In our continuing Chat series, Dr. Skye Sturgeon (SS) and Yvonne Lau (YL) return to talk about Yin & Yang: The This and That
YL: Good morning, Skye.
SS: Good morning!
YL: Thanks for joining me again. Today, we're going to chat about Yin and Yang. A lot of people, especially in our audience, has heard of the terms Yin and Yang. Even people who haven't have probably seen the symbol itself on, like, bumper stickers, tattoos, t-shirts, etc., and it's become a symbol of things that are Asian or Chinese. But I think a lot of people really don't understand what it is, so I would love to talk with you today about Yin and Yang, and then what it means in the TCM sense, all right?
SS: Sure. Well, this has been a part of my teaching for, gosh, many, many years. I talk to students about this, I talk to patients about this. It's fundamental in understanding Chinese medicine, but there's a lot more to it. There's a whole philosophy behind Yin and Yang. So, yeah, let's jump into that.
YL: Okay, for the people in the audience, let's just make sure they recognize what we're talking about. So, let's describe the symbol first.
SS: Sure, I've printed out a picture of it and I'll show that, then we'll talk about it. So, this is the picture I have printed out [shows image of black and white Yin-Yang symbol], and you're correct, this is going to be familiar to most people. They're going to have seen this symbol, and this symbol represents the Utmost Extreme—it's what the name of it means. It's often referred to as the Taiji or Taijitu symbol. And there are 4 parts to it.
The first part is the circle. So, there's a circle that surrounds the symbol, and this circle represents all of reality. It is the utmost of reality, and this is a symbol that frequently gets used with Taoism, and so it really represents the Tao. And the Tao is everything. Famously, in the Tao Te Ching [Daodejing], it says the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao. So when you start talking about it, you’ve already left Ultimate Reality. But our minds want to encapsulate this in some way, so the best way to understand it is using a circle, and the circle represents everything. The totality of everything.
YL: So, when you say everything, though, Skye, Taoists, in my understanding, are all about metaphysics, and mystical stuff, and so when you say the Ultimate Reality or when they were referring to the Ultimate Reality, are they talking about just our physical world, or the spirit world, and anything else? What is Ultimate Reality in that sense?
SS: Yeah, so, it's everything. Everything. And one way that I kind of grasped this is to think about everything in the universe being made up of, and excuse the expression, of stardust that has been differentiated, combined, and so on. And so, not only do we know, about the cosmos with you know, just in the Milky Way, there's a billion stars, and at least 100 billion--and people give different numbers--maybe there's a trillion different galaxies, so the vastness of it is incomprehensible. But we can go internally and know that we have consciousness, whatever that is, that is self-reflective, and we have mind, and we perceive things, all of this is encompassed by this idea of everything. Everything is made up of the same substance.
You can say it's made up of atoms, or electrons, or neutrons, or the parts of the atom. I like to say stardust, because to me, that includes everything. So, when I say everything, I mean everything. I'm going to come back to this in a second.
So, the second part of the symbol is sometimes referred to as two fish that are swimming around each other. One of them is usually black, the other one is usually white. And these two fish circling around each other represent our mind's understanding of things, because when we reflect, or when we think, or when we perceive, we tend to do it by dividing things into this and that. Into dualism.
And so, the Yin-Yang symbol, in fact, the words Yin-Yang represent this inherent dualism in the way that we perceive. In fact, some would say that is the only thing that our minds do--is judge things as being this or that. And so, these two symbols represent that.
And one very accessible way of grasping this is if you look at the basis of life. We talked about this when we talked about Qi, but, in fact, the basis of life is breath. So, when you breathe in, and you breathe out, those are two aspects of breathing. We can say it's the Yin and the Yang of breathing. And the breathing in is the Yin, and the breathing out, the expansion, is the Yang.
Now, this brings us to the third part of the diagram, which is, within each of these swimming fish, the black and the white, there's a dot. And in the white, there's a black dot, and in the black, there is a white dot. And that's because nothing that we can perceive is 100% Yin, or 100% Yang. It's always a mixture.
In fact, there's a little bit of Yin in Yang, and there's a little bit of Yang in Yin, and we often say they transform into one another. And one way to grasp this is to take, again, a look at the breath. Because when you breathe in, you don't breathe in and you're done. There is a gap, and there's a flip, and there's a switch, then, between breathing in and then breathing out. So that is what the dot represents, that gap, or that transition between Yin and Yang.
