Anam Cara

Duality, then, is informed by the oppositions that meet at this threshold. I would argue that an authentic life is a life that is aware of and willing to engage its own oppositions, and honorably inhabits that threshold where the light and darkness, the masculine and feminine and all the beginnings and endings of one’s life engage. Sometimes, people who are very vociferous and moralistic are people who have erased the tug of opposition from their lives. They have little sense of the otherness that suffuses and surrounds them. Thus, they can allow themselves all kinds of moral platitudes and even moral judgments of others. It is lonely sometimes to hear them talk because, in their certainty, you can hear the hollow echo of a life only half-lived.

All creativity comes out of that spark of opposition where two different things meet. It is where each one of us was conceived. Masculine and masculine, feminine and feminine on their own cannot procreate. It is the two sides, the two sister oppositions, that create the unity. It is the same rhythm within subjectivity: there is a whole outer side to you, your name, face, role and identity, and there is the hidden world you carry within you. I think that real balance is, in some sense, about action, where the living reality of your life balances what is within you with what you are meeting outside. One of the greatest duties of post-modern culture at the end of this millennium is to try to bring the personal and the communal, the individual and the universal, together.

Experience is working all the time with duality, with that energy of opposition within you. You have no experience that does not have two sides to it. In a certain sense, all of your experience is a kind of narrative or story, with this deep underside that you never see, yet out of which all your possibilities come. Even though it is opaque, it constantly guides you and brings you to places you never expected. That is the surprise and the unpredictability of life. In relation to the notion of balance, we have to begin to strive towards a concept of person or self that is sufficiently complex and substantial to do justice to our huge metaphysical needs at the end of this millennium.

One of the victims of media culture is the depth and interiority of the self. People are treated like images, like instances of general principles, but rarely are individuals taken and illuminated for their own unique depth. The history, narrative and possibilities they carry within themselves are usually sidelined in any description or presentation of them. It is frightening how our collusion with technology has damaged so much our sense of individuality and our sense of the secret and sacred world that every individual inhabits.

Imagination

The imagination is the faculty that gives the duality within us expression and allows its forms of opposition to engage with each other. In the Western Christian tradition we gave a huge role to intellect and to will. The intellect was used to find out what the goal or object was and then the will drove it along the linear track towards it. This model of human sensibility brought us much beauty, but its neglect of the imagination has also cost us dearly. A human life can have everything—beauty, status, reputation, achievement, all kinds of possessions, but if the imagination is not awakened, all these lack presence and depth.

There are poor people who have absolutely nothing, but who have a depth of creative imagination that allows them, even in bleak circumstances, to inhabit a gracious, challenging and exciting world. The heart of it all is that there is an indissoluble, radical, subversive connection between mind and reality. The structures of your mind, the way your mind works, the way your consciousness moves, its patterns, actually determine the world you inhabit. You cannot separate the two of them. The awakened imagination brings us great riches. The imagination is not one-sided; it is passionately interested in wholesomeness and wholeness. The imagination is never tempted or attracted to the flat surface or to whatever is safe and perfect. Sometimes when you hear people talking about the human self you would think that it is made out of stainless steel and is meant to have perfection and purity. But we are clay creatures, striving desperately towards the light.