Everything — and Nothing
October 29, 2018
PEOPLE with emotional difficulties are often diagnosed today with “bipolar disorder.”
“Bipolar disorder” is not a scientific diagnosis. You can’t take a physical test and be assured that you have an organic condition. The diagnosis is based on subjective interpretation of symptoms. Mood swings — ranging between manic thoughts and depression — are said to characterize this illness.
Some individuals have organic predispositions and temperaments that make mood swings more likely and truly challenging, or even incapacitating. But I believe this diagnosis is so wildly popular for a deeper reason. The human condition itself is bipolar.
We all swing between two poles.
What are those poles?
We can simplify them and call them, everything and nothing.
Sometimes we may be exhilarated and think everything is possible. Other times we may be despondent and think nothing is possible. In this alternation, we sense something true. These poles express two facts of our existence.
We were created from nothing by everything.
The nothing is what you originally were. Physically, you were formed by material elements. But material elements were ultimately formed out of — nothing. No scientist can prove otherwise. Every thing has a cause. And the entire universe logically had a beginning and was once nothing.
You are not simply physical though. You are spirit too. Your thoughts, your feelings, your sublime aspirations, your mood swings — they are part of your spiritual substance. These came from nothing. Deep within the heart of our beings is a well of the nothingness we were.
Everything is our Creator, who inexplicably can create out nothing. Everything is His beauty, His mercy, His justice — and most of all His omnipotence. He holds us in existence every hour of the day and without his willing our existence, we would simply cease to exist.
“Bipolar disorder” is perhaps sometimes the failure to fill the chasm of nothingness with everything. We participate in our spiritual creation or destruction.
We are all bipolar, but some have no everything with which to fill the nothing.