And we can see this dualistic kind of thing [with anything] that we look at. For instance, let's look at the colors, black and white. So… Is there pure white or pure black? And if we say that there is a little bit of Yin in Yang, a little bit of Yang in Yin, we can say that actually, when we look at black and white, there's always an element of gray. If there's a little bit of white in black, [it] becomes dark gray. So, then the question comes up: How many gradations are there between pure white and pure black? How many can you imagine?
YL: I think it's infinite, potentially.
SS: Correct answer. It is infinite. Now, so our minds can imagine this. Let's say we have pure black, and we add .000001 white to that, and we get this, like, little bit less black, and we can divide that between black and white. The gradations between these two extremes are infinite.
Now when we talk about dualities, because that's essentially what we're looking at, is [that] the nature of our mind is dualistic. And we can imagine many, many dualities, and between any two dualities, because our minds can imagine the gradations. How many gradations are there between any two dualities?
Let's say good and evil. Okay? Those are two dualities. Is anything purely good or purely evil? Isn't there, like, a little bit of good in evil, and a little bit of evil in good, and so on? There are gradations between them. How many gradations are there between good and evil can we imagine?
YL: Infinite, yeah.
SS: Now… The nature of our mind is that we perceive this and that. In anything that we look at, we can define something as being more Yin or more Yang, there's gradations between them. And so, when we experience reality, we're actually engaging in looking at the possibility of infinity. The number of dualities that we can imagine I would say also approaches infinity, and so our experience in this cosmos is an intersection of infinities at different locations throughout whatever we can imagine, the spatial relationships between anything. It's an infinite number of infinities, and each one of us is actually experiencing a unique aspect of infinity at all times.
YL: That's kind of mind-blowing, honestly. It puts it into the Marvel universe, multiverses, the movies…
SS: Yeah, exactly. Our minds can imagine this, okay? Our minds can imagine this, and so that's the power of this symbol. Now, there's a fourth aspect of this symbol that most people don't even think about. I said earlier that this symbol represents everything. And we can see the structure of the symbol. There's a circle, there are these two commas that wrap around each other. We can imagine them moving one into the other. We can see the little dots that say a little bit of this in that, a little bit of that in this. But there is a fourth aspect to this symbol that we don't really think about that much. And that is, what is on the other side of the Yin-Yang symbol?
YL: Oh, gosh, that's never dawned on me to even think about.
SS: I'll show you. Here's the symbol. This is the other side. [Shows the back of the paper which is plain white.] Nothing! And everything and nothing wind up being two more dualisms that we can imagine.
But what does this mean, that there's nothing on the other side? And that's because actually--and quantum physics bears this out--what we perceive is actually things coming from nothing and creating into something. Or everything. And so this on-off is something that they're exploring right now with quantum physics, and I always find that very provocative to understand, that basically there is nothing except what our minds make of it or perceive it to be.
YL: That's amazing. I mean, it's like when we're talking about dualism, everything has to be in relation to something else, like these permutations that you're talking about. You have the two extremes, whether it's dark and light, or heavy and light, and it's pretty amazing that it's all about our own perception of everything.
SS: It's all about thinking. And the thing that trips us up is that we believe our thinking. In fact, Rene Descartes famously said, "I think, therefore I am”. And so, then that poses the question, what if you don't think? And what happens to reality if you don't divide it into this and that? If you don't make all these dualisms - is it still there, and what is its nature? And so, its nature is emptiness, that is to say, devoid of any characteristic that is not created by mind.
YL: That's just so deep. I'm thinking of “if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound” kind of thing, because no one perceived it.
SS: So, I have a very strong opinion about that question. Which is… first of all, you have made up this concept called sound. And to have sound, you have to have some mechanism of perceiving that sound.
You've also made up this idea called tree. And you've also made up this idea called falling, and all of those things are completely created by our mind's ability to distinguish between this and that. And what I'm posing is: If we didn't divide it into this and that, would there still be a reality that is empty of the attributes that our mind creates? And so, yeah, my opinion is, if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it, is there sound? The answer is definitively no.
