The One That Is Both
Table of Contents and Sample Text
Chapter 2: Agreement
Chapter 3: Nonverbal Poetry
Chapter 4: Life is a Gift
Chapter 5: Plant Kingdom
Chapter 6: Unlimiting Your Perspective
Chapter 7: Little Words
Chapter 8: What Love Is
Chapter 9: Vibration
Chapter 10: Ethics of Zero-Point Energy
Chapter 11: Official Coverup
Chapter 12: What is Alive?
Chapter 13: Sameness and Difference
Chapter 14: Confronting the Inexplicable
Chapter 15: The Three Treasures
Chapter 16: Zero-Point Energy 101
Chapter 17: Getting Lost and Unlost
Chapter 18: Subjective and Objective
Chapter 19: Eden Time
Chapter 20: On Waves and Lighthouses
Chapter 21: Intuition and Synchronicity
Chapter 22: Midway
Chapter 23: Welcome, My Friend
Chapter 24: Reading the Poetry of the World
Chapter 25: Manifesting
Chapter 26: School of Hard Knocks
Chapter 27: Wave Structure of Matter
Chapter 28: Money
Chapter 29: The Many Faces of You
Chapter 30: Unions of Opposites
Chapter 31: Bios
Chapter 32: Paradox
Chapter 33: Irony
Chapter 34: Serpents, Light, and DNA
Chapter 35: Receiving
Chapter 36: Union of the Material and the Divine
Chapter 37: Journey to Completeness
Chapter 38: Diamond Consciousness
Chapter 39: A Creation Myth
Chapter 40: Meet Your Inner Teacher
Chapter 41: Order Up Your Day
Chapter 42: Bakala Party
Chapter 43: Connectedness
Chapter 44: From the Perspective of the One
This book is organized according to the same chapters in The One That Is Both. A quote or several quotes from each chapter are printed in italic. The key idea in the quote is then discussed, with questions to help you apply the ideas or find out where they manifest in your own life. If you have already read The One That Is Both, you do not have to do the exercises in order. Pick the one that most calls to you at this particular time. Alternatively, you can follow certain themes, or threads, which run through several chapters. Just follow the arrows like the one below, which contain a hyperlink, to the next chapter that continues that topic. Topics include language, the mysterious, self-expression, the natural world and our relation to it, topology (Mobius strip/Klein bottle), time, the law of attraction/intention/manifesting, waves and vibration, zero-point energy, cultivating a dual perspective (both/and), and oneness.
It’s a shame that our most powerful healing force has been characterized by a war metaphor, like there’s a battle going on inside your body, with bad guys and good guys, foreign invaders, and defenses. (p. 3)
We operate in the field of language like fish swim in water. It’s always there, everywhere, and we use it without having to think about it much. In The One That Is Both, I ask readers to start thinking about language and how they use it. Here we will take a closer look at one of the hidden features of language, the metaphors that underlie our everyday expressions. More detailed discussion can be found in Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Much of the idiom of our language is deeply embedded in certain metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), which we’ll explore throughout this whole book. The importance of metaphors in our language cannot be underestimated; they aren’t just for poetry—in fact, they’re embedded in our everyday speech. They’re so embedded that we rarely see them as metaphors: it’s just the normal way we talk. Why are metaphors so pervasive? Metaphor helps us understand something new by expressing it in terms of something else, something already known. Many of our concepts are concepts are metaphorically grounded in a few very fundamental ideas, such as containers, journeys, and, unfortunately, war. To see how metaphors work in your everyday language, think about how you talk when you have a cold or an illness.
“I’m going to beat this cold.”
“Join the fight against cancer.”
“The arthritis is attacking my joints.”
The underlying metaphor is that ILLNESS IS WAR. One side is going to win and the other is going to lose. This metaphor conveys that there are battles being waged inside your body—for example, either germs or a virus is the attacker, and your white blood cells are the defenders. The fact of the matter is, the cells are just doing their job, like your liver and kidney cells just do their job every time you eat something. There is no war; this metaphor just helps us understand what kind of job those cells perform. By characterizing illness using the war metaphor, it puts you in an oppositional position to something. It artificially separates you from the illness even though the illness is in you! Did you know that most of the bacteria that cause infections already live on your body? They are not separate, and some bacteria are even symbiotic.
