Analogue 5: The Realm of Duality
ANALOGUE FIVE
The Realm
of Duality
Light exists
with darkness, life with death.
The right-hand and the
left-hand belong together as siblings. It is not
possible, then, to separate them from their mutual complementarity. Good is never entirely good, nor evil pure
evil, or life without death, nor
death without life. Each entity unfolds towards its origin from the beginning point, and everything which
transcends this world is no longer mortal, but is brought forth
into eternal reality.
•
Ultimate Reality is the beginning point and Source.
Learning to return to it and
beginning to experience transcendence now is one of the great purposes of our sojourn here.
• Wisdom tradition introduces us to an evolutionary
process: The journey of eternal
return. It is through that journey that we begin to experience ego- transcendence.
•
The deep structure of existence is this journey of
Eternal return which is quite different
and often opposite
from our lived experience in space and time.
•
Eternal or Ultimate Reality is, however, the largest
frame around our temporal existence.
Without this frame we cannot understand ourselves or the meaning of our lives
in duality.
•
This teaching is central to Sophia Perennis--it defines
the Tradition of Perennial Wisdom.
•
This ancient wisdom feels counter-intuitive and is
definitely counter- cultural to our
modern reductionistic, materialistic, and rational understanding, education
and sensibilities.
•
In Philip we learn to be counter-cultural, as Yeshua was in his day, but who
was himself killed for it in
the end.
•
We can be conventional or we can become
counter-cultural (known by some as
cultural creatives) who know and practice perennial wisdom as outlined here.
COMMENTARY
The Demands of Duality
The Gospel of Philip has a very nuanced view of the world we live in. It knows that we inhabit the mixed realm of duality in space and time where darkness and light co-mingle and interplay. It declares that it is a domain that is full of opposites, complementarities, paradoxes and ambiguities. It sees that our world contains and is a mixture of both darkness and scattered light. It is not an easy realm to describe and even more difficult to live in and navigate as we traverse this territory of starkly contracting features.
This analogue attempts a describe the characteristic elements of a number of its particularities—in what we sometimes call, the “real world.” However, what we call “real” is not ultimately real. It is a temporary and transitional state through which we are passing. Everything here must be seen from the perspective of a larger, ultimate Reality which holds temporal existence as an impermanent manifestation, but designed in a particular way necessary for our becoming.
The form of
perennial wisdom which is characteristic of this Gospel expresses and helps us to understand many of its singular
features. Ultimately, however, we are
tasked to transcend this transitional world. But to transcend it, we must know it and come to terms with it.
While we live here we tend to think
about it in absolutist terms (as though things here are the permanent nature of reality). There are, however, no
absolute categories in duality.
Everything is an admixture with varying degrees of certainty or reality which are typically expressed as
polarities. Not unlike the ancient
text of Chinese wisdom (the Tao Te Ching),
with great clarity this text
expresses the mutual complementarity of opposites (the yin and the yang
of temporal existence).
Sapiential Propositions
In this exposition of duality (filled with opposites), certain propositions are made either explicitly or implicitly. This is a philosophical discourse in a traditional sense which makes certain claims that we either learn to know by experience or put to the test through time. This pursuit could be seen as the is the love and play of wisdom (philo-sophia ). In our realm, in space and time, the qualities that we experience can never exist without their opposite “siblings” or partners, nor should we expect them in any other way. If we experience one quality or aspect of reality, we should anticipate the experience of the other as well—often in full force. Darkness and light, right-hand and left-hand, good and evil, life and death—these come to us as pairs, and in each experience (on one side of the equation or the other) there also exists certain elements of the other side. According to this text, there is no side of the set that is purely itself. We often think of good and evil as opposite and mutually exclusive to each other. Traditional wisdom and this text knows that this is never true. There are ambiguities and between the opposites are shades of gray. This is a highly nuanced philosophical understanding.
From a wisdom perspective, to know these nuances and their balances, and to experience them practically, is the essence of wisdom itself—it is what it means to be wise and live wisely within the ebb and flow of these ambiguities and admixtures. Only then do we learn to discern and discriminate, accounting for and balancing them as we can. By hard won experience we learn to stay in a relationship of equilibrium with everything and everyone around us, even in the midst of extremes. Inevitably, the text says, everything will flow back into its Source as they have come. Through a process of reconciliation in some great mystery, they will be resolved in such a way that nothing will be lost—which is the deep vision of this text. In the meantime, we are here to experience the challenge of living in the turbulence and even the in-expressible chaos that these dualities often create. How could we learn wisdom otherwise? Without these challenges and their tests, we would remain naively ignorant?
