In the Spirit . . .

of making the two one

Knowing the masculine

and nurturing the feminine

you become a river of all beneath heaven.

River of all beneath heaven

you abide by perennial Integrity

and so return to infancy.

Laotzi, the Daodejing

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, "These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom."

They said to him, "Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?"

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."

Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas

Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid [male/female] gender role stereotyping.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 1996

It’s rare to find origin sources in both Eastern and Western traditions in sort-of agreement about much of anything. But here’s one. Laozi and Jesus are pretty smart “creative individuals,” and both have a great deal to say about “making the two one,” a powerful antidote to Western habits of polar-binary thinking. But what are they trying to say here specifically in relation to gender identities? What does that have to do with being childlike? And how might it all apply in our current cultural moment where, at least on the American side, the gender binary is so hyper-accentuated that a seventh grader can end up in front of the Supreme Court to flog his constitutional right to wear a T-shirt to school asserting “THERE ARE ONLY TWO GENDERS?”

I took the trouble in a previous post to re-gender pronouns in a quote from R.W. Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar,” insisting it was not merely a “woke” gesture. Many of the wisest minds in human history, including Laozi and Jesus, insist that overriding binary gender categories is a crucial step on the path to enlightenment, a two-into-one alchemy that somehow also entangles infancy. Re-gendering pronouns, not just in someone else’s text but in our own heads is, they insist, essential to that process.

Let me clear at the outset: This process has nothing to do with whether you are biologically male or female, situated anywhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, or even with gender equity, though that would be a tacit consequence of it. It has to do with how one conserves and organizes, toward a greater purpose, the range of qualities, mental faculties, and abilities we are naturally endowed with. That’s how infancy enters the equation, as in: You had it together back then, now you don’t, so wake up. And it has nothing to do with metempsychosis or transmigration, an infant somehow remembering what she knew before she got here, then forgetting it at birth or shortly thereafter, the way William Wordsworth puts it, for example, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:”

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar. . .

. . . trailing clouds of glory . . .

From God, who is our home . . .

There are elements of this paradigm that Laozi and Jesus would endorse: Daoism is premised on a kind of eternal recycling between the “elsewhere” of Absence and the “here” of Presence; Christianity is premised on “God, who is our home.” But in neither case is being born the problem, “a sleep and a forgetting” inevitable once you get here. As I read these texts, they say exactly the opposite, that you come into this life with a pretty good toolkit, a broad spectrum of assets. Whether you call the source of those gifts Dao, God, Nature, or evolution is not the point. You’re supposed to maintain and use them all, including the ones that are not marked from the outset as gender-specific, but become so under the toxic tutelage of gender-dysfunctional cultures. Sleep and forgetting don’t just happen, they are induced.

One contemporary term we use to describe this gender-agnosticism is androgyny, as in this passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:

But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me

also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body,

and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and

happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two

powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the

woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and

comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-

operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman

also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said

that a great mind is androgynous. . .; that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that

it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and

undivided.

I’ve been preoccupied with this particular sort of “spiritual cooperation” ever since I was about 4 years old, sitting on the back porch steps of my home in Forest City, Pennsylvania, a scene of awakening I document in some detail in a chapter called “He Tells Her Their Story” in my book Living Hidden. I was getting more and more “vexed and miffed” as I began to speculate about what was about to happen to my nascent sense of myself as a “creative individual” as I transitioned into a “boy” and then a “man” in the 1950s American culture that even a four-year-old could see was dysfunctional in relation to gender. Obviously, I didn’t have the discourse or experience to pursue this line of thinking critically. All I knew was I didn’t fit neatly into the basic stereotypes that were already being enforced with a vengeance to shape my identity “masculine.” And I decided, with a similar vengeance, that I wasn’t going to accede to them, that I would somehow conserve a wholistic sense of the “we” who “I” was right then by “living hidden.” I understood that this would require considerable ingenuity, as learning how to “pass” in a context inimical to one’s preferred “essence” always does. So I set myself to that task. I know how preposterous this sounds, even to me, thinking back on it. A four-year-old? Give me a break. But I also know it was true, not so much at the level of language or thought, but of feelings, sitting there on those steps, fuming, yes, at the inanity of the world around me, the one I was going to have navigate a way through, but also fierce, determined not to give in to its meanest stereotypes.

