The Dance: Masculine and Feminine

The divine, in all its magnificence, shows itself to us through two figures. I have called them he and she throughout this book. He is the Unknowable Future. She is the Immutable Past. They are the main event of the cosmic stage, perpetually engaged in a dance that is the whole of existence.

Before going further, I owe you a word about why I use those pronouns, because they can be misread.

A word about he and she

I do not mean that men are like the future and women are like the past. I do not mean that any particular man is active and any particular woman is still. Every person I have ever met carries both, and in proportions that have nothing to do with the body they were born in.

He and she are names for two principles, and I use gendered names because human beings have been using them for these principles for thousands of years and the names carry a resonance that abstractions do not. In Chinese thought, yang is associated with activity and movement, and yin with stillness and receptivity, and each contains the seed of the other. My he and she, as the myth draws them, sit close to that pairing: he appears as pure activity, the movement of provision, and she as the stillness that contains everything.

It is worth noticing that not every tradition draws the pairing this way. In some Indian traditions the masculine figure, Shiva, is the still, pure consciousness, and the feminine, Shakti, is the dynamic power that moves, though the two are finally inseparable, as fire is from its heat. The roles are reversed from mine. I take that as a reminder that the names are lenses, not facts. What matters is the relationship: one principle that appears, from here, as provision without a lean, and one that holds everything without moving, and a love between them that never closes the distance. And remember from Book One that, strictly, neither of them moves at all. They are the still ends. The movement is ours.

We have never seen them

For all the immensity of their roles, none of us has ever seen either of them.

We feel a connection to the past. We think of it as known, stable, a place we have been. But she, the Immutable Past, is sealed. We have memories, and memories are experiences in the present; we have never once stood inside the past itself. It feels familiar and is always just out of reach, an archive that holds everything and lends nothing out.

We feel, too, that we can sometimes see a little way into the future. We make plans, forecasts, predictions, and sometimes they come true. But he, the Unknowable Future, is never seen. The moment any part of him arrives where we could see it, it has become the present, and then the past.

So we know them only by their effects: the stillness we sometimes touch, the provision that keeps arriving, the ripples at the edge where they meet.

The children at play

If they are the dancers, what are we?

I keep returning to the image of children playing on the floor of a great ballroom. Around them and above them the dance goes on, vast and ancient and graceful. The children are absorbed in their own games, hiding, seeking, laughing, quarreling. Now and then one of them stops, looks up, and sees the dancers turning overhead, and is struck still with wonder. Then they go back to their game.

That is our role. Lighthearted and profound at once. We play the game of existence in the space the dance makes, and the dance makes it possible for us to play.

The ballroom is now

And the ballroom has a name. It is now.

The dance does not happen in the past, which is sealed, or in the future, which never arrives. It happens at the edge where the two meet. That edge is the present, and it is the only place any of us has ever been. That is the subject of the next chapter.