The Great Yes or the Big No
The Fundamental Goodness of life
Life is not a canvas on which we simply wipe away the dark sides, our madness is real. It is foolish to close our eyes and dream of a better future without a solid understanding of reality.
In our quest for a better society, we need to recognize what makes the world go round. Understanding what lies behind all the suffering, conflicts and wars is crucial to overcoming the pandemic of violence.
From the point of view of the nihilistic philosophy that currently dominates official discourse, there is nothing behind it, nothing has any real meaning, there is no truth, human nature is the race of the fittest. This is the Big No to life itself. Modern politics and neoliberalism are the arrowhead that reduces life to pure materialism and blind energy. It is the graveyard of common sense and the heyday of experts, where we wage war to make peace, dehumanize our brothers and sisters, take from the poor to make the rich richer, and witness genocide in real time.
What does the Great Yes mean in this context?
It’s so easy to get lost in the daily bombardment of bad news that it seems like a fairy tale to talk about the Great Yes. Give it a chance and keep reading and it will become meaningful.
The following text is an invitation to look at the deepest levels of life, beyond our limited ordinary views. Not as aloof far out advice, but as a reminder that we, humans, are part of the Greater, whatever you may call it, God, Cosmic Intelligence, Ala or Brahman and definitely much greater than our personal identity.
The Great Yes
Before the beginning, before everything, before creation, there was the Great Yes.
It makes everything possible, it has no opposite, it is non-dual.
Always present in everything and everyone.
It works on all levels, from the quantum particles to the structure that sustains the cosmos.
The Great Yes does not need the No, just as the light does not need the shadow, just as health does not need disease, just as love does not need hate.
“This Great Yes is the fundamental goodness of existence. Or to put it simply: life is about what works and not about what doesn’t work.”
We are alive because the body works well, and not because the normal state is a malfunction. A car can only break down because it worked before. Entropy, a measure for the disorder of a system, only makes sense if the system is in order in the first place. The earth provides the perfect conditions for organic life because there is a certain order or balance; without this balance it would be uninhabitable.
When the Big NO is the main tendency in life, nothing has the possibility of becoming something. Even when this is more than obvious, our usual mindset focuses on what doesn’t work. We are usually in the Big NO.
We have forgotten the Great Yes of existence, that’s why we fight against life, that’s why we try to control nature.
As I said before, it’s not about being “Mary Poppins”, it’s about harmonizing with the basic goodness of life and solving the real problems from that point. Declaring life as inadequate is obviously not the way to go. To think that existence is imperfect, and we need to fix it, is the path of destruction.
I have found that this simple truth is hard to internalize because our habitual conditioning focuses on the Big No, but give it a chance and think about it. Life becomes much more peaceful when we understand it.