Dr. Kumar wrote:
There is no opposite to any thing that is truly real ....
What is the opposite of love, many will say is hate. But that is at mind level.
But at the no-mind level, say heart level, there is no opposite to love.
LOVE IS JUST LOVE.
LIFE IS JUST LIFE.
BEAUTY IS JUST BEAUTY.
GOODNESS IS JUST GOODNESS.
No opposite unless we start using our all very 'useful utilitarian' MIND.
I responded:
Please leave this dead horse alone! Emotions, like tastes, why, even genders, are not in binary opposite relationships. Assuming first that they are, and then flogging the very same assumption was a pastime for the Sophists. It is a verbal labyrinth, a trap. No one will dispute that 'life is life', and if one wants to stay put at that level, quite fine for her or him. But, why grudge somebody who thinks life has various attributes and tries to understand and explain them? Further, how will one ever use a word without knowing what it means. Definitions, explanations, synonyms and antonyms - knowing what a word means or does not mean - are integral to understanding anything. Dismissing all that as the delusion of the mind is a pointless denial. There is one character in the VKN novel, 'One Week', one Electric Thoma, whose vocabulary in English was limited to less than a hundred words. For anything he did not know the proper word for, he would use 'that corner'! Think of a physician who tells all and every patient of his with running temperature - 'a fever is only a fever, take aspirin'! Such thinking is usually called 'reductio ad absurdum'. Indian philosophy for ages, starting with Upanishads, also has held this 'funnel' vision of the world. In human affairs, there are no perfect antonyms or synonyms. So, let us stop flogging a dead horse!
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