| Polarity Paradox |

We don’t know what the Yang is, the positive, the bright side, unless at the same time we know what the Yin is, which is the dark side. These things define each other mutually. And to see that, you might think at first, was to settle for a view of the world that was completely static.

Because after all, if white and black, good and evil, are equally pitted against one another, then so what. It all boils down to nothing.

But the universe is not arranged that way, because it has in it the principle of relativity. Now you would think in a Newtonian and respectable Platonic universe that the earth would revolve around the sun in terms of the perfect circle, but it doesn’t, it’s an ellipse. And if it were a perfect circle, the earth wouldn’t revolve around the sun in terms of the perfect circle, the earth wouldn’t revolve, because there would be no go to it.

So it seems a little off. That’s why in all Chinese art, there is not symmetry. There’s not complete balance between two sides of the painting, because the moment you have symmetry, you have something static.

But when you’re a little off, then it moves. So in that way, when you study this architecture, you will see that it’s always a little off. It would be dead if two sides of the room were just the same.

Relativity is not only the human situation, but the very nature of life. It is sort of a balancing act, and rather different from the ordinary balancing act, in that the system always balances. However far out you my get to one side, life eventually comes up with the other.

But we don’t perceive this for exactly the same reason that we ordinarily don’t think that space is real. Most people feel that space is nothing. But when you begin to consider it carefully, you see that space and solid are relative to each other – that you cannot possibly conceive any solid body except in space. And contrariwise, you can’t conceive space except as occupied by solids.

And when physicists begin to talk about properties of space – curved space, expanding space, and all that kind of thing – it first strikes the layman as nonsensical. Thus he simply cannot conceive how nothing can have any properties.

As Einstein once said, “the fish would not, of course, be aware of the water.” And in the same way, we are not aware of space being an effective agent of some kind, as being really there.

| So then, just as we think solids more real than space, so, in the same way, we give weight to positive – the Yang aspect of things, rather than Yin – the negative. |

And we are therefore hung up on the quest for those positive things in life: the good, the pleasurable, and so on, and think that somehow we can posses them away from, and apart from, their polar opposites.

Never forget that this is not simply a case of opposition. Polarity and mere opposition are a little different in concept, because when we say that opposites are polar, we mean that they are in fact, the abstract terms, or ends, of a sort of continuum that joins them.

| In the same way, the two sides of a coin are Euclidian surfaces of a solid: the coin is one; the magnet is one. But the heads and tails are different, and the north and south poles of the magnet are different. So what you have here is the paradoxical situation of identical differences – explicitly different but implicitly one. |

Excerpt from “Out of the Trap”, Alan Watts

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The paradox is comical. We can’t have one without the other or it ceases to exist. We can’t eradicate that which we don’t like, whether it’s a political party, our ego, or our pain or the belief systems we have about the political party of our choosing, our transcendence, or our relief and joy won’t exist, in that they wouldn’t be recognized or felt.

I laugh when I read Alan Watts.

There is a Buddhist Koan, “What is the sound of one hand?”

In Chinese proverb, “One hand does not make the clap. So if two hands clap, make the clap. What is the sound of one hand?”

“You see, what a silly question. And yet everybody is trying to play a game in which one side will win, and the can be one hand clapping – to get rid of the opposite. Light get rid of darkness. I conquer the universe. In other words, I play the game that I am going to get one up on them, and hold my position. I am going to dominate the other.

And as soon we get into that particular kind of contest, we become insane. Because what we are doing is pretending that there can be an in-group without an out-group.”

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