Cosmic Duality

by Time-Life Books

Book Overview

Part of the Mysteries of the Unknown series. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809465167
• ISBN13: 9780809465163
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Time Life Medical
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.4" x 11.1"

Customer Reviews

Cosmic Duality

_Cosmic Duality_, a layman's metaphysical study by Time Life, is about the opposing forces in the Cosmos, their root in religious traditions, and what they mean for humanity and man's spiritual quest. In the universe there are many dualities: God and Satan, light and darkness, male and female, good and evil, innocence and experience, life and death. The most openly dualistic religion of all time is that of the Persian prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), with the good God in eternal conflict with the god of destruction. Zoroaster preached an anti-ascetic creed, as the things of this world are the creation of the good deity. Other religions looked at matter, considering it evil, such as the later Gnostics, Manicheans, Bogomils and Cathars, who were heretics as they considered the material presence of Christ and the Cross as wicked and to be ashamed of. Alchemists tried to integrate their souls into a fusion with eternity, along with their well-known attempts to transform base metal into gold. The philosophies of Descartes and Marx are also discussed as coming from earlier dualistic methods of thought. The treatment of the duality between men and women is not very informative, as this book is published by the Establishment, and the difference between the sexes is looked at as socially constructed although the sociobiological standpoint is briefly mentioned. A great many bizarre subjects are touched upon including exorcism, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Satanism, the dark side of fairy tales, angelic hierarchies, voodoo, witchcraft, pagan fertility rite, Tantric sex-magic, hermaphrodites, the Seven Deadly Sins, stigmata, Yin-yang, odd religious cults and a host of other things. _Cosmic Duality_ is a work of relativism, not of definite insight, leaning toward the feminist Mother Goddess myth as humanity's primordial faith, along with theological and social liberalism in general. However, it does end with a statement by William James, "one might say that it consists of a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto."