beyond the binary

[Doug Millison]

Not at odds with the worldview -- moving beyond the duality of binary
systems, embracing good and evil -- that emerges from Pynchon's novels:


"But every wave has its healthy and unhealthy forms, and nature mystics
often mistake their experience as being a unity with nature as opposed to
human culture. Emerson corrected this error by referring to
'nature-and-nation' mysticism: in other words, the World Soul, the
Over-Soul, is the divine ground of both nature and culture. In healthy
nature-nation mysticism, you are one with both lakes and windmills, clouds
and cars, horses and horsepower. Of course you will work to minimize the
human footprint on the biosphere, but you don't do so by absolutizing the
biosphere.

     	"A profound insight tends to come with nature-nation mysticism: in
some deep, awesome, mysterious way, everything that happens is all of a
piece. There is indeed something called 'good' over here, and something
called 'bad' over there. But both of them are necessary pieces of this
great work of Art called manifestation. Just as a beautiful painting has
both light and dark shades, so this world necessarily has both good and
evil, both pleasure and pain, both life and death: you could not see this
world without both, it would not even exist as a manifest event.

     	"Now the average person pursues happiness by trying to find
one-half of the pairs of opposites: by trying to find pleasure without
pain, life without death, good without evil, health without sickness, left
without right, inside without outside, up without down. Not the mystic, who
instead rejoices in the unity of the opposites, the vast play of pairs as
they erotically unite throughout the manifest realm, their secret joy
lighting up the night with screams of their uncontainable delight.

     	"The great mystical texts, both East and West, always speak, in
hushed terms, of the liberated one, the enlightened one, the one who is
awakened, the one who understands the ultimate secret of the universe. And
you know how this enlightened one is described? He or she, it is said, is '
freed from the pairs .' Freed from the pairs of opposites, freed from the
dualistic nightmare of tearing the universe in two and trying to identify
with only half of reality while running away from the other half. You tear
yourself in half as well, and that torn and fractured condition is known by
many names, the most common of which is suffering. But wholeness lies in
the other direction, freed from the pairs altogether.

     "And so the secret message rings out, from the Bhagavad Gita in the
East: 	[...]

     
     "To the Gospel of St. Thomas in the West:

     Jesus said to them:

     	When you make the two one, and

     	when you make the inner as the outer

     	and the outer as the inner and the above

     	as the below, and when

     	you make the male and the female into a single one,

     	Then you shall enter the Kingdom.

     "To the incomparable Lao Tzu, sage of all humankind:

     	Is there a difference between yes and no?

     	Is there a difference between good and evil?

     	Must I fear what others fear? What nonsense!

     	"You see, dear souls, it's true: the great, great Joy of the
nature-nation mystic resides in the blissful union of the opposites. He or
she does not rejoice in the light conquering the dark, or the good
conquering evil, or life conquering death, but in the mysterious play of
light and dark miraculously held together in the Joy of manifestation
itself. Somehow, everything is eternally right. No matter how dark the
dark, how painful the painful, how evil the evil, the mystic knows that it
is all a part of the great painting of Life. Even while we fight to lessen
evil--and we should--and punish wrongdoing--and we should--and work
ceaselessly to right wrongs--and we should--there is a sense that the world
is Profoundly Okay. As dear Aldous Huxley put it, 'And then there is the
sense that in spite of Everything --I suppose this is the Ultimate Mystical
conviction--in spite of Pain, in spite of Death, in spite of Horror, the
universe is in some way All Right, capital A, capital R....'

     	"People who haven't had this experience of cosmic consciousness
often get confused at this point. They think that because you are alive to
the basic All Rightness of the universe, you shouldn't be upset by the
terrorist attack. Just the opposite! Because you are grounded in the
unshakeable security of the perfect All Rightness of the world, you can
afford to get totally, absolutely, crushingly upset. You won't weep for the
victims, you won't weep for yourself, you will weep for all humanity, it
all comes pouring through you with a pain and intensity that will melt your
neurons, blister your skin, tear your eyeballs out of their sockets: you
will cry for every single sentient being that ever lived, cry for every
lion who lost a cub, for every husband who ever lost a wife, for every
mother who ever lost a son, for every loss in every conceivable world--it
will hurt with a pain so unbearably raw you will throw yourself flat on the
ground and beg God and the Goddess to please, please make it stop.

     	"And yet--paradoxically, mysteriously, profoundly--under all the
horrible, horrible, horrible pain is that unfaltering Joy in the basic All
Rightness of it all. The quiet bliss of the simple feeling of Being is your
constant companion; you are one with the sun and the moon and the radiant
stars; one with the great cities, the planes and trains and automobiles,
one with all the wonders of manifestation arising not around you, but
within you--a Joy that is so overpowering you often find it hard to
breathe, a Thrill that runs the length of your body, toe to head, and then
disappears into the heavens happy to hear from you. You hold the earth in
the palm of your hand, bless the galaxies adorning your crown, cry as the
rain on nature and nations alike. Your compassionate tears and empathic
tortures all arise in the vast Security and swirling Joy of the World Soul
that is your own Over-Soul, and the Over-Soul will whisper gently in your
ear: 'I will be with you, even until the ends of the world. How could
anything ever be amiss?'"

     	Margaret Carlton was quietly weeping as Joan talked, and I kept
wondering, as I always did in Joan's presence, just how such a one could
really move among us....

     	"And you will rage, too, rage the way rage is supposed to be felt
when you are no longer afraid of hurting the world, for the world in its
basic All Rightness cannot be hurt, and therefore you can afford to feel
the rage--feel all of it, feel every rage that has ever been felt: the rage
of the father whose daughter is killed, the wrath of the person whose best
friend is murdered, the absolute fury of a husband whose wife is raped and
whose body abandoned: you are the Soul, the Over-Soul of humanity, and thus
you will feel everything humanity has ever felt--and you will let it all
in, because you can afford to. Your rage will find infinity, your blood
will circulate plutonium, your heart will feel like Hiroshima, you will
suffer wrath and hatred and the incandescent desire to kill and kill a
million times over. You will eat it all, you will take it all in, you will
open up and stand back and the entire course of nature and nations will
come rushing through you, savaging your psyche and leaving the insides of
your soul torn and horribly bleeding--because you can afford to. You are
not letting in just the light, just the love, just the caring--those are
all dualistic opposites, just as rancid, by themselves, as their mirror
images of hatred and evil and rage. No, you are letting it all in, letting
the universe itself in, because, in fact... you... are... the...
universe--in all its wonderfully mysterious play of light and dark, joy and
sorrow, cheers and fears, terror and delight.

     "But now you understand the secret union of the pairs, the ultimate
oneness of all the opposites, and you will never again play the game of
looking for light without dark, pleasure without pain, good without evil,
left without right, up without down. Freed of the opposites, you rest in
the unshakeable Confidence of the basic All Rightness of the entire
universe, and through the vast open spaciousness that you now are, the
opposites will come and go, moving to a destiny that is no longer
exclusively yours. You are now every nation and every nature that has ever
existed--your Heart is that big, dear souls, your Heart is that big.

http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/boomeritis/wtc/part3.cfm/xid,8240159/yid,
74733600