The Taoist view
“At the root of Chinese thinking and feeling is the principle of polarity, which should not 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 so in much of the world an idealism to achieve the former flourishes. cultivate and get rid of the latter.
People raised in the atmosphere of Christian and Hebraic aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal that stems from their linear (rather than cyclical) view of time and history. Indeed, the entire enterprise of Western technology is aimed at ‘making the world a better place’ – to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without disease.
But, as is now becoming clear, our violent attempts to achieve this ideal with weapons such as DDT, penicillin, nuclear power, automobile transportation, computers, industrial agriculture, dams, and forcing everyone by law to be superficially “good and healthy” are, ‘create more problems than they solve.
We have meddled in a complex system of relationships that we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us as it reveals more and more details to us to study. As we try to understand and control the world, it flees from us. Instead of being annoyed by this situation, a Taoist would wonder what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself.
This means that the art of living is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is understanding the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons and the principles of growth and decay so that one’s actions use them can make of it and not fight them.
In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not necessarily against technology. The Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this principle of “going with the grain.” The point, therefore, is that technology is only destructive in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect or neglect of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, the most important of which is polarity.
In Chinese, the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the descending, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in mundane matters such as cooking as spicy and bland.
The art of living is therefore not seen as clinging to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because one cannot exist without the other.
When we think of them as male and female, we are not referring so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics that are dominant in, but not limited to, each of the two sexes. The masculine individual should not neglect his feminine component, nor the feminine her masculine. Thus Lao-tzu says:
By knowing the masculine but retaining the feminine, one becomes a universal flow. By becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows the good as the good,
there is already evil.
‘To be’ and ‘not to be’ arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short contrast with each other;
High and low are mutually exclusive;
Before and after are in order.
They are thus like the different but inseparable sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or the pulse and interval in each vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that one will overcome the other, for they are more like wrestling lovers than fighting enemies.
It is difficult in our logic to see that being and non-being are mutually productive and mutually sustaining, for it is the great and imaginary fear of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent universe. We do not easily understand the point that emptiness is creative, and that being emerges from non-being as sound from silence and light from space.
Thirty spokes meet in the wheel hub;
It’s the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It’s the space inside that makes it useful.
Cut out doors and windows for a room;
It’s the holes that make it useful.
Therefore, profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness of what is not there.
This space is not ‘just nothing’ as we usually use the expression, for I cannot escape the feeling that space and my consciousness of the universe are the same, and I am reminded of the words of the Chan (Zen) Patriarch Hui :neng, who wrote eleven centuries after Lao-tzu:
The mind’s potency is wide and vast, just like the vast sky. Don’t sit with your mind fixated on emptiness. When you do that, you fall into a neutral form of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad people and good people, bad things and good things, heaven and hell; they are all in the middle of the void. The emptiness of human nature is also like that.
So the yin-yang principle is that the something and the nothing, the on and off, the solid and space, as well as waking and sleeping and the alternation of existence and non-existence, are mutually necessary.
Yang and yin parallel in some respects the (later) Buddhist view of form and emptiness, of which the Heart Sutra states: ‘That which is form is precisely that which is emptiness and that which is emptiness is precisely that which is form . ”
The yin-yang principle is therefore not what we would normally call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity.”
Original article from Creative by nature