Hmm, what has been said so far about the {left, right} pairing has been reasonable and “factual” as far as I can see. I’d like to add my two bits as well, though. The distinction between the left and right (as opposed to the singularity right-left) is for, like cusm notes, “impos[ing] a duality onto your practice.” What this means is that it is a heuristic device for categorizing our reality. It is much like we learn to work with individual sephiroth and the individual paths, but as we learn more and more about these singularities we come to see that in each sephira and each path is mirrored the whole structure; i.e., left or right is the distinction we use until we are poised to overcome this method of categorization.
A few years ago I wrote an essay related to this subject called “Post-Mortem: A Logical Analysis of Aspects of the Mystical Experience Through a Deconstruction of the Pythagorean Table of Opposites.” In the essay I play off some of the introductory remarks and concerns of Grace Jantzen in her book Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. I argue that the division of singularities is required for any phenomenological experience. To establish this, I look at the basic spatial division that we require as the matrix of our experience: we need to divide left from right, up from down, and ahead from behind in order to have any sort of understanding and experience in this world. In other words, we impose this duality upon our practice in order for there to be any practice at all! Related to a whole class of binary pairs is the pair {true, false}. Now way back when (circa 500 BCE), the Pythagorean Mystery School had developed a table of opposites which reflected their esoteric beliefs. This table has the following ten binary pairings: {limit, unlimited}, {odd, even}, {one, plurality}, {right, left}, {male, female}, {resting, moving}, {straight, curved}, {light, darkness}, {good, bad}, {square, oblong}. What occurs here is that the necesarry division of these singularities into their respective dichotomized pairs become illogically or arbitrarily associated amongst themselves. In the list of pairs I have preserved the structure of the table: each element that is listed first in any set becomes associated with one and other, and the same for the second elements of each set. Thus, left = bad = female = darkness, etc.. From here I show that this whole association is absurd, and that we cannot with any degree of accuracy allow a strict identity across these dichotomies. Based on this examination I propose a “Principle of Compliments” which works to illustrate how we cannot establish stable identities across these pairs and that whenever we consider an actual existing thing, we have to consider it as a whole. This requires that, while we made need to divide a host of binary singularities to experience phenomena, we must keep in mind the ebb and flow of our unstable or indeterminate heuristic categorization.
If anyone would like a copy of this essay through email, please PM me. Also, if you are willing to ignore some bickering and bad vibes, you can check out this damned diZzy thread where I (and others) construct/perform a linguistic-magic/kal experiment, in (my) part inspired by my analysis in “Post-Mortem.” |
