Vulnerable but Still Resilient: Awesome Opposites

Copyright (c) 2010 Dave Smart

There was a documentary on the History channel recently about the great life extinction at the end of the Permian age. Their theory is that it was caused by a catastrophic volcanic eruption, or series of eruptions, that covered most of Siberia with lava hundreds or thousands of feet thick. Underneath this great layer of volcanic rock they found coal, evidence of the age and the extent of these eruptions. Vapors and runoff from the eruptions, including the coal burned by the lava, so poisoned the atmosphere and the oceans the world over that most life was killed; and only those species where males and females of the survivors could find one another were able to survive; all others became extinct. Similar documentaries have described the extinction of the dinosaurs and other forms of life at the end of the Cretaceous age; and before the beginning of the Cambrian, when an ice age caused the Earth to be entirely frozen. Life on Earth has narrowly avoided total extinction at! least three times.

These brushes with total extinction seems to have left an extreme survival imperative upon all life, nearly all species, including us. But at the same time we humans are reminded daily how vulnerable and fragile we are, and how many different ways there are to die.

In the face of such blatantly contrasting imperatives it is no wonder that our different voices tend to come in opposite pairs. Specifically there is the Defender, who assumes we are vulnerable and must be protected. Against the Defender is the Survivalist, who assumes, or at least hopes, that we are hardy, tenacious, and can "take a licking and keep on ticking".

We differ from Marxism in that the latter postulates opposites, and their attendant tensions, in seemingly every domain of thought. Rather, in Jungian psychology and philosophy, polarization is part of the birthing process and once polarized, opposites attract. The reasoning does not begin with the imperative that opposites must exist; they occur only as a part of the birthing and growth process; even as when cells divide there is at one point the "anaphase" where the divided chromosomes are pulled to the opposite ends of the soon-to-be-divided cell. Yet what modern paleontology tells us is that there is reason to believe that, in carrying the genes of the survivors of (at least) three great extinctions, the unfathomably deep-seated survival imperative, along with a kind of delicacy, or vulnerability arising from our great complexity, gives rise to a very deep basis of opposite voices that reflect primeval opposites; a sort of Ur-Marxism.

It is easy to write off such concepts as musings from very recently discovered data. After all, how many human generations lived and died without any knowledge of the causes of great prehistoric extinctions? It is not so easy to write it off however, when one realizes the disturbing parallels between the nature of these events and recurring themes in the mythologies of indigenous people the world over. For instance in the mythology of the Hopi tribe, there are stories of the emergence of survivors from "worlds" that were destroyed by water, fire and ice. The Pre-Cambrian extinction resulted from an ice age that caused the entire world to be frozen over; the other two extinctions were not exactly from fire but from something closely related to it: the poisoning of the atmosphere and the oceans from in one case catastrophic volcanic eruptions, and in the other the collision of the earth with an asteroid. Genes may not be as "dumb" as we think they are.

But how can I live with irreconcilable opposites within myself?

Society seems to want to classify each of us as 'types', or 'kinds'. But none of us is but one type or kind. Our striving to be one defined type may benefit us in a given situation, and pushing the other types, or voices, to the sidelines may be necessary to that situation, but this is not the same as trying to eliminate other and/or opposite voices from ourselves. For one thing, the opposite voices will not really go away with such efforts. For another, all the voices exist for a reason, even as each physical part of our bodies exist for a reason.

Heart-centered meditation teaches us to orient to the center place and from there, hold each opposite voice non-judgmentally. The center place is not always calm, even as the eye of a hurricane is not really calm. Society's temptations to be a particular 'kind' or 'type' will not help here. What may help is that a part of us, in our genes, have that indefatigable perseverance that once allowed life to survive in a relentlessly hostile world.