Nature abhors a vacuum, but there is something else that Nature abhors even more than that. Nature abhors any kind of extreme. A vacuum is only one example of this. Nature tries to fill a vacuum with something. Nature can’t stand any kind of extreme.
Every extreme situation sets off a chain reaction in the rest of the fabric of reality. Nature—and all the rest of reality—strives, struggles, and bends its effort to bring the extreme state back to the point of equilibrium.
Our bodies struggle all the time to maintain a homeostatic condition where we’re neither too sick nor too healthy. The body will seek to return to its homeostatic baseline whenever we do something to push it one way or the other.
This is why we get pain and sickness signals from our bodies when we do things to sabotage ourselves. Our body is fighting our efforts and trying to bring us back into a state of health.
This happens at every level of the natural world, in relationships between people, and even in society at large. Every political movement that tries to push an extreme agenda always winds up swinging the pendulum back the other way.
We can’t have the light without the dark. We can’t have the right without the left. They work together—and if we look at the world non-dualistically, we understand that they’re actually the same thing. These is no such thing as right and left because we’re one people and actually even one thing. The division is an illusion.
One of the great lessons I learned from raising children is that nothing ever stays the same. Something is always changing. Change is the one inevitable when it comes to any situation.
If you don’t like a situation, just wait a little while and it will change. If you don’t like which direction the political landscape is swinging, just wait. The trend will reverse and it will swing back toward the middle.
We get into trouble when we fail to understand this and try to force it even farther to the extreme of our choosing. This causes the Rubber Band Effect to snap back even harder than it otherwise would have. This is how we get stung.
We get into trouble when we refuse to accept the signals Nature is sending to us—the signals that tell us we’re straying too far away from our homeostatic baseline.
We get into trouble when we receive these signals, but instead of changing for the better and moderating our behavior, we double down and fight through them for the right to destroy ourselves even faster.
There’s a famous saying that goes, “Nothing will change until/unless you change.”
This is all wrong. Something will change. Something will always change. If you don’t change, if you don’t hear and receive these warnings, things will change for the worse. Things can always get worse until we die. Many people have sabotaged themselves to death and continue to do so every day.
The good news is that the Rubber Band Effect can help us improve. It can help us return to a state of sanity and equanimity. If we’ve been in the habit of forcing an extreme in one direction or the other, returning to our baseline will feel like the greatest relief of our lives.
This is especially true of extreme self-sabotage. Everything in your being is telling you to stop pushing these extreme states of self-punishment and unhappiness. It takes a colossal effort on your part to keep these states going and even to push them farther away from what’s good for you.
Pushing these extreme states is in fact what’s making you unhappy. You would be thrilled, relieved, and overjoyed if you just let the Rubber Band Effect pull you back to your baseline. Your baseline homeostasis would feel like pure Heaven compared to the Hell you’ve been forcing yourself to live in all this time.
Walking the path of health, life, and equanimity is easy, effortless, joyous, life-giving, and natural. All our inclinations lead us in this direction. Our deepest, innermost gut tells us exactly what we have to do.
All this pain and unhappiness we’re experiencing is Nature, our bodies, and our spirits screaming at us to change our ways and follow the path we know is right. We already know what we have to do. We have to fight ourselves every second of the day to avoid doing it.
The Rubber Band Effect could take us back to that so effortlessly. We wouldn’t have to struggle anymore if we didn’t fight ourselves this way. We would fall into the path of life as easily as if we were falling off a log. That’s our natural state.
If you’re struggling right now or you’re committed to some extreme agenda at the expense of everyone else, know that you’re working against the power of Nature itself. You’re contradicting every law of reality and the universe—and that never lasts.
If you’re racing to destroy yourself, the universe can only send you so many warning signals before you succeed. If you set yourself at odds against the natural tendencies of the rest of the human race, you’re going to wind up marginalized while the rest of society swings back toward the center. This is one of the inescapable laws of reality. No extreme can last, no matter what it is.
Every extreme political movement in history has ultimately failed. People who push themselves into extreme states, no matter what state it is, either wind up swinging back to homeostasis or they die. These is no other option. Nature doesn’t work that way.
The path of life and happiness is the middle way. It’s a compromise between extremes and even the total absence of extremes. Any effort to divorce these extremes from each other will end in failure because that isn’t how the world works. Thinking anything else is delusional.
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