Meeting in the Middle

Starting over

When people make up after a quarrel … they'll usually say … ' Sorry … darling … I didn't mean what I said.' But what if we had meant it in some way? And what if we had come to affirm that … we were quite right … in learning to be our own person … and we have done just that. Do we still say … ' sorry ' … or do we say … ' I think … darling … we have to talk?'

In today's climate … of the mind meeting up with the passions … whether that is in the home … or in the world … I think we are seeing just that … the need to talk. This is obviously the meeting … of the proverbial rock and the hard place. Long a place of despair in the thoughts of the thinking man … but today … he may be relieved to know … that its exactly that!

But we are not without some suggestion about what to do in such a situation. The legends offer to us … the story of Dionysus II who is reported to have visited Asia Minor … and asked for the daughter of Siva in marriage. Thereafter … the trail gets cold … and one views the emergence of Zeus and Hera … in the legends of the Greeks … sometime later. But the theme … receives a later day treatment from the Indics … in the story of Siva himself.

In the Indic version … Siva seeks the hand of the daughter of the Prajapati … the progenitor of man … and is successful. However … the daughter … Sakthi … figures the father held back her right to her virtue in the home of her birth … and is lost without it in her new home with Siva. The same theme recurs in the legend of Jason. Hera sends him on a mission to retrieve the golden fleece … which he does … and thereafter … peace comes to the relationship of Hera and Zeus.

In bringing these intimations to the experience of the rock and the hard place … we are able to piece together … the break in the relations between mind and passion. In returning to meet with each other … we find that the passions have retrieved their virtue … in the ownership of the golden fleece. Then … it must be said of the father mind … that he needs to find his own sense of virtue … without recourse to the daughter's golden fleece.

This may mean that the father … must engage a death and resurrection experience to do that … and to heal from there … with the realization that its a condition … natural to the personality of a man. In the acceptance of such an experience … the meeting between father and daughter … is not one of reconciliation … but of growth. In the resurrected life … the father may still be father … but its on the basis of a new relation with his daughter … in which he displays his own virtue … in relation to hers.

The virtue of the mind … the way it represents knowledge … reason … and understanding … is something we need to pay more attention to. It is a growing experience … and the references to a knowledge based society … by the media … with the instruments of the tech … are producing a new breed of outlook … that is unlike what we used to accept as knowledge … and virtue in the past. Certainly … the notion of what is the right thing … these days … may have taken a paradigm shift … in our experiences.

When meeting in the middle … it may appear that the resolution lies … in the way that father and daughter ...come to a greater appreciation … of each others independence … and unique nature. From the primitive experiences … when the passions raised the mind … to these times … when the mind may be gaining its ability to stand alone … man has certainly come a long way. But for the relation to be defined as father mind … and daughter passion … is not necessarily an unbalanced condition. Passion in the body of a female physiology is a considerable instrument … and its highly possible … that at some level of significance … they are equal in their contributions to man.

No doubt in the vast scope of relations between mind and the passions … there might be several other factors that play a part. We'll need to look at those. However we might want to bring our attention to the fact that … a personal relation today is not entirely between two people alone. The world has grown far too big for that.

The phrase … ' No man is an island '… comes into our perspective today … and we realize that our joys in life are punctuated with our sense of relation with others … whether that takes place physically … or in another dimension. They are all representative of the fact that … thoughts … like passion … are only special when they come into an application of themselves … in our daily activities.

Change is a constant factor in our lives … but our ability to steer that in the direction it ought to go … has been the hallmark of the survival of the species. In rising to meet the other … in the middle … we demonstrate our ability to do that … by selection … naturally.