What If It’s Neither This Nor That?

Here’s an interesting coincidence…maybe something to do with fields.

Socrates (740-399 BCE) and Siddartha Gautama (Buddha) (563 or 480 BCE – 483 or 400 BCE) were contemporaries* living 3,581 miles apart. And, yet they landed on a similar truth about reality. They refused to split experience into opposites: good/bad, beautiful/ugly, certainty/uncertainty, wisdom/ignorance—binary thinking. They both embraced uncertainty, convinced of the dynamism and transitory nature of everything.

According to Buddhist teacher and scholar Stephen Batchelor they led lives of self-examination and constant questioning, avoiding putting forth any absolute truth knowing the complexity and ambiguity of human experience.

Perhaps in concert with this stance, neither Socrates nor Buddha wrote anything down. We have to rely on the writings of Plato for Socrates and for multiple disciples of Buddha to access their perspectives. 

Craving for Certainty

However, because the brain evolved to keep us alive, it craves absolute truths, certainty. Thus it can slip into dualistic thinking to feel more safe. People, things, situations are either good or bad.  Anything that threatens our certainty—either physically or psychologically—triggers the brain into this self-protective mode. 

For instance, when someone in an interaction disagrees with you vociferously or attacks you personally, you can fall into the instinctive and more comfortable stance of certainties, dualistic thinking. I am right, you are wrong, and now I am going to prove it to you. The quest for certainty takes many forms. This is one of them. 

Like Socrates and Buddha, can we get comfortable in the space between opposites and enter into a state of not-knowing, questioning? When we can side-step the temptation to assert things are definitely this or that, a space opens for something new to emerge.

A Spectrum 

What if the “truth” is somewhere in between or along a spectrum of possibilities, somewhere between two opposite points of view?

In Space Is Not Empty, Alan Briskin and I describe eight characteristics of fields** one of which is valency. In physics this refers to the capacity of an atom to form bonds with other atoms. In our book we describe it as the capacity of a person (or system) to combine with other entities, the ability to interact with other people, even those we differ from. At one end of the spectrum is prejudice or an inability to join with, interact with others because of our judgments. At the other end is interacting so much we lose our perspective. 

To move along a spectrum of possibilities means we need to avoid dualistic thinking, to stop defining ourselves or others as good or bad, wise or ignorant. We need to lean into uncertainty, not knowing. With the help of our natural curiosity—that can be pushed to the background when the desire for certainty overwhelms us—we are better able to move along a spectrum of valency, testing ways to interact constructively with others, searching for new ways forward together.

In this way, we affect the social field in which we are operating, making it more open and less constricted.

Fields

The simplest way Alan and I define fields is that they are the spaces in which interactions take place. Or, more specifically, a space or territory in which a network of interactive forces—both visible and invisible—are radiating from sources inside and around us. These living fields of energy and information influence how we feel, think, and behave.

Undoubtedly Socrates and Siddhartha Gautama were living and teaching in different fields. How they came to such similar points of perspectives on “reality” across that distance remains a mystery that only the larger field in which we are all embedded understands.

Questions to Consider

When do you get caught in binary or dualistic thinking?

What are the conditions that keep you caught in this way of thinking?

When are you able to engage in self-questioning, not knowing?

What are the conditions or actions you could take to step out of an either/or perspective and open to not knowing and asking questions? 

*Thank you to Stephen Batchelor for tracing the contemporaneous development of their perspectives in Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times (2025). 

**The eight characteristics are vibration, intensity, permeability, spaciousness, resonance, valency, complexity, and relationality.