But enough about me. I want to get back to what Laozi and Jesus have to say about this, beginning by stating the obvious: Both were born into stridently patriarchal cultures and they didn’t make much of a dent in either of theirs, at least as it pertains to gender. Laozi may or may not have existed as an actual singular person. The Daodejing was composed (mostly) between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, as the “Spring and Autumn” period in Chinese history transitioned into the “Warring States” period. Any historical epoch that is remembered via those two words, “warring” and “states,” is highly unlikely to valorize “the feminine.” Likewise for Jesus. The matter of gender equity let alone (God forbid!) gender blending, was not up for grabs in his Jewish community or the Roman Empire in which it was embedded. “Warring” and “states” would be good monikers for his era as well, and for pretty much the whole of Western history thereafter, so deeply infused with Roman militancy, which became Christian militancy in the 4th century CE, a paradigm that endures to this day. That’s a long time for not much to change. So what’s the point, you might fairly ask of doing all this work of waking up, gender-wise, when it hasn’t had a significant impact on the culture at large? All the validation I need is it didn’t seem pointless to Laozi or Jesus, pretty good testimony on its behalf.

So let me try to unpack some of this, starting with Laozi, the Ur-thinker for what came to be called Daoism, now enjoying a resurgence, especially among Westerners looking for a life-, gender-, and earth-friendly spiritual alternative to the capitalist regime. Daoism is founded in a fundamental oneness that surpasses both human understanding and expression, Dao (or Way) the unity that precedes duality and multiplicity, as Laozi explains:

Way gave birth to one,

and one gave birth to two.

Two gave birth to three

and three gave birth to the ten thousand things.

Then the ten thousand things shouldered yin and embraced yang

blending ch’i to establish harmony. (#42)

In Daoism yin/yang dualities are never polar binaries, as in Western systems. They are always intertwined with one another, in “harmony.” The traditional symbol for representing those dualities is the taijitu, that familiar circle with complementary tear-shaped swirls of black and white, each with a dot of the other within it, like locking tabs that link them inseparably. The original figurative source of this relationship between dark and light was a mountain, its northern yin-face shaded, its southern yang-face brighter. A mountain is not two things, it’s one. And as with everything in nature “under the sun,” there is never a complete separation of the dark from the light during its diurnal cycle. In the Daoist system, the female is yin, the male yang. The fact that the female is on “the dark side” might seem ominous to a Western mind, where dualities tend to be organized hierarchically, in this case, light over dark. A Daoist mind doesn’t work that way. In fact, in this specific case, if there is a hierarchy, it is counter to the one instinctive to a Western imagination. The animating force that moves pretty much everything we see and know, or can’t because it’s beyond our ken, Laozi calls “dark female-enigma,” as in this passage:

The valley spirit never dies

It’s called dark female-enigma

And the gateway of dark female-enigma

Is called the root of heaven and earth (#6)

Or “dark-enigma integrity,” as in this one:

Can you let your spirit embrace primal unity

Without drifting away?

Can you focus ch’i into such softness

you’re a newborn again …

Can you be female

opening and closing heaven’s gate?. . .

Give birth and nurture.

Give birth without possessing

and foster without domineering:

This is called dark-enigma integrity. (#10)

Dark-enigma is, like Dao, a name Laozi uses for the nameless source of everything. Integrity is the “de” in Daodejing. So it’s a big deal. And it’s feminine. The feminine also often serves as a template for what Laozi calls wu wei or “nothing’s own doing,” the ability to overcome self-centered drives and desires and accede to the flow of Dao the way everything else in the natural universe does when it is healthy. Wu wei is a kind of passivity that inspires spontaneity, in-the-moment being; it is the source of creativity, the motive for compassion, the origin point of wisdom, the portal to enlightenment, a combination of connotations that has no clear counterpart in Western thinking. None of this is to say that it belongs only to women [although Daoism was and is user-friendly to women in communal matters.] Laozi’s point is the same one I felt on those porch steps, the same one Virginia Woolf sees in that taxi: We are, all of us, born with an innate capacity to fuse twos into ones, including gender traits, and then we are trained quite stringently to override it, to become half-ourselves.

For Laozi, female energy generally shares many of the features we associate with the feminine in Western systems: soft, receptive, nurturing. The difference is that these qualities are valorized rather than demeaned. One of the tropes for that is “the mother:

There was something all murky shadow,

born before heaven and earth . . .

Isolate and changeless

it moves everywhere without fail

picture the mother of all beneath heaven. (#25)

. . .

There is a source all beneath heaven shares:

call it the mother of all beneath heaven.

Once you understand the mother

you understand the child,

and once you understand the child

you abide in the mother. . . .

