The Theory of Relativity and What the Hell it Has to Do with My Life
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I’m going to demystify relativity here. Because you always hear nowadays, “everything’s relative”. Mostly as a justification, sometimes as an intention to get out of a conflict. But we rarely ask ourselves what relativity is, what it means. It is not such a complicated philosophical concept that you couldn’t understand it. Einstein was no greater than you are. It wasn’t through some kind of extraordinary knowledge that he arrived at this conclusion. I don’t think that it was through reading hundreds or thousands of books (or however many books he read) that he came to understand relativity. It wasn’t a synthesis of all the existing academic knowledge before him. It was a going back to essence. In stillness, the world speaks to you.
Relativity is simply this: when you say something is big, what you are implying is that, that something is bigger than another thing. For example, the statement ‘your house is big’ actually says, ‘your house is bigger than the majority of houses’, or ‘ your house is bigger than mine’. So your statement says more about you than about the house. Why do I say this? Because it tells us what you are comparing something to, and this is an indication of what’s important to you.
The theory of relativity says that existence is relationship; existence means relationship; existence implies relationship. All three statements are equivalent. This means that you cannot have something without something other than it to compare it to. You cannot have one without two, you cannot have good without bad. If there was only good, then good would not exist, because we could not distinguish it from anything. If only bad existed, then you wouldn’t know it was bad, and maybe like this, it would be all good… Haha! Done with the jokes, bottom line is: If you want happiness, then you want its opposite too. That is it.
We are still mostly unaware of this. We make grave statements with great ease and assume that they are ultimately true. We impose our views upon others when, in fact, we don’t even want them for ourselves. But our statements don’t say anything about the world, but they say a lot about ourselves.
Everything you say is a comparison. This is how you think. This is the way our minds work. We are trying to solve the mystery of life, the mystery of everything with this mind. What will you compare all there is with? You may say, “compare it with nothing”, but even nothing is part of all there is. Good luck!
[This is an excerpt from my book Trust: Life after Enlightenment, or How to live happily in a world without meaning, which you can find here https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Enlightenment-happily-without-meaning-ebook/dp/B07B9JSMQ2]
