I was 20 years old, in my student flat, when I first read the Tao Te Ching. A tiny book of 81 verses. A philosophy that developed in Ancient China and is often connected to Lao Tzu, this ancient way of life, known as the balance of yin and yang principles, is much older than what the texts suggest. Now, more than ten years later, I am still learning to apply almost everything that I have experienced in the same philosophical sense as a way to gain greater insight. I feel it can be of great value and help to many if they use this philosophy as a means of expansion and self-realization, both intellectually and spiritually speaking.

To be completely transparent, the more I strive to develop my observation skills and cultivate an ability to see things more realistically, the more I see a world where those we consider benevolent, like good samaritans and preachers, are the very incarnation of fear-mongering demons (take that literally or metaphorically, as you like), delusional and narcissistic cult leaders who claim to be Avatars of the New Age of Aquarius who are but authors of confusion, political leaders that act as soulless agents of deception, destruction, and genocide, and power-hungry individuals, greedy, con-artists, who put themselves in leadership positions with low IQ, and psychopathic tendencies that contribute more and more to a world of deception, chaos, and disharmony.

Before I delve into the profound philosophy of the harmonious Yin and Yang principles of the Tao, applicable in various aspects of our lives such as work and relationships, I want to share a synchronistic message that has recently come my way. I’ve been consistently encountering synchronicities, particularly from the Bible. All sacred texts can be a powerful tool for spiritual and personal growth. While the Book of Job and the Book of Poetry/Psalms continue to remain my favorite books from the Bible, I was surprised to see this message recently from the Book of Mathews, and as I read every word, my mind and heart expanded a little more, and my body relaxed a little more.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. 

Matthew 6:19-21

Because the Bible can be interpreted in many ways, and many books from the Bible have been officially removed for the patriarch society to rise and maintain its control over society, my interpretation of this is that heaven is referring to the mind. Treasure in heaven is the spiritual riches we can acquire in the mind as we attain more self-discovery through a journey of transformation and personal enlightenment. Those riches are yours and yours alone, and no thief can steal them from heaven, your mind. Now, obviously, my interpretation is not the only interpretation; I am only going a little deeper, and you are free to interpret that as you like by using your own heart or intellect. And, of course, we can also interpret that in a more religious sense of conducting a life of spiritual obligation and good piety and so on. All perspectives can be relevant in that way.

Yin & Yang Principles

The concept of Yin and yang represents the dualistic nature of existence and the interdependence of opposites. Yin and yang are complementary forces, and their balance is essential for harmony and the natural flow of life. Yin and yang principles can be applied internally, psychologically, and spiritually but also externally to any industry or field, from religion to medicine to technology, etc. Many prophets who have left great spiritual texts have emphasized the necessity to love God and not violate the laws of God here on Earth. We all saw what happened in Gaza and other atrocities that continue to take place in plain sight, but we’re told not to talk about it, not to challenge them, nor their repulsive war crimes and same old patterns. 

As far as our moral and ethical lives are concerned, we are making the same mistakes that our ancestors did, with the only difference being that we make them in a more sophisticated manner. We assumed that greater intelligence should give us greater control of our own conduct, but this has obviously not been the case. Because we are specifically speaking to one aspect of human intelligence, and that is the intellect. Without emotional intelligence, the yin principle, in other words, the feminine principle of the dualistic nature of things, there will be no progress; if anything, our efforts toward a greater society will become lost ground. Morality, as a practical subject, has to do with the individual gaining emotional control over conduct. Ethics, on the other hand, is about gaining mental control over attitudes. These subjects can also be attributed to Logos and Mythos. 

Now, many of us who are interested in advancing ourselves, gaining a better attitude toward life, freeing ourselves from all our subconscious fears, doubts, and anxieties, and gaining a sense of integration in life and into the life of the Universe must try in some way to discover principles that will guide our ethical and moral convictions and at the same time not offend our intelligence. But we live in a world where this isn’t easy and where things are generally backward. In fact, a silly dream comes to mind when I was living in Tulum, Mexico. I traveled to another world to meet and speak with another group of humans, where upon arrival, I was greeted by the guard in this way: “We hear you come from a world where things are backwards”, to which, of course, I responded with a vicious smack across his face. 😂

Authors of Confusion & Disharmony

So with that in mind, in this world of ours, we encounter self-proclaimed Avatars or messengers of the New Age who, on a global scale, negatively impact families and individuals of sound mind. These individuals establish new cults without genuine insight, asserting themselves as the only path to salvation, the exclusive Avatar of Aquarius, or the only true Guru, etc. They construct a spiritual system or any other system for that matter, that mirrors their pathology, addictions, and deeply rooted personality disorders, such as Cluster B personality disorders and the Dark Tetrad, including Machiavellianism, proudly showcased in their published works.

