Reconciliation of Opposites

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Illustration: 51581

The emergence of the universe can be considered as the result of the interaction and reconciliation of two forces that are opposite to and complement each other. This is adequately expressed in the yin yang symbol, in which the white and black fishes are each other's opposites. Together they unite as a whole in a perfect circle and that is the symbol of the Tao: the unspeakable energy through which everything exists and the opposites interact (illustration 1, right).

In addition, the symbol shows that no element is absolutely black or white. The white eye in the black fish shows that there is white lurking in pitch black, and the black eye in the white fish shows that there is black lurking in crisp white. The same principle is reflected in the contrast between night and day: the darkest moment of the night means that the light is going to return, and if the sun is at its highest peak during the day, it means the return to darkness. In that way, the light carries dark within it and the dark, light.

In our body, the yin-yang interaction causes cell death and cell generation, which continuously keeps on going until the moment of death. We can consider cell death as a negative principle and cell generation as a positive principle, thus making it clear that balance between these opposing principles is necessary for our health.

However, we tend to favour the positive and dislike the negative. If we project this tendency onto our biology, we want as much cell generation as possible and as little (preferably none) cell death as possible. Yet if we were to get our way we run into the limits of our skin, because it can only be stretched to a certain point after which it tears apart. In other words, in a world where there is only room for the positive and the negative is suppressed with all our might, the only outcome can be total destruction.

Where did this fondness for the positive and aversion to the negative come from? Why our preference for creation, love or pleasure and our hostility towards destruction, hatred or suffering? We will sketch a beginning of an answer using the image of a triangle (illustration 1, left).

Illustration 1 (Erik Stout - from *The Supreme Doctrine - Psychological Studies in Zen Thought* by Hubert Benoit)

The lower left corner of the triangle indicates the inferior positive principle. On the other side of the horizontal axis, in the lower right corner, we find the inferior negative principle. These two are each other's opposites and by their pushing and pulling – then a little more to one side and then a little more to the other – balance is created. That balance, on the other hand, can only be maintained if there is a third, superior principle that reconciles the two opposites. That is represented in the upper corner of the triangle as the superior conciliatory principle, just as the Tao is the superior conciliatory principle of yin and yang. The conciliatory principle immediately represents the limit within which the opposites can move back and forth before an all-destroying imbalance arises.

If we now examine the evolution of our mental faculties, then first there is the animal instinct. As far as we know, that doesn’t distinguish between concepts such as right and wrong or positive and negative. Animals do what they do without thinking about consequences or worrying about global warming. As life forms become more complex though, the mental ability to think develops. This is characterized, among other things, by being able to distinguish, name and describe in abstractions, and reflect on our own thoughts and behaviour and rate them desirable or undesirable. Thus, with the evolution of our thinking, all pairs of opposites arise through which we perceive everything at some point as positive or negative phenomena. We call the positive constructive and the negative destructive. The intrinsic will to live then creates in our abstract and dualistic thinking a natural preference for constructive and aversion to destructive.

From that moment on we see the world as good or bad, positive or negative, but the superior principle that reconciles them remains out of sight; to realize that, a next step in our mental evolution is necessary, just like thinking is a next step after animal instinct. However, if that step is not taken, we will continue to see only the hostile nature of the positive and negative principles and not their mutually interdependent aspect. That necessarily maintains the absurd desire that the positive constructive must at some point in time totally overcome the negative destructive.

Yet if we look at our human behaviours, we see that they arise from both constructive and destructive tendencies and impulses; after all, we see small children building a sandcastle with as much zeal as destroying it at the end of the day. In addition, cell death and cell generation indicate that existence is only possible through a continuous movement of creation and destruction. However, as we grow up and learn to think conceptually, our constructive tendencies and impulses are seen as qualities and our destructive tendencies and impulses as character flaws. Then we try with all our might to ’improve’ ourselves by cultivating our so-called qualities and at the same time we suppress all our so-called character flaws, with the result that our destructive tendencies go underground, and from our unconscious still exert their power on our behaviour, albeit now at particularly undesirable moments.

If the superior conciliatory principle is not realized, it disappears from the triangle. The horizontal axis of both inferior principles then rotates a quarter turn and becomes vertical. The inferior positive angle points upwards and becomes heaven with God, and the inferior negative angle points downwards and becomes hell with Satan. We take qualities and character flaws, good and bad, for absolute and true, considering God as the perfect human positivity and Satan as the perfect human negativity. God stands for everything that is just, good, beautiful, affirming and constructive; Satan for everything that is unjust, bad, ugly, denying and destructive. As long as we don’t see that positive and negative, good and evil or man and woman are explicitly opposed to each other, but implicitly form a whole in which both need each other to exist, we remain stuck in we-they-thinking with the inevitable continuous anxiety that they only want the worst for we.

Illustration background: ZERIG; Illustration God: Sabine_999; Illustration Satan: Iffany.
Edit: Erik Stout

The resulting continuous struggle with an “other” manifests itself, among other things, in a permanently increased state of alertness because our buttons are relentlessly pushed. The resulting tsunami of physiological stress responses is at some point considered a ’new normal’ state of being, whereby all physical signs and symptoms of this overexploitation are downplayed as mere harmless inconveniences. However, if the balance is not restored and we continue to hold on to the one-sided (namely dualistic) view of the world as ultimate truth, we lose the balance completely and the obscure complaints eventually turn into life-threatening mental and/or physical illnesses.

