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QUANTITY - How much?
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Balance - Amount - Opposites - Rhythm - Pendulum - Ideas - Gender - Difference - Duality
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Unity - Division
Together - Separate
Attraction - Repulsion
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From unity comes duality. One becomes two.
1. Opposites
The yin/yang symbol represents the idea of polarity.
Polarities situate our world by defining its boundaries. They describe the states and qualities of things, but never the things themselves. The qualities of a rock - hard, heavy - may have their opposites - soft, light - but 'rock,' as a thing in itself, has no opposite.
This is because a rock is the sum of its qualities. 'Rock' is shorthand for all of these various attributes.
We perceive things through their qualities, which is another way of saying that we perceieve them through their differences. A specific set of differences makes a 'rock' a 'rock'; but tweak a few and it may become something else altogether.
By virtue of its attributes, every thing is two-faced, caught between multiple pairs of opposites, like a spider at the centre of a web.
2. Rhythm & Balance
In everything there is a measured flow, a backwards and forwards from one state to another; sometimes more, sometimes less. A deficiency of one thing is always an excess of another, and vice versa. Too much of any one thing is an imbalance, and leads to ill health. Health itself can be defined as a state of balance between two opposites, or extremes.
True balance is impossible because it implies a standing still. Nothing in this world stands still; if it appears to do so it is only because we cannot perceive its movement.
3. Gender
Gender is a way of talking about the interactions between things.
In some teachings, the numbers one and two are regarded as the parents of all of the other numbers. We can see One as a latent thought, or idea, emerging from the nothingness of Zero as a point of potentiality. We can see Two as a receiver, or womb, for this thought. From it is birthed Three (the firstborn), along with its infinity of siblings.
The idea of gender suggests that for creation to occur - in other words, for things to exist - there must be a pair of complementary, and fundamentally different forces that interact with one another. These are the poles of life - positive and negative, life and death. Each strives to unite with the other, and from their union new forms emerge.
1 + 2 = 3.
If we accept that everything is connected - that every thing interacts with other things - then it becomes apparent that everything must both give and receive (everything has inputs and outputs). Thus, in all things there is an active force (Yang) and a passive force (Yin). Gender is a way of characterising these forces: the active force is regarded as masculine, and the passive as feminine.
Thus the principle of Gender manifests in all things.
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Main posts:-
The Principle of Polarity
Masculine - Feminine
The Middle Path
Balance
Shades of Gray
In-between