Consider, for instance, a scenario where a five-year-old learns new psychological or philosophical terms like “projection,” “Logos,” or “transmutation” and creates an entire religion around it, fueled by an absurd and false sense of grandiosity. These self-proclaimed Avatars go to great lengths, portraying themselves as the very incarnation or Logos of Planet Mars on Earth without fully understanding or integrating the concept of Logos in the first place. While well-intentioned spiritual seekers and rational individuals may unintentionally fall prey to such absurd teachings, similar to followers of various cults worldwide, these self-appointed Avatars, including their successors (some no longer alive), display little concern for the genuine well-being of their followers. They don’t mind their pockets growing fatter while leading astray thousands who are misled and families torn by teachings lacking authentic insight and intended solely for the pathology of that same cult leader. 

Throughout history, we have had and still have great minds and mystics walking amongst humans, including contemporary figures, such as Eckhart Tolle and many others, leaving beautiful spiritual and philosophical works that greatly exceed the intellect or insight provided by these frauds, but not one of them with their sound mind has claimed themselves to be the new and only Avatar of the New Age of Aquarius, the new prophet and so on. To some, this may be funny, but to others, it is costing their mental health and the well-being of their families. So be very mindful as you seek harmony or personal integration in life and within the broader Universe because we live amongst frauds and authors of confusion. 

And if you struggle to identify these toxic and abusive individuals within various cults, religious groups, family or social gatherings, etc., with severe narcissistic, sociopathic, borderline, histrionic, or psychopathic personality disorders, there are three simple questions you can ask and a few pointers with the first being showing signs of Egomania, where the person needs to be extraordinarily self-involved, their ego comes first and foremost, and if you slight their ego or precious and bloated hypersensitive sense of self, they punish you for it. They have no issues projecting that onto you, though, because, of course, they will never take any accountability for their appalling attitudes. Another among many is psychopathy. A person who lacks morals will have no moral sense of right and wrong and will resort to pedophilia, stealing, prostitution, criminal behavior, sexual assault, con-artistry, etc. Psychopathy has always been historically associated with criminality and an absolute lack of conscience or morality and with no remorse. Here are the three questions that can help you measure and identify toxic individuals with the aforementioned personality disorders:  

• Are they abusive? If you don’t know the answer to that, then this indicates that you need to undergo therapy, and hopefully with a good therapist, as any field is always undergoing its own process of evolution and expansion, and understand the way you gaslight yourself and how your past has deeply impacted your ability to label abuse for what it is, respect and validate your own boundaries and see both psychological and physical abuse for what it is. A very common sign that someone has suffered significant childhood trauma is that they will try to persuade abusive, toxic, and cruel people to treat them better instead of seeing this as a sign to distance themselves immediately.
• Is this a consistent pattern of behavior that is being displayed across time? Anyone can have a bad day, and anyone can be in an altered physiological state. If not, then it is not a personality disorder.
• Have you asked them to stop, and have they failed to stop? If the answer to all three is yes, then you must remove yourself immediately from these individuals, whether they be romantic, platonic, professional, or interpersonal relationships. You have every right to protect your sanity and your well-being. And if you think this is not compassion, you fail to understand the difference between neurosis and compassion. Your compassion lies in asking where your compassion is for you—listen to your heart, learn to love yourself, heal your mind and emotions, and remove yourself from any such environment. 

It is not your responsibility to enable or tolerate severely destructive and traumatized people to perpetuate cycles of abuse because it helps them elevate and derive pleasure from their sadistic ways, and it is certainly not your job to find yourself explaining the basic elements of human respect to a full-grown man or woman. Sane individuals understand the fundamental concepts of honesty and kindness as they are inherent in all. No adult should need to be told how they are making other people feel. This is a sign that you are dealing with children who have never grown up, spoiled kids in adult bodies with vicious traumas and severe psychological issues, so vicious that it breaks the child’s relationship with reality. But don’t expect anything other than them projecting their insanity onto you. It is the only way for them never to take accountability for themselves and their mental illnesses.

These individuals are living inside their psychotic delusions. It is the extreme end of emotional dysregulation based on trauma usually, and maybe genetic for others, where they are so intensely emotionally dysregulated that the body and the brain are not functioning in sync anymore, as well as the hormonal system isn’t either. The HPA access is dysregulated, and they do not perceive reality as it is, nor do they want to, so it is a self-willed psychosis where they take chunks of reality, a better reality they want, and form them into their own psychotic delusion, and then they’ll take you and jam you inside their psychotic stew. 

