The Dynamic Balance of Polarities | Yin and Yang ☯️

as adrienne maree brown says:

“Everything dies, but that’s kind of good. It makes for a very rich world. All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life; it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity. Let’s learn what we need to learn and move on. To compost this and process it and see where else the resources need to

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the hemispheres are like two contrasting personalities within a single mind. The left half, she writes, ‘thrives on details, details, and more details about those details … [It] looks at a flower and names the different parts making up the whole – the petal, stem, stamen, and pollen.’ The right mind, by contrast, ‘creates a master collage of what t

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This may be illustrated by the Taoist story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, “May be.” The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, “May be.” And then, the follo

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The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity. The two principles are, as I have suggested, not opposed like the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, but in love, and it is curious that their traditional emblem is that double helix which is at once the

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Like the Taoists, McGilchrist looks all the way back to prehistory, before even the emergence of language, for the earliest signs of this imbalance. ‘Was it the drive for power, embodied in the will to control the environment,’ he asks, ‘which accelerated symbol manipulation and the extension of conceptual thought?’ He notes that our mostly dominan

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In the view of psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist, we can indeed understand the current state of our civilization in terms of a battle of the hemispheres. In his deeply researched The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, he argues that the hemispheres are ‘involved in a sort of power struggle’ which

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AT THE VERY ROOTS of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid

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qi exhibits a continual interplay of polarities they called yin and yang. Yin represented softness, wetness, darkness and receptivity, while yang represented hardness, dryness, light and activity. We can understand yin and yang like the north and south poles of the Earth, or the positive and negative poles of an electric current. Each is an integra

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