YL: Just to dance around the rabbit hole even more. I've always wondered when we perceive something, like color, for example, right? Your eyes and my eyes, looking at color, we have anatomical structures in our heads that are supposedly perceiving this color spectrum, and what you call blue and what I call blue--are we really looking at the same thing? It's always been something that I've wondered about, you know?
SS: So… There is no blue.
YL: There is no blue.
SS: We can propose that there is light. And does light have a color?
YL: It is all colors, according to science.
SS: It's either all color, meaning, the entire electromagnetic spectrum, or there is no color, because color, like sound, is something that we have made up to describe our ability to perceive. And what we perceive in the electromagnetic spectrum is a very, very narrow wavelength of light.
And we have named them because we like to divide things into this and that, so we have given them names. They didn't have names before we gave them names. It isn't like God said, okay, this is blue. Because if you speak Chinese, the word blue does not mean that. What's the word blue in Chinese?
YL: Lan.
SS: Lan. Which is correct? Is it blue, or is it lan? And so this is the way our minds work, is that we perceive things, and we want to refer to them, so we give them names. But the names that we use to refer to what we perceive are not the things in themselves. They're a reference to those things, and so when you say what you see as blue and I see as blue, are we seeing the same thing? This is unknowable.
YL: Unknowable, yeah.
SS: Unknowable, whether we see the same… and it doesn't matter, because we see a certain wavelength, and we refer to it in a certain way, and you can understand what I mean by that, because you have a common experience of that particular wavelength. And it means something to you, something you perceive.
But you have to go look at the other side of the Yin-Yang symbol. There's only emptiness. And we make all this stuff up, we make up all these names to refer to reality, but it's not reality itself. It's a reference to reality, filtered through the apparatus of our minds, which have limited perceptions based upon the senses that we, our organism, has evolved to develop. And we assign meaning to this, and, you know, we wind up creating an entire society and buildings and everything else, all based upon our referring to what is otherwise real, which is empty of all these attributes. We just add them. We add them on there, and they're useful. It can be useful, but it doesn't necessarily mean we actually perceive everything, because we don't.
There's even looking at light again, what we perceive is a very, very small wavelength, but we develop instrumentation, and we can look at the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We know there are X-rays, we know there are radio waves, and everything in between. But we can't really perceive them except through very sophisticated instrumentation. And even then, we're just picking between Yin and Yang, this and that, and we're differentiating these various things, and there's a usefulness to it, and it gives our lives meaning. Where does the meaning come from? Well, we make it up. We make it up. It's okay, it's awesome. It's wonderful.
YL: I think we would be insane if we didn't, right? How could we survive as human beings if we didn't think in terms of this and that?
SS: Well, I think you've created another dualism, sanity and insanity. And how many gradations are there in-between sanity and insanity? There's an infinite number. And let's say the population of people on Earth all have some position on that spectrum between sane and insane. And it is impossible to know, if we weren't doing this, how reality would appear to us. We don't know that, because this is all about knowing.
This is all about knowing, and of course, many religions, including Taoism, [and] this is a symbol of Taoism, I mentioned that before, but even in Christianity, when they talk about the origin stories of Christianity in Genesis, the sin of mankind was eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, before we ate of that tree, we didn't perceive good and evil, this dualism, and it’s said we lived in paradise. Before we knew.
YL: Yeah, before we knew. So, what you're saying is that there was no dualism in the Garden of Eden, because there's no good and evil? There must have been dualism. Was there no night and day? I mean, I'm not Christian, but…
SS: If you look at the origin story, there were events that occurred in the creation story, and the creation of light from darkness was one of the things that was created. But if you don't have this dualistic mind, you wouldn't know the difference between night and day. They would just be. And you wouldn't assign meaning to it. You know, you wouldn't have assigned meaning to nakedness versus clothes. There's no meaning there, they're just… that's the nature of things. It was sweet. It was paradise.
YL: Okay. Pushing that further, though, does that mean that Adam and Eve did not know hunger, because they were always perpetually full, or they never knew thirst?
SS: So, you can imagine all kinds of things. So I can imagine that, when they were hungry, they ate. And when they were thirsty, they drank. And when they were cold, they warmed themselves. I mean, they just were beings, they just lived, they just did their thing. But the problem is that we take Yin and Yang, and we're gonna see, as we continue this discussion, we're going to arbitrarily assign meaning to those things, and in Chinese medicine, assigning meaning to Yin and Yang is crucial for diagnosis and treatment.
