Types, Polarities, Pairs, Dualities, Poles, Opposites …

I am struggling with the issues “types”, “polarities” etc. for quite some time, and have now (re)discovered that Ken has answered my questions already in “The Future of Religion”. :slightly_smiling_face:

Under the heading “Miscellaneous Elements” there is a chapter “Typologies”, in which Ken describes the typologies as we know them as one of the five AQAL-elements (masculine/feminine, Enneagram etc.)

The next chapter is about “Polarity Therapy”. Here Ken makes an important distinction between “pairs” and “polarities”. He starts with what I would call good/bad “pairs” (“strong versus weak, health versus illness, confident versus insecure” etc.) Ken writes that these are “essentially separate and nonintegrable”.

Ken then writes about what I would call good/good pairs, as polarities adresses by polarity therapy (“ordered versus flexible, reflection versus action, stability versus change” …)

Ken goes then on to a more “sophisticated version”, where “each major level of consciousness and development tends to have a set of polarities that are particularly common at that stage.”

I would like to add, that the stages of a developmental scale can also be seen as pairs/polarities: traditional versus modern, modern versus postmodern etc.

Finally, Ken writes about “deep polarity therapy”: “Whereas Shallow Polarity deals with the relative finite realm and relative truth, Deep Polarity deals with the ultimate realities and ultimate truths. In effect, Deep Polarity deals with all opposites, even the ones not approached by Shallow Polarity - including exactly the apparently irreconciable opposites such as life versus death, pleasure versus pain, transcendental versus immanent …” “The seemingly ‘bad’ part of all dualities (death, pain, illness, falsity, badness) are actually the dark shades and shadows without which the Painting of Life itself - and all its good ‘light’ areas - would be utterly impossible”.

So what do we have?

A) Within manifestation

  1. good/bad pairs, no integration
  2. good/good polarities, integration (the AQAL types)
  3. pairs/polarities within a developmental scales. Here we have both integration and nonintegration. According to Ken, the basic structures of every level are “include”, (i.e. integration), wheras the worldview are “transcend” (no integration)

B) Ultimate realities

All pairs, dualities, poles and polarities are to transcend, but only after they all have been fully recognized. “What can be done is to drop not just the negative pole, while chasing and desiring the positive, but both poles simultaneously.”

What do you think?

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