Seeing the small is called enlightenment,

and abiding in the gentle strength. (#52)

And this is how, by seeing the small and abiding in the gentle, the child comes into the frame, the original strong and enlightened one we’re supposed to conserve in us, or to recover if she has been abused or exiled. Female tendencies are lauded even in warfare, when various kinds of “giving,” including retreat and compassion, are said always to win, sooner or later, over brute force:

A great nation flows down into

the place where all beneath heaven converges,

the female of all beneath heaven.

In its stillness, female lies perpetually low,

and there perpetually conquers male. (#61)

Again, the point is not to replace men with women in positions of power because they are innately better for that, it is to reimagine how the qualities and tendencies we associate with gender categories can remain in (or be restored to) a cooperative and generative balance. Since in patriarchal cultures the female traits are most demeaned, they are the ones most in need of recovery. If you are looking for of a map to do that, bell hooks offers a pretty good one in The Will to Change, addressed primarily to men but useful to women as well who are just as captive to the gender-related toxicity of patriarchy, but in converse ways.

This is precisely the point Jesus is making in the Gospel of Thomas, which was excised with prejudice from the Christian canon in the 4th century CE along with many others we now call “lost.” It was pretty scary to get “lost” during the heresy heydays of the early Church, lots of burning and burying, that sort of thing! Most of those gospels were founded, from the Church “fathers’” point of view, on the gnostic heresy, a particular kind of radical dualism that, among other things, accords considerable authority to the individual at the expense of the clerical hierarchy. So they had to go. The Gospel of Thomas is different; it promotes the latter—individual authority—but via a two-into-one rather than one-into-two dynamic. Patriarchy is hard to override, of course. In the context of the gospel of Thomas Jesus couldn’t even persuade most of his disciples to change their tune in this regard. Simon Peter (the original “Rock”) is particularly belligerent about it:

Simon Peter said to them, "Mary should leave us, because women aren’t worthy of life." Jesus

said, "Look, am I to make her a man? So that she may become a living spirt too, she’s equal to

you men, because every woman who makes herself manly will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

(#114 Noah translation)

Jesus is having none of Peter’s misogynistic bluster, rebuffing it immediately and forcefully, in what may look initially like a self-contradictory manner, by turning Mary into a man. Jesus is not, though, interested in indoctrinating Mary or his female disciples into an ideology of patriarchy. He is talking here, I believe, about a form of androgyny, the merger of male and female identity features, such that neither dominates, both resonate companionably, leading to a transcendence of the oppressive gender binary that impedes one’s path to “the kingdom of heaven.”

How the Christian culture became so stringently patriarchal, even misogynistic (just last year, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention in America decided to “disfellowship” several of its churches for having female pastors) is understandable, if unforgivable, given the Roman culture into which it was gradually assimilated. This tendency is not, though, founded on the words or habits of Jesus, who clearly liked women, attracted them as disciples, and treated them as equals to the men in his entourage, even when they didn’t. Mary Magdalene is the best example of this. I won’t go into the complex history of this remarkable woman in relation both to her discipleship and to her gradual transformation from Jesus’ highly favored follower (see the lost Gospel of Mary, e.g.) and friend, perhaps even partner, to a repentant sex-worker, except to say that Paul initiated the process and it got gradually amplified, especially by Augustine, during the Romanization of the Church.

Here is another example of the gender-tension among Jesus’ disciples:

Mary said to Jesus, "Whom are your disciples like?"

He said, "They are like children who have settled in a field which is not theirs. When the owners of the field come, they will say, 'Let us have back our field.' They (will) undress in their presence in order to let them have back their field and to give it back to them. Therefore I say, if the owner of a house knows that the thief is coming, he will begin his vigil before he comes and will not let him dig through into his house of his domain to carry away his goods. You, then, be on your guard against the world. Arm yourselves with great strength lest the robbers find a way to come to you, for the difficulty which you expect will (surely) materialize. Let there be among you a man of understanding. When the grain ripened, he came quickly with his sickle in his hand and reaped it. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear." (#21 )

Mary is obviously a prominent enough disciple to ask Jesus a direct question (a feminine role that Paul specifically precludes in Corinthians 1). And Jesus’ answer, delivered in the presence of his male apostles, is a stunning rebuke of their apparent gender privilege. All of this is punctuated by the “ears to hear” trope that Jesus repeats when he’s trying to get his disciples to wake up. It seems clear to me in context that Jesus is not talking solely about gender tolerance in his little group, though he wouldn’t mind it if these guys lightened up. He’s talking about the need for overriding gender distinctions entirely:

You [must] make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female . . .”

