A Letter For Mutual Arising 相生
The Taoist Principle of Complimentary Opposites
When I lay down to sleep I typically turn a podcast on that’s just barely audible. My mind likes to run wild and having something to focus on helps it slow down and turn off. My Grandpa Jack was the same, his old faux-wood clock radio sat on his bedside table and typically had sports talk radio on (shout out to KFAN and The Common Man Dan Cole).
I also like the idea that I can gain wisdom as I move from conscious to unconscious and asleep. I’d like to think that knowledge can be absorbed subconsciously while my mind and body drift off to sleep.
Upon searching for something new one night a few months back Alan Watts came into my zone of interest. I don’t really know much about him yet, but his son Mark and their org are releasing recordings of Alan to the public.
Alan has an incredible British accent and way of simplifying complex and esoteric concepts into easily digestible communication. His lectures, which he would give to crowds of westerners throughout the 1950’s/60’s and routinely recorded, are so well delivered that they both pull me in and put me to sleep. It’s like Alan is my dad, cradling me as a swaddled baby in his arms, talking to me softly in his english accent as he bounces me gently to sleep, filling my ears with profound wisdom and inspiring thought that my brain won’t comprehend for many years.
As I was putting our youngest son down for a nap one Sunday afternoon (and planning to doze off myself in what feels like the greatest luxury of all as a middle-aged dad), I turned on an Alan lecture to play in the background. After a couple of minutes a topic came up that I had never heard of before - the concept of mutual arising.
It’s a Taoist principle, stemming from the Tao Te Ching, that refers to the idea that opposites or dualities do not exist independently but rather co-arise - defining and giving meaning to each other through their relationship.
相 (xiang) = mutually, each other, a reciprocal relationship between two or more entities
生 (sheng) = to give birth or life, to arise, to produce
In this context nothing arises and exists in isolation, everything arrives at the same time and exists co-dependently with its opposition.
"Being and non-being produce each other; difficult and easy complete each other; long and short contrast each other; high and low distinguish each other."
Light is only light because we know of darkness and they arrive at the same time as interdependent poles of a unified system. Apparent opposites cannot exist independently but must arise together, each defining the other through their relationship.
Lao Tzu expresses this in Chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching:
“When people see things as beautiful,
ugliness is created.
When people see things as good,
evil is created.”
Alan taught me that this is the true essence of Yin and Yang. The principle comes from the idea that a mountain has both a sunny side and a shady side. Yin (shady north side) and Yang (sunny south side) exist only in relation to each other. Without both arising mutually, there is no mountain, there is no “sunny” or “shady” side; their identities arise from their opposition and exist in harmony.
It’s this mechanism of dynamic balance that underpins all of existence.
It’s the examination of the Yin and Yang of life that helps us understand our reality and how we experience it. In Itzak Bentov’s brilliant work “Stalking The Wild Pendulum”, he talks about how everything we experience is relative to our perception of it. That our reality and what we perceive is context dependent. The full passage is much better than anything I can write:
These two things together, Mutual Arising and Relative Perspective, have helped clarify so much for me and how I experience the world. It’s given me a fresh set of eyes on how I interact with other humans as well. Each of us moves through this world with a completely unique experience and that experience, our own keyhole of reality and how it’s interpreted impacts us all. It changes with us moment to moment. We change moment to moment.
In a brutal but truthful sense, this means that no one can ever truly understand our perspective and reality. It’s relative only to us. Conversely, I cannot ever understand fully what someone else’s experience is or was in a moment or compounded over time. In the words of the great modern philosopher
in her exquisite essay Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization:
It’s in this vein that I keep challenging myself to understand WHY my reality is experienced the way that it is. Why my Skittle Factory makes my skittles the way that it does. It hinges on my relative perspective and how mutual arising presents itself and is examined as an ingredient into my skittle factory.
The next part to Parakeet’s essay explores this idea that we have the ability to create the skittle factory that makes the skittles that we want (life). That our thought patterns/loops are the core production line and that we have the agency to maintain them, upgrade or reconfigure them. The thought-loops create our reality and our reality determines our experience - so to change our reality and experience something different (better!) we have to learn to examine and change our thought loops. It’s necessary.
In examining our thought loops it’s easy to fall into the dualism that life presents and get lost. Do I like this or not like this? Is it good or bad? Is this beneficial or hurtful? It can lead to complete apathy and a figurative throwing up of the hands. Like all things, practice here makes all the difference. It’s in a meditation practice or contemplation practice where we hone this ability.
That’s where power comes from concepts like Mutual Arising - in the parables and stories that accompany them and give us a framework for reflection and doing that practice.
In particular there are 2 of them that resonate deeply, one from Alan and one from a professor of mine posed to me in college that I’ve never fully understood (maybe still don’t) until now.
Alan’s quote is this:
“You can’t have an inside without an outside or an outside without an inside”
It’s one of those sentences that if you say it out loud and in front of people they will scratch their head and think you’re crazy.
The second quote is from my college Professor, Dr. Dave Levy (whom I’ve written about here before), whom I remember saying this to me at the end of class one day:
“To go westward one mile is to go eastward one mile”
These are classic Zen parables, the latter of which lived rent free in my head for the better part of the last 20 years. It would pop up in my mind from time to time while meditating or out on a run or sometimes even just driving and following google maps. I’d always end up thinking to myself “WTF does it mean?”
Although I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand it, I feel closer now than ever. The concept of direction is entirely dependent upon your current relative location and your unique relative perception of where you are in time and space.
East and West are constructs of that reality that can only exist in opposition of each other but as part of a greater whole. On our spherical earth movement in any direction eventually unifies with its opposing direction. Think of someone on the other side of the globe watching your movement in a particular direction and perceiving that movement as contradictory to your perception of it.
When I bring that parable home in my own practice, it’s more personal.
Am I heading in the right direction? What direction am I heading in? Do I know where I want to go?
Ever conscious of this, I try to just orient myself to move towards joy. I’m just now realizing that in order to do so I have to understand it’s opposing feeling and it’s relation to why something feels joyful for me and the harmony between the two opposing things. The pain and suffering on the other side of that coin is necessary and complimentary - together the joy and suffering form the ground on which I perceive my reality.
Which means that embracing and understanding both sides is necessary to living a fuller experience. Resisting one side is futile and only serves as a mechanism for muting life, which may be what others choose, but I don’t want a muted life. I want mine to be colorful and exciting and interesting. I want my relative experience dial turned up to 11.
As I try more and more to seek to understand and lean into that I’m learning simultaneously what suffering really means to me. I’ve still got a long ways to go, we all do, it’s something that takes a lifetime.
Damn am I grateful that I’ve started to understand it. That Alan, and Dr. Levy, and Lao Tzu before them, brought it to me at this part of my journey. The things I’ll continue to learn from it seem limitless, which is always the best place to be. Or the worst? Or both the best and the worst? Yes, both.
With love and deep appreciation,
Andrew