The good, the bad and the ugly. I never thought that Eli Wallach was that ugly, but whatever.
I seem to be more sensitive recently to how much splitting or polarity exists in the world. Good vs, Bad or Good vs. Evil seem to be at the forefront of things. I’m sure this is related to the presidential race and the never-ending, moronic, self-defeating partisan politics that we, in the U.S., are burdened with these days.
And though political rivals like James Caraville, Bill First and others seem to be able to sit down together to sell Coca Cola when it comes to working together to resolve some of the country’s and world’s problems – the abyss between two sides each seeing themselves as right (so to speak) once again rears it’s ugly head.
This whole good/bad thing begins in infancy as a psychological process known as splitting.
At the beginning, in childhood, there is a relationship between the child and the mother, the parents, the environment. When the relationship is difficult or painful, the child deals with it by splitting the difficult from the easy, the love from the hatred. But to do that, you have to do it with your mind, because it is not real. You have to split your perception. You have to split your mind. You have to believe something that is not there. That is the beginning of mental structure. You have to split the reality into this and that, split mother into good mother and bad mother. Well, your mother is never all good or all bad. She is a mixture. So if you split her into good mother and bad mother, and you have to remember this and that, you are creating something in your mind that is not really there. In time, that becomes the mental relationship that you re-enact in your life relationships. So there is the idealized mother, there is a frustrating mother, and there is the attacking mother. And your relationships with those three parts are what become re-enacted in your life as mental relationships. – A.H. Almaas on Psychological Splitting
This is not something we can blame on improper parenting, it is one of the fundamental dynamics that gets laid down in the brain that forms the rudimentary basis for discrimination, linear thinking and self-reflection. The problems associated with splitting arise as a result of arrested development – the maturation and evolution of the person and the mind stop at a level that continue to rely on “half-baked” goods.
Maturing to the point where we can see people and situations in their entirety – the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful – is a sign of real progress. It probably won’t help to sell Coke, but it could result in the ability and capacity for more people to work together for something other than profit.
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