Course Three: Practice 133
as the Tao (“way”).
Anaximander of Miletus, a
Greek philosopher of the 6th
century BCE, proposed that
reality had its foundation
in an all-pervasive, un-
ending substance that
he called the Infinite
or Boundless, the
Divine Source of all
things. The Bound-
less divided itself
into two compo-
nents by spinning
about its center. Its
hotter and lighter
component was flung
outward to form the
Heavens while its colder
and heavier component
sank toward the center to
form the Earth. Later the Earth
separated further into the dry land
and the wet oceans.
Various religions envision Divinity as the ulti-
mate One. Hindus call it Atman-Brahman, who is
universal Spirit as well as the actual physical cosmos.
The Greeks expressed the same idea as Pan (“all”):
“Pan is all, and all is Pan!” The three monotheistic
(“one-god”) religions of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam believe in one Supreme Being whom they usu-
ally call simply God. Moslems call this deity Allah,
meaning “the One.” This Supreme Being is said to
possess the following universal qualities, being:Eternal—Existing forever, beyond time;
Omnipresent—“All-present” everywhere;
Omnipotent—“All-powerful”;
Omniscient—“All-knowing”; and
Omnibenevolent—“All-loving.”(All of this, of course, implies that the Supreme Be-
ing is responsible for everything that happens!)Dyads and Dualities
Duality is a concept fundamental to humans.
Because we are symmetrical creatures with two hands,
two eyes, and two ears, we tend to see everything in
terms of “either/or,” “this or that,” “on the one
hand...but on the other hand.” Duality thus becomes
the first form of classification, as
we sort everything into one cat-
egory or the other. The most
perfect symbol to express this
concept is the familiar Taoist
yin-yang.As sexually reproducing animals,
we humans are also divided into
two categories by gender: fe-
male and male. So it’s natu-
ral for us to tend to think
of the world as being
filled with two kinds
of things that fall into
these categories.
Many languages,
such as Latin, Span-
ish, French, Italian,
and German, refer
to various things not
as “it,” but as “he”
or “she,” the way we
do in English with
ships. As the ancients
envisioned their deities
to explain the world,
naturally, they con-
ceived both Gods and
Goddesses, assigning
gender values to various qualities and ac-
tivities that are often still with us today (seeing test-
osterone-fueled aggression as “masculine,” for ex-
ample, or estrogen-fueled compassion as “feminine”).
The Taoists saw Yin as the female principle and
Yang as the male, and believed that everything was
either mostly one or mostly the other, but still always
contained elements of both (thus, the little dot of black
inside the white area of the yin-yang, and vice-versa).
This is called polarity: the idea that everything in the
world exists somewhere along a spectrum between
two poles (right and wrong, masculine and feminine,
light and dark, cold and hot, etc.). This is a more help-
ful and accurate way of seeing the world than duality,
which divides everything sharply into black and white
(“It’s either good or bad, and can’t be somewhere in
between.”)
Many cosmologies include a dualistic notion of
archetypal opposites in myths describing the first gods
being born as twins. In the Assyrian story of creation,
the first couple, An (Sky) and Ki (Earth), was born to
Tiamet (Great Serpent-Mother of Chaos and the Pri-
mordial Waters). This duality was continued in the
names of their grandchildren: Anshar (“Totality of the
Upper Elements”) and Kishar (“Totality of the Lower
Elements”). The Hindu Vedas describe Atman and
Brahman, the former being immanent (within), the
latter transcendent (without).
Because one of the primal dualities is Good and
Evil, it is all too easy to apply those corresponding
values to whatever we list on opposite sides. This sort
of thinking has caused untold grief in the world, as
people inevitably list themselves on the side of Good,
and therefore anything or anyone they think of as- Practice.p65 133 1/14/2004, 4:21 PM