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Chapter 9: Fusion as a Bridge
technology. This process has also seriously undermined the position
of women and has greatly affected their sense of dignity and
self-esteem. It has also challenged the Yin values in society, considered
to be counterproductive.
Unquestionably, the growing sense of despair and disorientation
which large groups of people in the world today experience is
directly related to the split and the resulting imbalances which they
experience within themselves.
Restoring the Balance
With the growth of a new world culture, with a process of unceasing
economic growth and expansion and the simultaneous rise of
both minority affluence and mass poverty, these dualist tendencies
are being further aggravated. The rise of fundamentalism and
dogmatism, both as an instrument to legitimize power and achieve
control and as a response to a growing despair and as an expression
of the thirst for security is a further sign in the world rocked by
imbalances and social fluctuations has become increasingly uncontrollable.
This uncontrollability is seen as unavoidable and inherent
in the very mechanics of the system and as an inevitable
price for economic growth and advance.
Repression of the body and of sexuality and a search to compensate
for it go hand in hand. Thus repression and a desperate
search for liberation from it are both on the rise. There is a trend to
see the body and sexuality as the source of all evil and start crusades
against them so as to secure law and order. There is at the
same time a growing obsession to secure and maximize pleasure,
a trend which has grown to be the object of ruthless exploitation
in which the body and sexuality have become mere commodities
on the market. As a result, public life is being sexualized, as a
source of economic expansion and profit.
Thus the repression of the body and sexuality have precisely an
inverse effect and has become a major source of a fast-growing
market and rapidly expanding pleasure and amusement industry,
which capitalizes on this repression.
The first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created
or destroyed. In terms of Taoist theory, all energy comes forth
from the Great Void, the original Wu Chi which undergoes a series
of transformations in the formation of the universe. Thus the
human body is seen as a particular form of transformation of this
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