What to do to restore balance? Well, for example, we can examine whether we ourselves have absolutist ideas. Suppose we are Team White supporters and we despise Team Black so much that in our belief a world without it would be the pinnacle of joy. Yet if for some reason Team Black were to cease to exist, Team White would face the same fate, because Team White is not itself Team White; it is because of Team Black that it is Team White. Similarly, Team Black is not itself Team Black, it is because of Team White that it is Team Black. The two explicit opponents implicitly need each other within their competition in order to exist.

What happens to a crazy fanatic supporter who suddenly realizes that the arch-rival is needed to fully enjoy everything the competition has to offer? He will still cheer when his team wins and grumble when they lose, but he will certainly not make it a problem anymore. He can fully enjoy every match and accept any outcome without resentment or rancour. He no longer has to attack supporters of the opponent or vandalise in any other way, but has a few beers after the match and then goes back to living his life.

Now see what might happen in our consciousness as soon as there is realization of the superior conciliatory principle, namely: problems are no longer seen as a problem. This means that situations can still be considered unpleasant, unjust, unsafe, or incorrect, but that the need to change them with all our might, and to our standards, disappears. We therefore become sincerely tolerant of other ways of seeing and thinking and become open to them, because with every fibre of our whole organism we understand from experience that yin cannot do without yang. And that irrevocably coincides with a complete relaxation in body and mind.

The question that naturally arises is: how can we actually experience the mutual interdependence of opposites in the same way that we know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that water is wet and fire is hot? For starters, we have already determined that realization of the opposites coincides with our ability for logical thinking. After all, white is white and black is black, that’s logical, and likewise, it is logical that whoever is not for us is against us. Logic distinguishes and divides, and we need that for the practical business of everyday life. Yet it also clarifies that experience and realization of the conciliatory principle are beyond the reach of logic, and therefore of our ability to think.

What is also beyond our thinking faculty, with its infinite possibilities for fantasizing and imagining, is to imagine something that we have never experienced before.[1] If we have never eaten an apple in our lives, then no description can make us experience what it tastes like, no matter how hard we fantasize about it. So if we really, completely and without any doubt want to know the taste of an apple, we will have to put our teeth into it. Realization of the conciliatory principle works in the same way because if we really want to know what that feels like, we will have to undergo and experience something. But what?

That is, of course, the key question. If we look at the evolution of our animal instinct and thinking, it is noticeable that at first they are completely focused on the external world, because it is there that we find our basic necessities such as food, water, clothing and housing. However, once those needs are met, as Maslow's pyramid depicts, we begin to use our thinking faculty for other purposes such as safety, social contact, and self-realization. The latter, however, is beyond the competence of our thinking faculty, as is realization of the superior conciliatory principle. To get there, we need to shift our gaze from our external to our internal world – to our own body and mind. We then enter the world of self-inquiry.

Self-inquiry means using our thinking faculty to assess and penetrate our entire organism as deeply as possible, both in our body as in our unconscious. Unfortunately this is for many still a bridge too far, because of a deep rooted anxiety about what can be found there. Yet when there’s courage we can look inside to investigate everything which will be encountered there. For this we badly need our thinking faculty, until we finally find out that it is precisely our logical mind which prevents us from realizing the superior conciliatory principle. But we can only experience that after we have tried all the ways of thinking at our disposal to come to that realization.

We see the same principle, in a slightly different form, in athletes, dancers or musicians. When we want to learn a sport or dance, or learn to play a musical instrument, we have to think much and hard about it in the beginning. As our practice progresses however, it becomes more and more second nature until at some point it seems to go completely by itself. Practice is experience and in exactly the same way we once learned to walk, so we know how to do it without having to think about it. Only through experience can we really know, and knowledge that we have not experienced ourselves, or book knowledge, is therefore actually not real knowledge but merely an idea of it.

So where can we practice the skill of self-inquiry? That depends on our nature. For one, a particular religion or spiritual group works; yet another may feel more at home within psychology, psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. Of course, there are countless books, gurus, groups and organizations that have set themselves the goal of supporting our self-inquiry. In the end, I think what it comes down to is finding a method, teacher, or both, that works for us, and we can only find out by trying different ones that feel appealing. However, if we decide to walk this path, we may be able to experience the next step in our mental evolution in real time and experience what it feels like to go through life without desire and fear.

Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

[1] There are countless cases of people who saw in dreams and visions, mythological and religious images to which they themselves had not previously been exposed. They could tap into Collective Unconscious (by C. G. Jung, or Mind at Large from Aldous Huxley); the state in which “every individual is able at any moment to remember everything that has ever been experienced and to perceive everything that happens anywhere in the universe.” (A. Huxley, The Doors of Perception). Because of its overwhelming nature, an important function of our brain and nervous system is supposed to be to funnel through only a very small and certain selection of perceptions and memories that are particularly useful for our physical survival. Nevertheless, aforementioned images and visions can occur both spontaneously and during the practice of certain rituals or intake of chemicals. However, that is not the same as being deliberately thought of or fantasized about by an act of free will. (See also: Joseph Campbell – Myths to Live By).

PS. This blog post is partly based on Chapter 2 (Good and Evil) from the book The Supreme Doctrine – Psychological Studies in Zen Thought by Hubert Benoit.