OPPRESSIVE FORMS OF DUALITY

 
Evolutionary illusion or illusory evolution has to proceed through apparently incompatible opposites such as pleasure and pain, vice and virtue, success and failure. Of the many pairs of opposites, the pair which needs especial mention and consideration is that of man and woman.

Male and female human forms are rightly described as opposite sexes. Progressive realization of the adequate forms, the continuation of the species, and the onward march of the incarnated life stream are dependent upon the opposition and interplay of the sexes, particularly at the higher phases of biological evolution. This is equally true of psychological and spiritual evolution as long as it is held up in the domain of illusion.

The opposition of sexes and the alternative attempts to overcome or reconcile this opposition are admittedly a source of inspiration, sublimation and exasperation, which haunt the interplay of sex opposites at the psychic level until they are withstood or understood fully and adequately.

One special feature of the sex opposites is that while remaining in counterbalancing opposition to each other, they are more patently and firmly tethered to each other than many other opposites. A man who is conscious of himself as a male is at the same time conscious of woman as a female; and the tension of the felt duality is on him a constant burden, which he often invisibly passes on to a member of the opposite sex.

The same is true of a woman who is particularly conscious of herself as a female. The opposites create and sustain a burdensome illusion which is transferred to each other. And if this illusion is shared by both, it goes on increasing in geometrical proportion instead of being mitigated in any way.

On the other hand, the disburdening of the illusory and oppositional duality of sex is also a self-communicative understanding. Then love is gradually freed from the tinge of differentiative sex consciousness, and understanding is lifted out of the obsessiveness of one of the most oppressive forms of duality.