens our grasp of a more significant reality that underlies our contrived existence while our expanding and deepening awareness protects us from the material seduction of single-minded ideals such as success, beauty and independence. But when our identity is built on antagonistic contrast rather than on cohesive complementarity and diversity becomes its own end without purpose, we slide back into our darkest addictions which many of us conceal through socially sanctioned preoccupations such as constant engagement in work so that we never need to deal with ourselves. This easily occurs because we live in a world within a world that prevents us from recognizing the essence of life. We are unknowinglycaught in an artificial universe that appears as real as the natural world because it is superimposed onto existence. The personal microcosm of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs negotiates and even conspires with the societal macrocosm of our structures, technologies and policies to sustain an economy that shields us from the harsh reality we avoid and a culture that rewrites the genuine meaning we seek.

While our engineered universe tacitly serves our basic needs, it also greedily obscures our volition to feed on our customized fantasies for maximum captivation as we are imprisoned by the impermanence of our fleeting states that we labour to maintain. This suppresses our own awareness of what we intrinsically wish to pursue and corrupts our most sacred values by clouding the realization that we are incomplete and transient creatures. But no matter how much this social artifice can virtualize our reality, we can all still feel that something is missing. And for most of us, what is missing is the need to love another that complements us and to be loved in return, not necessarily romantically, but spiritually in the sense that we can feel our essence flow freely from the depth of what we really are to the surface of our stories where we animate the significance of life.

In the film Good Will Hunting [7], we discover a young working class man is a math prodigy with no formal higher education. However, a promising future is hindered by deep-seated insecurity and distrust stemming from a history of child abuse that is channeled through his outward aggression and cockiness. After being arrested, he avoids imprisonment by accepting the terms of supervision under a renowned professor of mathematics, who recognizes his genius and negotiates the conditions of his release that comes with mandatory therapy sessions. Ultimately, it is the close bond he forms with a therapist from the same neighbourhood that encourages him to move outside of his comfort zone and confront the essence of who he really is. While this is a story about trust as we witness a person transitioning into adulthood pulling away from soulful exchanges before there is an opportunity to be betrayed or abandoned, there is an unconsciously deeper message about the alignment of complementary relationships. We see how his coalescing interactions evolve from the security of brotherly camaraderie in his most familiar surroundings to culminate in his vulnerable pursuit of intimacy with a less acquainted young woman for whom he must overcome his feelings of unworthiness. But it is the harmonic rapport that arises between counselor and client through their surrogate father-son roles that leads to their reciprocal healing as they both explore uncharted territory in themselves. And finally, this tale demonstrates how our own intelligence can work against us by vindicating or attenuating every weakness in our character and turning our misdirected suspicions into an argued defense against living authentically. We hide our true selves by rationalizing who we have become and building an indisputable case for how we should be.

The issue with trust does not lie entirely with our capacity to trust someone, but rather with the uncertainty or risk of not knowing whom we can trust. If we are aware that certain people behave badly, then we can set an expectation about their future behaviour. Our apprehension is based on the certainty that these individuals pose a real threat and we know we cannot trust them to treat us well. In fact, we trust that they will attempt to abuse us if they can. The real risk lies with the people we do not know and situations with which we have little to no experience. This is what we face when we cannot determine who, what, where and when to trust. It is like suddenly losing one of our critical senses such as our vision and suffering the terror of its deficit. This extends to the panic some of us feel about trusting ourselves to complete an essential task or to make an important decision. However, if we want to build trust, we have to accept calculated risks in order to learn from our mistakes and secure our confidence as we steer between the dual extremes of what is truly known and unknown. Our function is always to know a little more.

The viagnostic system is a commitment we make to self-directed learning and the practice of what we understand, and this extends to teaching and exemplifying the universal truth that we come to appreciate as a direct consequence of that commitment. We affirm this pledge both as individuals and as members of a community, which means that we acknowledge the impact of our beliefs and approaches to life on those around us as well as those yet to be born. Our confidence arises from constantly testing what we know and do not know, but also recognize that we build our confidence on the things we know that were once unknown or uncertain and that it grows from what we gain from one another as a collaborative move towards the truth. This is critical to addressing themental incongruity that comes with our consciousness, and which is aggravated by the cultural contradictions of our societies as we engage in the insanity of endorsing ideas we not only know are not true but are harming us as well. The discord we suffer is deepened and sustained by a growing culture of apathetic superficiality that does not look inward and that treats mental anguish as a weakness.

Being ill does not negate the value of what we are, have or grasp. If anything, it creates an opening to the realities we suppress and its exposure helps strengthen a sense of community and heal the individual. None of us can really pass through the centre of a psychologically hellish existence without the support of those before and among us who can help overcome the madness of a complementary reality that occurs when its paradox is misunderstood. In our desperate struggle to find simplistic certainty in a complex truth, we are inclined to separate things into being black or white as in right or wrong. Ironically, we overly apply and promote our dualistic thinking out of a misplaced fear that we will go mad. But it is actually our endless twofold division of the world without resolution or comfort that leads us down a path of analytical lunacy as we attempt to live our lives with awareness. The faint divide between the epistemic and enigmatic sides of reality is a permeable membrane that keeps changing our relational grasp of the truth. Hence, if we cannot accept an existence that is simultaneously perfect and imperfect where we express what we know in relative degrees of being factual and false or familiar and foreign, the world will consume us and our meaning will be too precarious to persevere through the vicissitudes of life.

Our challenge is not with the convoluted nature we experience, but rather with the overthrow of all its views by an artificial system moving towards one dominant structure to create a false sense of order. Instead of taking sides, we need to let black and white blend into one another so that we may see the untainted shades of grey that the kingdom of illusion endeavours to conceal while its loyal servants inundate us with misinformation and stage a cultural coup d’état that we are too overwhelmed to resist and to maintain our cognitive sovereignty. Our common mistake is to confuse foundational duality with a binary set of choices instead of recognizing it as the dichotomous boundaries of reality that keep everything in balance and always changing. If only one side were to prevail, then all meaning would be lost because there would also be nothing at all.

Evil may be the horrific tormentor and slaughterer we fear, but it primarily serves as the temptress that lures us back to the ignorant conceit of a morally or spiritually pretentious existence as well as acts as the undeclared warden of our own prison that tricks us into thinking we have escaped. It infiltrates our simulated world that helps us fabricate any identity we desire and rationalize any story we want from the most deceivingly personal to the most subversively political. But we know that even a thoroughly reasoned regimen does not equate to reality any more than does a collective agreement on the truth, and we also know that our inner honesty is the only way to guard ourselves against this plague of deceit. To be viagnostic requires that we bravely enter into the dense fog of our uncertainty that cloaks the complementary meaning we need along the path to our essence, and that we simply place our trust in the wisdom of a paradoxical life.