A Perspective on Duality (pt.1)

 Hello everyone, I just felt like writing something which would get me canceled in the future today, so here goes.

(Of course, I am just kidding, please do not cancel me, all my views here are transient and I am open to learning more about these topics if you have a more coherent perspective on them). These are views that have been informed by many things, e.g. Jungian Archetypes, David Deida, Kashmiri Shaivism, and One chapter I remember reading from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (and also possibly many other places which I forget mentioning.

Well the first thing to clear, which seems so simple to me, yet I don't know how many people get wrong, is understanding masculinity and femininity as archetypal attributes of our egos instead of fixed essential groundings depending on our biology. There can be men who have a feminine temperament and women who have a masculine temperament. Now, In my opinion, the "politically charged debates" aren't exactly at this juncture, they are more about linguistics and power games. There is a sense of mental security we get from rigid categorizations (which is probably representative of the highly masculine matrix of societal interactions we live in and can be explained in the framework I am going to talk about lol or maybe not). By not letting slogans such as "trans women are women" enter the language, people can continue with the sense of security they get from claiming that the two sexes are ontologically distinct. The politics of this, or my own beliefs about whether such an ontological distinction exists or not is not something I want to comment upon anyway, because I do not really know enough about it.   

So coming to the interesting perspective I actually want to talk about. I remember an Idea from Bertrand Russell's book, about how a dynamic interplay of order and chaos is involved in the existence of societies. Due to historical or linguistic (or maybe biological? or psychologically intrinsic?) reasons, these archetypes of order and chaos are also associated with masculinity and femininity respectively. I have seen this same idea in many other places, for example in Jung (and ironically it is something Jordan Peterson talks about a lot), in Kashmiri Shaivism (interplay of Shiva and Shakti), In the words of the psychedelic gurus (e.g. sometimes mentioned by Terence McKenna), etc. The duality can be extended to many other things, such as potentiality and form, the general and the particular. etc., and is a beautiful concept that should be explored. 

This duality I think, is a fundamental archetype for humankind as a whole, and is a deeply pregnant source of meaning, however, it's just not adequately represented in the modern-day discourse, probably because most people have not contemplated its beauty. 

The idea itself is pretty simple, there are two opposing things and their dynamic interplay is like a game to observe (as in, it is happening right now, when you cognize the image). There are quite a few things to understand from observing this game, the picture of Yin and Yang is rather conducive to this discussion. 

1. Neither of these things exists without the other. I am reminded of a metaphor I read about somewhere which comes from Christian mysticism- the 'father-ness' of the father is given to him by the son being the son in the same way as the 'son-ness' of a son is given to him by the father being the father. There is no form without potentiality to contrast itself to, there is no order without chaos to contrast it with, and perhaps critically, there is no "masculinity" to exert without a polarized romanticized (or perhaps archetypal) idea of the feminine to assert itself against and vice versa.
2. In the dynamic interplay (I like the word root play here because it portrays the exact sense of playfulness and the whole plethora of emotions and movements involved in the contrasting interactions of these archetypes, which is 'alive' in a Krishnamurtian sense) of these two opposing properties they are 'sublated' to a higher unity. (this is very Hegelian language, but what I want to convey with the word sublate here is the sense in which he used the word 'aufhebung' from German. A blog somewhere described this word beautifully as in a sense when something is lifted from the ground, it is no longer present on the ground, in a sense having been canceled, but the truth of the assertion has also been lifted up to a higher transcendent unity). This is perhaps best displayed by Kashmiri Shaivism, and how it connects to Tantra, the sexual union being realized as this transcendent unity. shiva is form, structure, and masculinity, Shakti is creativity, energy, and femininity and through the polarized union between the two, a higher unity may be intuited or experienced. 
3. This also reminds me of a talk I heard by Ram Dass, where he was talking about this concept of duality and Advaita. If we assume that at a higher abstract level, the things that they are trying to refer to are the same, In dualism's breaking things down to their particular and seeing the interactions between them there is still beauty. It is in a sense the essence of curiosity and wonder, the sense of walking through a garden and really deeply observing each plant, how life itself has dynamically evolved into these myriad different forms. He mentioned it in the context of people who prayed to Krishna, how by continuous devotion, the dualist eventually realizes the transcendent unity between her and the other, however, she is so entranced and enraptured by this "Leela" (which is the word I was referring to in one of the blogs earlier) that they would rather continue experiencing this exponential ever-expanding movement (which I daresay, in relating to Wolfram's computational model of the universe, seems like the universe's hypergraphs computational evolution to its next step), from their privileged yet limited perspective as an observer in the process, instead of being integrated again into the being of it. As someone who was previously opposed to dualistic forms of religion (which for me at this point just seems like a coherentist dialectical approach to metaphysics which almost always ends up landing into nonduality), this perspective opened my eyes to appreciating dualism. However, I am still skeptical of how many dualists actually end up imbibing this view (which seems like it comes about after intense devotion), and in this age of intense focus on analytic movements of thought, whether they would have been unable to realize non-dual teachings (at least intellectually) directly as propagated by Bernardo Kastrup for example.

I got distracted and started talking about metaphysics in this post, instead of focusing on the particulars (Masculinity and Femininity) and now I am tired, so I will cheekily rename the post to be a perspective on duality instead of a perspective on masculinity and femininity. In the next post, or a post sometime in the future whenever I feel like rereading this post and continuing it, I will probably expand on what I was about to say here specifically in terms of masculinity and femininity.