The Golden Mean & Pairs

AKHIL CHANDRA





We live in a world of opposites where gain and loss, good and bad, pleasure and pain, life and death are as inevitable as the two sides of a coin. Yet, there is an underlying unity between the two contrasts.One of the principal polarities in life is the one between the male and female side of human nature. The sublime union between these two aspects is symbolised by Lord Shiva's depiction as a dynamic unification of the two, as the half-male, halffemale Ardhanareesh war. In real life, too, there is a constant dynamic interplay between the two extremes of opposites and one has to strike a balance between the two. For this, we need to maintain a balance between good and bad, between winning and losing and so on.
The Bhagavad Gita asks us to lead the unattached life of a self-controlled man, a karma yogi unmoved by pairs of opposites, “The Supreme Spirit is rooted in the knowledge of the self-controlled man whose mind is perfectly serene in the midst of pairs of opposites such as cold and heat, joy and sorrow, and honour and ignominy .“ Chinese sages called this dynamic interplay of two extremes as Ying and Yang -positive and negative -and have extended this thought extensively to the function of daily life.
One should accommodate widely divergent human experiences in an underlying harmony , bringing newer prospects and ethical views for the exploration and mitigation of human suffering. One cannot always win or lose or be happy or sad -so go on, find the Golden Mean.