Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
So many wonderful things come in sets of two: eyes, ears, legs, arms, hands, ovaries! Two-ness is a foundational part of the created world. The shared sacred texts of the Abrahamic traditions also recognize two-ness as foundational through the stories of Adam and Eve, a pair of humans. Even as these Western traditions honor two-ness as foundational in the created world, they also point to the oneness of all things, especially in references to God as the Holy One and insistence on a theology of monotheism.
In the Eastern traditions—especially in Buddhism, but also in Hinduism—the emphasis tends to start from the lens of oneness, such as in Buddhism’s insistence on non-theism, that is to say, that All is One, and a separate Being of God does not exist. The term “advaita” means not-two, and advaita vedanta is a school within Hinduism that emphasizes oneness as well. The term “not-two” suggests inherently that this tradition, while emphasizing oneness, must also deal with multiplicity, and at a minimum, two-ness.
Whether the emphasis begins on the side of oneness or two-ness, we find each tradition facing the tension of how to describe the simultaneity of an all-pervading sense of oneness and interconnection alongside the reality of diversity and difference. To honor both not-two and two is to lift up the value of relationship, to suggest that even in oneness and especially in two-ness, the core of reality is fundamentally relational.
The Christian tradition takes the numerology one step further, and while insisting on one God, celebrates three-persons-in-one, another tension that points to relationship as an eternal marker of all of reality for always.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- How do you experience two-ness in your everyday life? How do you experience it in your prayer life?
- How do you experience one-ness in your everyday life? How do you experience it in your prayer life?
- How do you hold the tension between oneness/interconnection and diversity/difference? What teachings or prayer practices help you to hold both realities simultaneously?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites” or tag us on social media with #EHoPWisdomOfOpposites.
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Christine Luna Munger
Christine Luna Munger, PhD currently serves as the director of the Episcopal House of Prayer. She previously served as Coordinator of the Spiritual Direction Certificate and Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University. She regularly writes, teaches, and leads group prayer sits at EHoP.
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