The Beauty of Harmonious Thinking | Yin & Yang

First and foremost, for harmonious thinking to take place within ourselves and in relation to the external world, we have to be willing to find our way out of the darkness. Everyone carries their own unresolved traumas and unhealed aspects within themselves, and if we’re unwilling to confront these aspects within ourselves, then harmonious thinking and a harmonious integration where yin and yang principles are complementary will be impossible. If we put ourselves out there and attempt to help and heal others without having done our own work, as it is often forced and done within many religious, spiritual, or even political systems, especially these new age cults, as I discussed earlier, it is completely out of integrity and out of alignment. Therefore, it isn’t going to work well for anyone. There are plenty of unhealed healers out there who have no issues talking the talk while their pockets get fatter but not walking the walk. 

Because the entire human race is traumatized, and I mean that without exaggeration, many if not most, grew up in some degree of family dysfunction, even if our caretakers were “well-intended.” Even if it looked good to the outside world, the dysfunction was there, and we were harmed in the process. Some more than others, but this was the reality for many. This dysfunction leads to co-dependency, which is on a spectrum just as it is for those with destructive personality patterns, such as narcissism, sociopathy, and so on. All co-dependent factors are a reflection of our relationship with self, which then extends to maladaptive ways of relating with others. It all starts with each of us. In a professional capacity, it has also been called “self-love deficit disorder.” 

For instance, in yin and yang philosophy, compassion without compassion toward self cannot contribute to harmony in relation to the self or the Universe. Some people spend their entire lives running from their own trauma, masquerading as the great helper, when more often than not, by being unhealed themselves, what they are really doing is enabling and controlling as their own lives become progressively more and more unmanageable and painful. And unfortunately, most don’t even understand why. When we integrate genuine love and compassion toward self, we learn how to orient to the world more holistically from a variety of different perspectives, which means being able to hold on to more Yin-based perspectives while still holding on to science and rationality and logic and other perspectives like that. 

Mythos & Yin (Female Principle of Duality)

When we think about Yin integration or Mythos, it refers to our ability to engage with deeper ethical attitudes that may not be empirically observed, like science, but where we get to feel more connected with the events that take place in our lives by engaging the lens of Mythos. Rituals are another way of integrating with Mythos, such as the ritual of graduation, which symbolizes a rite of passage, or even religious rituals. The rite of passage is an archetypal myth because what we’re doing is we’re walking down the line, and we are shaking the dean’s hand, we’re taking the diploma, we’re going back to our seats, and we’re moving the tassel from one side to the other. In this manner, we are projecting or imbuing a Mythos-based meaning onto those events in order to facilitate an internal shift that lets us know that we’ve gone through a rite of passage. 

It’s through the projection of these archetypal symbols and of this mythology that we actually can catalyze a lot of growth for ourselves, and we’re able to derive meaning from the situation. In our current society, we don’t allow a lot of space for the Yin aspect of duality; we tend to function mainly through logos, in other words, through logic, through science, through materialism, through empiricism. But Mythos, by its nature, is none of those things. When we engage in Mythos, in other words, in magical thinking, which is extremely important for the human being to derive meaning, it tends to be seen as “out there” or “crazy,” and there’s definitely a taboo of being an outside-the-box thinker. 

Now, obviously, we don’t want to engage in Mythos or magical thinking while operating a machine because we all know how that ends. Everything has its time and place, and we can also combine the two to transcend and discover other possibilities that may not be possible to determine through Logos alone, especially when it comes to our deeper potential. Who knows, maybe the key to discovering an entirely new cosmogony may be in the intersection of the two. However, Mythos is important for our own personal development and transformation first. We are the outcome of whatever our self-concept is, and once we learn to successfully engage with Mythos or rituals, such as, I am the co-creator of my own world, we can go through a stage of metamorphosis. Take Peter Pan, for instance. He was able to fly by first only engaging in happy thoughts and fairy dust, but once he got the hang of it, he could just fly, period. 

This way of life can also be applied to our suffering. Here, in the West, we look at suffering as something to be ashamed of or something we should avoid at all costs, while in the East, suffering is just as much a part of life and essential for our growth and greater understanding. So, although through Logos, we may look at a negative experience exactly for what it is, and we’re strongly identified with rationality and science and empiricism, as we engage with Mythos, we are able to move through that event knowing that it will lead to the point of our highest expansion. So, essentially, we can use Mythos to avoid going down the rabbit hole and engage in a thought process that is much more empowering than simply looking at the stark empirical facts of reality. Now, obviously, this doesn’t mean that anytime something negative or sad happens, we never get to feel down or lose sight of that deeper narrative, but being able to connect to that narrative helps us move through those situations more easily.

