Antagonistic or Complementary Opposites
This post is a sequel to one I did earlier this year, called The Shape of Our Thinking. I examined how the geometry of our thought affects how we view the world, how we think and act.
Since the argument of this post builds on that one I will very briefly summarize it here.
Astrology conceives of reality in terms of repeating cycles of growth and change – alternating opposites like light and dark, summer and winter and so on – and of ongoing cycles through time, of birth, growth, flourishing, decline, death and decay, followed in a collective sense by a rebirth, and so on. that is represented by the sine wave.
The straight line is our modern view of reality as conforming to Progress, where we just keep going up and up, getting better and better, always moving forward. The straight line and the wave are pretty much in sync on the upward slope, but on the downward slope they increasingly diverge. They are profoundly different models of the world, so they shape our thoughts and actions in very different ways.
Both of these two systems have various kinds of opposite concepts that structure the model – for instance,
– light / darkness
– day / night
– summer / winter
– heat / cold
– growth / decline
– youth / age
– masculine / feminine
and so on. There are other pairs of opposites, like good and evil, that have an ethical or judgemental quality.
So how do we deal with opposites? I think it largely depends on the shape of our thinking, and in this essay I want to examine the different ways of dealing with polar opposites that go with the two shapes.