Heroes Not Zombies

When I looked up and saw these black and white clouds I immediately thought of the yin yang symbol….that brilliant representation of wholeness, the union of opposites, and the permanency of change.

I think those are three of the most significant principles I return to again and again to make sense of the world, of life, of other people and of me.

Wholeness because all reduction, every move to separate and isolate, every attempt to disconnect, to abstract, to re-present, is fraught with the potential for delusion. There are no separate, isolated, disconnected phenomena in Nature. All our abstractions and re-presentations which we carry out with our left hemispheres are a step away from reality. Which is not to say they aren’t useful. They are. But you can’t rest there. You have to re-contextualise, to hand back the analysis to the right hemisphere to understand what you are looking at as only an aspect of the whole.

The union of opposites because we humans, Nature, Life and the Universe are full of opposites….dark and light, heat and cold, attraction and repulsion, organisation and disintegration. In fact it seems that there is no universe without opposites. We are tempted to construct the myths of competition and conflict from that fact, but we must not miss the deeper understanding – that all of existence emerges from the integration of opposites, not from the elimination of one pole by another, not from the unchallenged dominance of one over another.

The permanency of change because that’s the nature of reality. There is nothing fixed, nothing which is not in the process of growing, or adapting or degenerating, whether we see that as three Gods, or as the natural cycles of the biosphere and of the seasons.

So when I look again at these clouds, these beautiful black and white clouds, I am captured by their beauty and entranced by the teaching they can give me.

Read more about this in my book, “And not Or”. You can get it from Blurb at https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10155078-and-not-or

There’s also a Kindle version – https://amzn.to/2UozjIw – if you are in the UK. If you are not in the UK, go to your local Amazon site and search for “Leckridge” – you’ll find it quickly that way (let me know if you don’t!)