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the center you are existential, on the surface you are social. Marriage is on the surface, love is at the center. Love has a hidden harmony, marriage has an obvious harmony.
Just go to some friend's house. If you look through the window and the husband and wife are fighting, their faces ugly, the moment you enter everything changes: they are so polite, they are talking to each other so lovingly. This is a harmony that is obvious, a harmony that is on the surface. But deep down there is no harmony, it is just a mannerism, it is just for display. A real man may appear unharmonious on the surface, but he will always be harmonious in the center. Even if he contradicts himself, in his contradictions there will be a hidden harmony. And a person who never contradicts himself, who is absolutely consistent on the surface, will not have the real harmony.
There are consistent people: if they love they love, if they hate they hate -- they don't allow opposites to mingle and meet. They are absolutely clear who their enemy is and who their friend is. They live on the surface and they create a consistency. Their consistency is not real consistency: deep down inconsistencies are boiling; on the surface they are somehow managing. You know them because you are them! On the surface you manage, but this won't help. Don't be bothered too much with the surface. Go deeper -- and don't try to choose between the opposites. You will have to live both. And if you can live both, nonattached, unattached to either, if you can live both -- if you can love and remain a witness, and you can hate and remain a witness, that witnessing will be the hidden harmony. Then you will know that these are climates, changes in season, moods that just come and go -- and you will see the gestalt in them.
This German word gestalt is beautiful. It says there is a harmony between the figure and background. They are not opposites, they APPEAR opposites. For example: in a small school you see the blackboard, and the teacher writes with white chalk on the blackboard. Black and white are opposites. Yes, for Aristotelian minds they are opposites: black is black and white is white -- they are the
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