Yin / Yang

About the time that I was coming up with ideas for this website, I was having insights into all sorts of things, spending far too much time writing, and an unhealthy amount of time contributing to various Internet discussion forums.

There were times when my thought process took me into murky waters, and even though I felt intuitively that I had gone wrong somewhere, I was unable to see where. Possibly I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque, but I'd reached where I was logically so couldn't see the fault in my working. An example of this is that I spent nearly an hour thinking that Satan was the most influential figure in today's Christian church - which I understand is not uncommon among biblical conspiracy theorists.

What got me out of this distressing line of thought was considering that all sustainable systems exhibit balance. That is not to say that all systems are in a healthy balance of course - look how man is currently out of balance with the planet - but that particular pendulum will eventually swing round as our species realises the damage it is causing.

The symbol of a system in balance is the Yin/Yang, and The Spoon considers it to be so fundamental to an understanding of the truth that there are (as is appropriate when considering dualism) two on every page of this website. Also in the Yin/Yang is the idea that the light contains the seed of darkness, and darkness contains the seed of light. Seen in the context of our current environmental situation, perhaps we can say that it will be our ever developing and expanding technology that will save the planet, but also that the planet itself contains a solution that will save mankind.

Around this time I had some insight into the insight process itself and confidently declared (a bad habit of mine) that:
In all Truth the Yin/Yang can be found.
Everywhere the Yin/Yang exists, Truth can be found.

Which put into engineering terms, is to say that any system of a sustainable dualistic dynamic nature is capable of achieving balance. At this time, I decided to create a page dedicated to balance.

However I could see a flaw in using the Yin Yang to obtain Truth and Balance in that the Yin Yang symbol itself does not appear to be very balanced. It represents a very constricted world view where Truth is black or white, and that is not my experience of life. Happily I was able to discuss my thinking with my father who came to my rescue by telling me that when you take a Yin Yang symbol and spin it, it achieves a perfect state of balance and becomes a uniform shade of grey.

Again in Engineering terms, one can say that looking at a snapshot of a dynamic system never reveals its true nature, and that one must see a system in action before its nature and balance point can be determined.

Click here to for Wikipedia information on Yin / Yang.