Transcending Duality
How these polar opposites are balanced, and what it requires to balance them in spiritual practice, will become one of the pursuits of this Gospel. What Philip asserts is that through (and perhaps by means of) our passage through space and time, there is an evolutionary unfolding where we ourselves are assisted in creating these very balances and then, perhaps in the end, transcending them, moving into a new form of reality that contains the Whole. Human beings (and the entire creation, as we shall see) is unfolding from its beginning point toward a destiny that requires the experience of these polarities and the praxis of balance between them.
Though, perhaps, it seems at times, in this process we are dancing on a knife’s edge. For certain we will emerge from this experience with a direct knowledge of both good and evil—darkness and light. These will not be theoretical categories for us. They will be a form of wisdom because we have lived them practically and know their consequences. Much like a young person perhaps who longs for adventure and joins some military service for the “thrill of experience war,” he or she will come out of that experience knowing full well what the actualities of war are, and what the word war truly means and not some fantasy about it It will no longer be theoretical but real, and nothing will ever be able to detract from that knowledge. The ultimate meaning of that experience will no doubt change over time in light of larger realities, but the experience of it will remain as a backdrop to learning everything else from that new, higher, more transcendent point forward.
The final lines of this analogue imply however that the unfolding of duality through its opposites results in a reality that transcends mortality itself with their play of opposites. The progression is toward an immortal state where a new form of eternal reality exists the includes but also transcends the play of opposites and their balances. What the experience of transcendence will entail is not spelled out in this analogue, but later in this Gospel of Philip we move toward a visionary conclusion where this eternal reality is realized not just in the future, but also in the present moment.
Eternal reality, as a third force, is seen to flow backwards into time, touching us even as we move through temporality into Eternity.
The Process of the Return
So to be clear, the wisdom teaching that is expressed in this text is introducing us to an evolutionary process, known universally as the journey of eternal return from our origins to our destiny. In the middle of this journey, in space and time, however, it is possible for us to begin to experience ego-transcendence (the ego having been the creation of space- time itself, coming into being as a “social construct”). This process is the meaning and purpose of our experience here in duality. This learning constitutes the deep structure of experience in contrast to the surface structures of the world that we know all around us where the normal pursuits are simply the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain.
The actual
experience of life, however, always appears as admixture of things which is in this way that we come
to know the whole spectrum that constituted
by the essential elements of duality in their complexity. It appears that we are also learning
fundamental relationships that bind these contraries
together in complex and often dynamic relationships which are necessary
for their existence here and throughout the cosmos of Being.
The Frame of Eternity
Eternal or Ultimate Reality is the largest frame around our temporal existence—it is both the beginning and ending point. Without this frame we cannot understand ourselves or the meaning of our lives, or its deep unfolding or its purpose mirrored in their oppositionary forms. The nuanced teaching of this Gospel is central to Sophia Perennis. It helps to define what the teaching of Perennial Wisdom is as it is uniquely expressed in Jewish and Semitic forms and symbols. These appear to come to us from the lineage of First Temple Mystical as they were received and then perhaps freshly expressed by Yeshua.
This wisdom
transmission may seem counter-intuitive to us having been brought
up within the Occidental formulations of Christian dogmatism
where the balance between opposites is not taught or maintained. In the West, good and evil are constantly
contrasted, as are darkness and light, but
one is always privileged above the other. This insistence upon transcendent reality is also
counter-cultural to our modern reductionistic,
materialistic, and rational way of thinking that accepted in the
contemporary world. Both our
traditional theological education and our modern materialistic sensibilities work to block such a constructive
understanding of reality. Flatland
materialism is maintained as the only (and preferred domain), rejecting any greater, multi-dimensionally along the vertical
axis.
Traditional
western theology sees that same shadowland only in terms of sin, judgment and redemption for sin, and
not as the learning environment for
deeper knowledge and wisdom that must inevitability include opposites as categories in the learning
process. This is why this Gospel text is of such
importance for us today. We need its broad-spectrum seeing theologically and metaphysically without
which we easily become lost in our sojourn through the modern theological or materialistic worlds.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
1. How do you
assess and contrast the polarities in this analogue? Do these ring true to you and accord with your experience that they
cannot exist, the one without the other?
