Principles (the two masculine and feminine)
Their presence in the human psyche
March 14th 2014
Seen from the physical viewpoint only, human beings are either male or female and display the precise and immediately recognizable characteristics of one or the other. But from the psychic point of view, it is much more complex, as each person possesses both the masculine and feminine principles within them, and you cannot limit men to only the masculine principle or women to only the feminine principle. In the Chinese Taoist philosophy, this idea is represented by the yin/yang symbol: the black part, yin, representing the feminine principle, contains a white dot, and the white part, yang, representing the masculine principle, contains a black dot, to express how the masculine always contains a feminine part and the feminine a masculine part.
Men and women are not abstract principles but living combinations of masculine and feminine in unequal proportions, and they can change sex from one incarnation to the next. Indeed, each person has to experience both conditions, in order to acquire the qualities of the masculine and feminine principles in all their fullness.