Transcending Duality

There is perhaps no more compelling (and perplexing) saying the Gospel of Thomas than Logian 22. In it Yeshua declares that the one who is able to make two become one (the inside like the outside, the outside like the inside, the higher like the lower—so male and female are no longer two separate entities, but a single whole, and in addition, a (new) hand emerges from the old, a new foot as well—one superseding the other) may enter the Divine Realm holding the heavens. These strange images suggest, at the very least, that Ultimate Reality transcends duality in a higher unity.

For the followers of Yeshua’s teachings, these images raise some practical questions: How does such a transformation occur, and can it be done here in this place, and now in this time?

It may be hard to imagine the answers, but perhaps such a transcendence entails something we might call “convergence” and also some form of “sacred androgyny.” I have been thinking about these two terms a lot recently. Sam and Sally Roberts gave me a book for Christmas by Daniel Pink called, A Whole New Mind. In it he reports that when tests of masculinity and femininity given to young people today, again and again the findings report that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their peers. According to one psychologist “A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses and can interact with the world in terms of a much richer and varied spectrum of opportunities (136).”

I found that statement interesting in light of the one made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge two hundred years ago that “great minds are androgynous.” Could it be that Yeshua is describing a new state of being in a whole new kind of human being where not only has the form changed, but the inner state has as well?