2. How have you experienced this admixture of opposites as a form of play or as a kind of warfare? What are the most important yin and yang- like qualities and characteristic features of your life as you have come to know them?
3. Do you agree that on earth there is never anything that is either pure good or pure evil? How would you explain this? Or if you do not agree, how would you defend your position?
4. Explore your own response to Philip’s view of good and evil when you are confronted by genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, etc. Are these not entirely evil? How does Philip’s telling affect the way you understand these clear examples of evil in our day.
5. How does the experience of these polarities change us? What essential things do you see us learning from them?
6. If the Gospel of Philip is correct, what must our strategies be as we pass through this realm of ambiguity and duality?
7. What spiritual practices are required to live a balanced life in some way? What spiritual practices have you tested and found to be true or helpful?
8. What does self-transcendence (or world-transcendence) mean to you? How might this produce immortality? What is the relationship between mortality and the ego, and immortality and ego-transcendence?
9. How might you attempt to describe the beginning and ending points of the Journey of Eternal Return. How would you describe the true nature of Ultimate or Eternal Reality itself? How are you experiencing that reality now in the present moment?
10. This might be a good opportunity to read passages from the Tao Te Ching and see how that ancient text describes temporal reality from the perspective of Oriental Chinese tradition.
Notes for Reference and Study
A. We have introduced the term Perennial Wisdom or Sophia Perennis into this text where it will be used as a defining characteristic of our understand of the wisdom found in the Gospel of Philip. Clearly the insights of Philip exceed more traditional philosophical and theological categories that are defined by western orthodoxy. It is not till later, that Perennial Wisdom is articulated as powerfully in the West, but here in its formative stages it is being implicitly expressed in an early Christian text. It is perhaps just these more expansive insights that lead some scholars to imagine that Philip must be a later Gnostic text, when it can be demonstrated that it does not come from Gnosticism per se, but from Jewish mystical tradition. There may of course be overlaps between the ideas held by these various communities. There are certainly common ways of seeing shared by many spiritual communities, but they should never be conflated.
B. A basic definition of Sophia Perennis is that the foundational principles of wisdom have been given as insight through a form of revelation to every culture and region of earth. No group of people on the earth have been left out. The Spirit has been at work worldwide from the most ancient of times until now to give earth’s inhabitants foundational truths. It is not that the same language or symbolic system is used in all places, but that there are basic principles of sacred knowledge that exist, and these come to humanity from Above (Transcendence or Eternity). All ages and cultures of the world have shared similar perspectives and understandings and these have been guiding human evolution and becoming. Some scholars see a major shift taking place in the thousand years prior to the Common Era near to the midway mark which has been called the Axial Age. It was then, through its teachers and sages, that Perennial Wisdom began to flourish anew across the earth through what we call today the great traditional religions: Taoism, Confucianism. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, among the Jewish prophets, the pre-Socratic tradition of Ancient Greece, and the various Aboriginal streams of sacred teaching, including, of course, the Celtic World, and the traditions on the North and South American continents, and the Melanesian Islands. Later Christianity and Islam would come to share these insights.
C. Mention of the Journey of Eternal Return (humans coming out of Eternity into time and returning out of time back into Eternity) is explicitly expressed in this Analogue. This narrative is a fundamental model and a foundational teaching of Perennial Wisdom. Through fables, mythologies and sacred stories the world’s sacred traditions tell of the “Hero’s Journey” in this way (Please see Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces). A basic diagram of the Journey of Eternal Return might help to express some of its features:
D. The Yin/Yang symbol of Taoism is probably familiar to all of us. It has gained almost instant recognition, expressing a common understanding of Duality. There exists a Semitic Equivalent that is not as easily recognized, but which expresses similar nuances of meaning. This is the symbol of the Seal of Solomon or the Star of David where ascending and descending triangles meet and interlock. Much wisdom is encoded in this ancient sign that is not unlike the Yin/Yang expression from further East.
Footnotes to the Translation
•
The term unfolds toward is
literally loosed forward or possibly flung forward.
• Eternal reality could easily be
translated eternity.
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