They are complementary
Once there were two men who ate exactly the same food, but one had two bowls while the other had only one. The man with two bowls divided his food into bitter and sweet, and put only the bitter in one bowl and only the sweet in the other. The man with one bowl naturally mixed the bitter and the sweet together. As time passed, the first man grew thinner and thinner, and gradually wasted away, while the second, who ate just the same food, grew healthier and healthier daily. At last, the first saw his approaching death, and in desperation asked the second the secret of his vitality and vigour.
"You, having two bowls," the second replied, "divided the bitter from the sweet, and so believed in the importance of taste that you did not allow the food you took to sustain you with its own inner life. But I had only one bowl and so mixing the bitter and the sweet together, have not been fooled by the matter of taste, for whatever I have been given to eat I have taken simply as food, and it has yielded its nourishment to me, praise God."
The first man rose from his deathbed and with a great effort picked up one of his bowls and dashed it to pieces; and in the one bowl that remained he ate gratefully of the food his friend offered him and was whole again.
This is a beautiful story, a Sufi story. If you divide, you will be divided within too. If you divide existence into good and bad, God and devil, consciousness, unconsciousness, heaven and hell, this division is bound to create a division in you. You will be split in two; you will become a schizophrenic. You will lose your togetherness; you will start falling into parts; you will no longer be integrated. Your perception, your vision, is divided; how can you be undivided! Your vision is your being. If you drop dividing and you start looking for the one, you will become one too -- because whatsoever you see you become. Once you start eating in one bowl, the sweet and bitter both, you are nourished, because the contradictions are not contradictory. They are complementary.
Alan Watts has written about George Gurdjieff that he was a "rascal saint." That's perfectly true. A real saint is bound to be a rascal saint because he will be bitter and sweet both. If he is just a saint -- just sweet and sweet and sweet -- avoid him; otherwise you will get diabetes. A sweet saint is very dangerous. Just sweet? It will nauseate you. You will feel sick. The bitter is also needed.
When you feed on totality -- indivisible totality -- you are nourished. This is the meaning of this story: don't divide.