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These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The shuttling to improve arguments and affects between conscious and unconscious represents the transcendent function of opposites. The confrontation of the two positions generates attention, charges with energy and creates a living, third thing… a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation. So long as these are kept apart – naturally for the purpose of avoiding conflict – they do not function and remain inert.
[T]he indispensable dark side has been left behind or stripped off, and the feminine aspect is missing. . .. Through atheism, materialism, and agnosticism, the powerful yet one-sided aspect of the Summum Bonum is weakened, so that it cannot keep out the dark side, and incidentally the feminine factor, any more. ‘Antichrist’ and 'Devil’ gain the ascendancy: God asserts his power through the revelation of his darkness and destructiveness.
If self-awareness and spirit were good, then darkness, the physical matter of the body, and human instincts with their uncontrollable urges were bad. The birth of the ego had introduced good and evil into the world.
In the history of humankind the differentiation of man and woman belongs among the earliest and most impressive projections of opposites, and early humankind took the male and the female as the prototype of opposites in general.
Therefore the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish – as he ought – to live without self-deception or self-delusion.
Accepting all of our diverse and multicolored realities builds a bridge of partnership between the opposites: good and bad, outer and inner, masculine and feminine, self and other.
… however improbable it may seem, the devil too has a dual aspect. In the positive sense, he appears as Lucifer — literally, the light-bringer.
The mathematically precise arrangement of a crystal evokes in us the intuitive feeling that even in so-called "dead" matter, there is a spiritual ordering principle at work. Thus the crystal often symbolically stands for the union of extreme opposites of matter and spirit.
The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
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