Once such a metaphor is deeply embedded in language, it is hard to conceive otherwise. That is how you can get trapped in an ideology without realizing it. Hence, it is very important for scientists to examine not only the stuff they study, but the language they use to describe it. I brought up the example of ILLNESS IS WAR because we are getting to a point where that idea no longer serves us; it might even be doing more harm than good, as we “fight” cancer using chemical weapons and nuclear bombs (ie, chemotherapy and radiation). In order to bring peace to our outside world, we must find it within ourselves. We won’t find it there if we continue talking about our own bodies being at war.
Sometimes metaphors are invoked intentionally. For example, the weather terminology of warm fronts and cold fronts was invented after World War I, and the model was two opposing armies (fronts). Conversely, the notion of war as presented in The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, could be used. War is characterized as the tao, the way, which is natural. After all, conflict is natural. Warm, moist air does meet up with cold dry air to produce rain or snow. However, the interaction does not need to have undertones of violence. There could instead be undertones of love or coming together. Instead of using the metaphor WEATHER IS WAR, how about WEATHER IS SEX? The TV weather announcer would then have juicy lines such as, “The warm air is just flirting with the cold air, so the chance of precipitation is low… Our skies will be in the throes of orgasm tonight…”. It would certainly be more fun to watch the weather reports.
Not only is the war metaphor, pervasive, but so is the practice of treating simple debates or differences of opinion as arguments or battles. In The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words, Deborah Tannen has pointed out how the media, for one, has turned everything into an argument because they think that fights sell. It conditions people to want to see sparks fly, to expect a clash rather than a mediation or a well-reasoned give-and-take. She says, “Americans talk about almost everything as if it were a war. A book about the history of lingustics is called The Linguistics Wars. A magazine article about claims that science is not completely objective is titled “The Science Wars.” … Headlines are intentionally devised to attract attention, but we all use military or attack imagery in everyday expressions without thinking about it: “Take a shot at it,” “I don’t want to be shot down,” “He went off half-cocked,” “That’s half the battle.” Why does it matter that our public discourse is filled with military metaphors? Are they just words? Why not talk about something that matters—like actions? Because words matter. When we think we are using language, language is using us. As linguist Dwight Bolinger put it (employing a military metaphor), language is like a loaded gun: it can be fired intentionally, but it can wound or kill just as surely when fired accidentally. The terms in which we talk about something shape the way we think about it—and even what we see” (p. 13-14).
In such interchanges, it is not to the participants’ benefit to listen to and consider the position of the other side. Is that really how you want others to deal with you? If not, we need to put a stop to this practice of perpetuating disagreement for the sake of disagreement.
Notice too how technology influences our metaphors for the way things work. In the 1950s, the new technology was television, so we had TV dinners. Now the technology is computers, so we have Laptop dinners. Scientists thought of the brain in terms of a computer (or maybe it was the other way around). Psychologists believed that certain propensities were “hard wired” and that our “early programming” affects our view of life. Has anyone compared your memory to an iPod yet? When you get old, do you have RAM downgrades? Quantum mechanics provides a good example of how scientists had to revise their metaphors. For example, physicists had to stop using the metaphor THE ATOM IS A MINIATURE SOLAR SYSTEM because electrons were found to be difficult to pin down in their orbits. Electrons weren’t like planets that followed a specific, predictable orbit. Quantum physicists found that there was only a probability that an electron would be in a given place. So the next metaphor for the electron was that of a cloud.
We don’t learn these metaphors consciously; they are communicated subtly and we pick them up (there’s another metaphor, by the way, that IDEAS ARE THINGS) by listening to other people speak. If we become more conscious of the metaphors we use, we might be able to shift our understanding of and relation to things or processes such as illness.
What other things are characterized by the war metaphor? (e.g., the generation gap, arguments, games?) Write some down.
If, indeed, our bodies are simply doing their job and responding to circumstances, what might that tell us about conditions such as arthritis or fibromyalgia?
What might be a more appropriate metaphor for illness and the body’s response to it? Speculate on what other metaphors might work for the examples you gave.
How would we think and speak differently if we had a different metaphor for illness/health? (For example, we could use the metaphor ILLNESS IS A BOOK. We might then say things like “This cold is just a short story.” “I’ve got an epic novel of a fever.” “Your symptoms are pure fiction.” Or we could use the metaphor ILLNESS IS INFORMATION or ILLNESS IS A LESSON or ILLNESS IS ECOLOGICAL IMBALANCE. What might we say then?)