So entrapped is the common mentality in following its conditioned way of thinking that it forgets — always and everywhere — the middle path of intelligence. Tangled and woven in thick coils of what has been taught by his parents, teachers and the society at large, the boy-turned-man has little of its own volition to follow. All of what it knows can be divided simply into two; a world picturesque of opposites. Right and wrong, good and bad, and positive and negative. In every instant opposition is experienced, as true in the outer world as in the inner one. The reality is such by right of the quality and nature of the lens from which the world is seen. The man has been programmed and thus will be the nature of his programming, one of dualism and perpetual friction between polar opposites.

We follow our morning into the afternoon and evening, battling softly or loudly from one inner and outer friction to another, where one thing is right and another thing is not. So hypnotic is the flow of our experience that we rarely observe ourselves as witnesses to our own insanity, by virtue of which we might hope to see a third force at work. This third element, always by its design the wisdom which sheds light on the event or phenomenon in question, is hidden by the very fact that it was not included in our original education. Its absence has resulted in a poor reality stricken with endless abuses and alienations. The genius of a third force is that it explains the other two. With it in mind, a man can detach himself from identifying his own ego with either the left or right path and therefore venture off down the middle one.

Down the yellow brick road of intelligence, we might be expected to watch our steps carefully as an encounter with another being draws near. Endowed with awareness, we might also find ourselves wary of the words that flow into our heads and out of our mouths. With suspicion of ourselves a new possibility can arise naturally, one which observes the posture of one force in relation to the other. Like two chromosomes magically flowing into position by force of gravity or some special form of magnetism, two individuals can be seen to flop over to two ends of an argument quite automatically. The mechanics are so natural to us that it is rarely even noticed how unconscious our behaviour truly is. One moment you believe one thing and vouch for and defend it to the death. The next moment you find yourself on the other side of the coin, not having noticed the dramatic shift of character this entails. The trail of contradictions continues by this design.

The third force can be a conscious choice to bring oneself to a standstill, a motionless resistance to the automatic shuffling of men and the ideas which bind them down into a restless existence. Without settling down into polarized positions, and without the need to identify one’s identity with either of these opposites, a silent wake reveals itself between these illusory peaks. In an instant a man finds himself having jumped from the bottom of the pendulum to the top, where wide distances have been reduced to a singular truth. This is the truth of non-doing, where a man’s intelligence can surface quite naturally and without need of violence. The absurdity in believing yourself to be right or wrong no longer exists, and both positive and negative poles come together as complements of a greater whole.