Binaries

Monday, May 15, 2006

Credit where credit is due department...Ms. JK has helped to expand my understanding of binary systems and I extend my thanks to her.

As I have noted previously, the binary mindset is a major attribute of patriarchal systems and seems to be an important component in the defining and limiting mechanisms within patriarchies. That need to know something definitively, to mark its borders, to remove all ambiguity, is vital to their world view. Feminine patterns of thinking are far more open to shades of grey...perhaps because their psyches are used to postulating, expressing and digesting emotional states.

It is paradixical that, even though I advocate these more subtle ways of understanding, the very existence of a reason versus emotional argument is, in itself, a dichotomy and hence becomes another binary system. Because we are steeped in this male perspective...it has become part of our everyday way of thinking to categorize and assign a proper place to all of our cerebrations.

It is understandable that, in the course of human evolution and epistemology, we have progressively learned about our immediate environments and, in the course of gaining this knowledge comes a commensurate attempt to control them. We learn how to bend the elements to our wills, rather than to live in dread of them. Fire, for example, was tamed subsequent to it's power to inspire fear.

This is the advance of reason and its aim to bring the universe under our control. As we can see today...one of the effects is a kind of "shrinkage"...as we tame to world, it gets smaller. Our ability to traverse ther globe and our inclination towards world trade are examples of this shrinkage.

But, there was a time, before reason had become paramount, when our intuitive abilities were far more potent. The loss of some of these abilities is essentially the casualty in the advance of reason, which is not and has not always been the only technique our brains are capable of using.

This is part of the difference in patriarchal as opposed to feminine mindsets.

In the best of all possible worlds, neither way of looking at the world would dominate. Both are equally important and relevant in cultivating a holistic and complete understanding of our world, why we are here, and how best we can manage ourselves and societies within these holistic parameters.

But, because we have sacrificed the intuitive, the shamanic, the "mysterium tremosum", we have allowed that part of our brain to atrophy. It is literally "mind-boggling" for us, as a society, to comprehend alternative ways of knowing. That has been the major etiology of our demonization of all psi related phenomena. They defy reason, scientific proof as we have come to know it, and have therefore been marginalized as useless, speculatory, nonsensical pap.

There are those, however, who understand that these atrophied abilities represent the way to a greater, more comprehensive and all embracing philosophy that will take us in directions we can only, as yet, imagine.

That all being accepted...my dear friend JK suggests that we embrace ambivalence, avoid the pitfalls of ratiocination...and...make these valid in our everyday lives. She suggests, for example, opting to change our political affiliations from the republican/democrat dichotomy to independent. She makes the case for eschewing black and white and opting for grey.

Of course, for the "transgender" person...we have come to understand that neither gender nor sexual identification are truly binary, as the patriarchal world view espouses. Ms. JK calls this patriarchal arrogance and it has prepetuated a marginalization of women and all things emotional in its path to the deification of reason. In this new and improved world, reason will no longer reign supreme. Nor will emotion. They will be equal partners and share the path to a greater destiny that embraces the paradigm of "all possibilities". Anything that can be dreamed may become manifest on this path towards a new epistemology!!

trickster108