I Ching - Yin = Sky and Yang = Earth?

Comment:

Your books arrived today.  As usual, I enjoy opening your books for inspiration.

I hopped to the center of The Nu I Ching to read your history of Yin and Yang.  Like you, I have only ever read that Earth is Yin and sky is Yang.  But it still seems opposite to the principles.  If Yin is expanding and Yang is contracting, it seems to me that Earth should be Yang and sky should be Yin.

The logic of women = Yin, women = fertile, Earth = fertile, therefore, Earth = Yin is not based upon the basic principles of the theory.  To me, it is simply a distortion.

The Earth is contracted and dense matter, hence it is Yang.  The sky is expanded and open, hence it is Yin.

-- David Thomson, author, Secrets of the Aether

Reply:

The concept of Yin as female and Yang as male is most widely accepted, and there are effects on both women and men due to this concept.  Those human distinctions are eclipsed by a greater reality.

The closest thing to the point you're raising as referenced in The Nu I Ching is the quote by Mira Alfassa from The Mother's Agenda:  "I had a kind of vision of an Infinite Eternity through which the Supreme Consciousness voyages."  There  the "Infinite Eternity" is the open sky, all of space and is Yin, while the "Supreme Consciousness" is the stars and planets, creation, manifestation, or Yang.  Yin is traditionally the receptive, and Yang the creative.  Yin must exist first, or Yang has no field within which to create, no "infinite eternity" through which to voyage.  Therefore your reasoning is not only correct, but you are seeing it from an advanced perspective -- not surprising from what I know of you.

I think it is only when the two perspectives interface that Earth becomes Yin and Sky becomes Yang, those two perspectives being 1) the Earth-bound human perspective and 2) the "infinite eternity" through which the "supreme consciousness" voyages.  From this viewpoint it may be like looking in a mirror -- the image is reversed.

When we are confined to dwell on Earth as human beings, Earth becomes our "infinite eternity" (Yin).  If we were to venture to other planets, even fabricated ones (space ships/cities) we will have a ground upon which we walk and a bed in which we sleep.  This Yin groundedness is to us, as human beings, our infinity, our eternity, because it is ubiquitous -- we do not exist without it.

So, to beings encased in human bodies, the Earth becomes Yin, much as to the developing fetus the womb represents infinite eternity.  We ourselves, in our bodies, become Yang, as soon as we identify within a body operating from a brain inside a skull.  To us the sky becomes Yang -- it is a fellow-voyager with us -- it comes and goes; it is not infinite or eternal, and we can do without it.  We do without it every time we enter our little homes and shut out the sky/stars/heavens with our walls and ceilings -- or every time we get in our cars and shut out the "outside world" through which we are nevertheless voyaging.  A car, as Yang, has to have a road and landscape through which to move, like planets (Yang) need sky (Yin).  Conversely, the Yin landscape will exist regardless of the car.

Actually, a car is a pretty good example of the undulating functions of both Yin and Yang, depending on one's perspective.  You've probably heard that a car is a phallic symbol.  But have you ever heard that a car is also a womb symbol -- an insulated capsule, climate-controlled, self-contained?  It is both.  Just about anything we can name represents both Yin and Yang when we go far enough around the elephant to see more than one perspective.

In The Nu I Ching I didn't take the discussion to this arena because the book only ventures so far outside conventional wisdom.  The book explores new territory but it is not the be-all, end-all of the discussion.