Marriage of Mythos and Logos | Yin & Yang

In our current society, anything that falls into the category of Mythos tends to be viewed under the label of pseudo-science, meaning fake science. Mythos is not fake science, and it isn’t in competition with science, either. Mythos stands on its own, totally and wholly separate from science, and also very important as it is based on internal dynamics that enable us to derive meanings from situations and feel more connected to the Earth, other humans, or reality at large, which is vital for human beings. Science is actually a fairly new perspective in terms of the full stretch of human existence.

Before we had the scientific perspective, we relied mostly on Mythos to gather intelligence about our world. So there’s a strong attachment to science or Logos and a strong taboo against Mythos, mostly because science is so new from the perspective of humanity as a whole. On an unconscious level, most people are trying really hard to keep people in the scientific perspective to avoid falling back into the ignorance of magical thinking or Mythos. Now, obviously, too much strictness, such as too much Yang (masculine) in any context, becomes Tyranny, and too much Yin (female) or permissiveness leads to degeneration and deprivation. And we certainly do not want to live in a place like that.

Many of the earlier scientists were actually alchemists. Alchemists bridged the world between Mythos and the scientific revolution. Isaac Newton was actually an alchemist, not a scientist. So alchemy is basically a marriage or a combination of certain scientific perspectives, where there’s also this inner work of psychological and emotional perspectives that goes along with it. I have written several posts on alchemy that you can find through the search bar on my homepage. Here is another post on alchemy. The divorce between Mythos and Science was obviously necessary for our growth and development as a species. Still, one of the side effects of that divorce was that Mythos became cast into the collective shadow and seen as purely magical thinking and as something that’s purely ignorant. And whenever we cast something into the shadow, it comes up in ways that are not necessarily the best way it can come through. Mythos will seep its way into our science and our rationality, so it’s important to be mindful and make our practice of Mythos more conscious and put it in its proper place and not start to seep into other places that it doesn’t belong. 

If we perceive Logos and Mythos as mutually exclusive, we will struggle with the Yin and Yang principles and between holding the perspective of Mythos and the perspective of Logos, so we end up with people in the world who polarize to one side or the other. We’ll find people who hold very tightly onto the scientific point of view, where they become hyper-materialistic and turn science into a religion or cosmology in itself, where they do not use science for its intended purpose, which is an intellectual tool for us to be able to gather empirical data about the Universe and to draw conclusion directly from that data. When we fail to do so, we begin to look at the world as though it’s a bunch of impersonal scientific processes, and if we look at ourselves through that lens, we end up viewing ourselves as a machine and nothing more than a biological robot, with synapsis firing as we speak or a bunch of chemical processes going on in the body and the brain, etc., where there are no actual intangible things, like love and consciousness.

Separation & Resistance | Yin & Yang

Science is not Mythos, and this is where the shadow of Mythos comes in, where we disguise science as Mythos itself by projecting this cosmology onto the Universe, with no actual empirical data that’s going on here to justify that. It is not engaging in the scientific method to actually project this cosmology of science onto the Universe; it’s actually more Mythos, which leads to bad science. So, in order to practice good science, we need to become conscious of our drive for Mythos and separate that from our scientific drives. Then, we can start to strip away everything that’s beyond what’s empirically observable with the science and what’s coming through as pure data. 

On the other side, we have people who, despite scientific evidence that shows the world to be around 4.54 billion years old, still believe the world is 5000 years old as their beliefs are strongly rooted in Mythos. This is not because they lack exposure to scientific perspectives but because of disharmonious yin and yang integration, because they feel that in order for those Mythos-based beliefs to be real or valid, they have to have the same kind of scientific empirical weight that scientific data has. So, instead of looking at religion through the lens of Mythos, through the viewpoint of it being important archetypal stories that convey some kind of meaning, they see them as something that factually tangibly happened and need to prove that it happened this way. 

When we hold on to Mythos this way, that exchanges Mythos for science and engages the shadow of Logos that appears within the Mythos, so there’s no space for the scientific perspective to be integrated. This resistance doesn’t only apply to religious folk; this resistance to the conscious integration of both Logos and Mythos can happen to anyone, including spiritual or enlightened folk, as we push away or ignore certain scientific truths because Mythos has been so helpful and meaningful thus far. So, to self-realize and expand, we don’t have to have those two mutually exclusive or in competition; we can have a real integration of perspectives where we consciously adapt both lenses of Logos, science and rationality, and Mythos, magical and creative thinking in its place.