Can’t be much clearer than that. This collapse of the gender binary is ensconced in the context of a more general collapse of all binaries:

"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below . . .”

Here is a passage where Jesus explains this two-into-one enigma:

Jesus said, “If two make peace with each other in this one house, they will say to the mountain, ‘Move Away,’ and it will move away.” (#48)

The “one house” here is not communal, out there, but personal, in here. Reconciliation between the two (rather than faith, as in Matthew 7:20) is the means for moving mountains with a simple command, a dramatic shift in the conception of where spiritual power is founded.

This passage is darker and more dramatic:

Jesus said, "Two will rest on a bed: the one will die, and the other will live." Salome said, "Who

are you, man, that you ... have come up on my couch and eaten from my table?"

Jesus said to her, "I am he who exists from the undivided. I was given some of the things of my

father."

<...> "I am your disciple."

<...> "Therefore I say, if he is destroyed, he will be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will

be filled with darkness." (#61)

What I see here (besides the obvious fact that Salome is another woman conversing as an equal with Jesus) are the various ways in which twos might become one in everyday life, via sexual intercourse and eating, for example. Jesus claims his very existence is “from the undivided.” I take his “if he is destroyed” to mean becoming one, which fills one with light. And light is where it’s at for Jesus:

Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?', say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on its own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image.' If they say to you, 'Is it you?', say, 'We are its children, we are the elect of the living father.' If they ask you, 'What is the sign of your father in you?', say to them, 'It is movement and repose.'" (#50)

These are dazzling and idyllic images of the children of the light, without shame or fear, the epitome of goodness, movement and repose balanced rhythmically, breathing transcendently. We come into the world unified and can return to that state whenever we choose, actually must, Jesus says, to have any hope of entering the kingdom of heaven, which is not “up there” but right here.

The culmination of all this must be a full makeover:

“and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in

place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom."

I personally take Jesus to mean that one needs to rebuild oneself from the ground up to create an authentic likeness in place of the generic simulacrum culture and society indoctrinate us into. This requires every step I’ve detailed thus far: becoming childlike, reconciling the inside with the outside, transcending gender, and resolving binaries into singularities, twos into ones. “[T]hen will you enter the kingdom,” the point of it all. Which gets me back to my personal story, which I conclude this way:

And that’s when it struck me, yes, exactly that, which is why I’m telling this story: Everyone is born with an almost equal balance of he and she in there, masculine and feminine, though they are not named yet that way, therefore remain unified, indistinct from one another, amicable, interactive, quite peaceable before the binary lies culture tells you to force you down one road or the other, from day one, take this one or that, but you can’t take both. And I mean really take it to the extreme, no keeping the other even in sight, no turning back either, ever. . . .

And right then I thought about the “he” in there and I thought about the “she” in there, how beautiful they were, so alike and so close together, loving one another, true love, I mean, not lovey-dovey love, before they got turned into words, I mean, before time started clicking, before the road not taken got taken away, and this is what I decided: He will never give her away, and she will never give him away. They are married now and will not be divorced, though those, too, were lies I hadn’t yet learned how to name. I also knew that he would have to cherish her in secret to get by, and she would have to cherish him in secret to get by, the origins for, I now think, and the ultimate explanation for, my reclusive temperament, which you know, if you have one, is not soft but fierce, will not brook interference, impregnable, the perfect way to hide what was mine from whatever and whoever might want to take it away, a temperament you aren’t necessarily born with, but choose on the top step of the back porch pulling at the bottoms of your shorts or your dress, which are almost the same thing when you’re four or so, because it is only in the hiding that true love can flourish, at least inside one’s head, that room of one’s own, the only one we will ever truly own. . . .

And that was the day I became a “creative individual” and started living hidden in earnest, as a way of maintaining the joy of the oneness of the twoness we are all born with. (Living Hidden, 56-57)

Again: Two roads? Take them both. Together, and only together, “they” are the “Way” to “the kingdom of heaven.”

All Laozi excerpts from Tao Te Ching, translated by David Hinton (Counterpoint Press, 2015)

All excerpts from the Gospel of Thomas are from the Lambdin translation (the Gnostic Society Library) except the one marked in the text from the Noah translation.

Virginia Woolf excerpt from A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt, 1929.

Here is a link to my website page with a PDF Living Hidden: https://paulkameen.com/?page_id=6885