Beyond The Binary

What does it mean to step outside the binary in the context of God and relationships?

We are led to believe we live in a binary world. It’s us and them, good and bad, this or that. Division is encouraged – separating out right from wrong, heroes from villains, in every arena including politics, gender, religion, lifestyle and economics. The foundations of this perception are buried deep in a specific philosophical perspective, one that is best summed up by René Descartes’ axiom: “I think, therefore I am.”

By choosing to equate thinking with being, Descartes set up a binary: that mind and its processes are separate to the body. He suggested the body cannot ‘think’ and, in his description of thinking as the pre-requisite for being, created a hierarchy where thought is perceived as the highest attribute of the most advanced beings. In any one entity, thought rules the house.

Descartes didn’t say “I dance, therefore I am”, or “I sing, therefore I am”, or “I love, therefore I am.” It was thought that he believed defined our being-ness, and in that separation of mind and body, set into motion a philosophical engine on the world whose machinations we are still attempting to reverse.

Because if you believe ‘conscious thought’ is what determines existence itself, what will your attitude be towards all those entities we perceive do not ‘think’ in the ways we do: animals, plants, rock formations? How will you treat those other human beings who demonstrate more embodied, practice-based knowledge and less in the way of classical education?

This Cartesian dualism overturned the globe as colonisers from Europe invaded other geographies and took with them perceptions of existence – and what constituted a valuable existence – to cultures which previously had worked with more fluid, holistic, comprehensive perspectives of being-ness. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of learning her native Potawatomi language and discovering nouns in that tongue are both animate and inanimate, alive & dead, acting more like verbs than things. Talking of reading the word ‘wiikwegamaa’, meaning ‘to be a bay’, she realises:

“A bay is a noun only if the water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be­ a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.”

There is a being-ness in a bay that dualism does not consider, because it separates and idolises human conscious thinking from all other forms of existence. In ignoring the being-ness of a bay, a flower, a frog or a seedling, dualism permits humans to treat these other entities with disdain and use them as if they were non-entities; non-thinking, non-being ‘things’.

But this binary perspective of existence doesn’t just come through Descartes. In the global north, it comes through Christian colonisers. This religion clearly marked out the difference between soul and body, heaven and hell, equating one side with greatness and the other with not-so-greatness, from the very beginning – “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness” (Genesis 1:3-4). Anyone growing up near the Christian tradition is given indelible instructions based on these early separations: that your body and its needs are sinful, that you are here to escape your physical form, and that if you’re not good you are very, very definitely bad.

There’s part of us that speaks out against the illogical quality of this. If a divine source created everything, including our bodies, then how can our bodies be bad but our souls be good? How can a frog be less important than a human being, or a stone less important than a church? Coming to spirituality on your own terms, you might find yourself railing against this spiritual dualism and hierarchy, and embracing a more physically-engaged, shame-free spiritual practice which embraces all beings and takes a more animist view of the universe.

But even in contemporary spiritual circles I see dualism played out, most often with gender. The concept of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine are spoken about a lot. In tantra it’s described as ‘polarities’, with bliss only accessible if both energies meet and blend. The Earth is the Mother and the Sky is the Father (concepts which are drawn from ancient polytheistic religions), there’s the Moon Goddess and the Sun God, and it’s one big cosmic school disco with the girls clinging to the wall on one side and the boys shuffling about near the other.

Dualism and binaries are everywhere: in the way we perceive our mind and body, how we see the natural world and the entities that live in it, how we name God and divinity into a shape we can understand. And I invite you to step outside of it with me, carefully and gently, to see what else can be seen.

I am non-binary. I was born into a female human body and lived many years as a woman, using she/her pronouns. And then, when I was about 30, I realised there was a word for the way I had felt all my life; a name for the person I was on the inside. I was non-binary: not a woman, not a man. Being non-binary is not just about my personal identity; it’s about how I see the world and existence as a whole – outside of the very concept of binary or dualism. Despite common misconceptions, non-binary is not ‘half way’ between woman and man, because that only doubles down on a ‘spectrum’ of something, with two ends that can be set up in a binary to each other. We do it with gender, and we do it with living and dead, animal and human, good and bad, body and mind: if it isn’t one, it must be the other.

Except we know, in our deepest hearts, there is no simplistic discernment between two ideas twe’ve chosen to set up as ‘opposing’. We know that:

• Our cells are constantly dying despite us being classified as ‘alive’

• Humans are a type of animal, not a separate thing entirely

• ‘Good’ people can behave very ‘badly’

• The body knows information the mind has chosen to ignore

We know, in our deepest hearts, that we are One: we are both living and dying, good and bad, our physical self and our intangible, spiritual self. We are all of it, all of the time. It’s just easier for us to imagine there are binaries, because then it allows us to stay separate.

Call to mind, briefly, a recent frustration you had with someone you love. Perhaps they behaved badly, or you felt annoyed, or they let you down. When they are separate, it is much easier to stay frustrated or angry with them than when you perceive them as part of a Oneness to which you also belong. It feels comforting to stay separate, to hold onto the strong emotion and let that form a protective shell around you, rather than letting go of the pain and embracing them with deep compassion for their suffering and your own.

This isn’t to say if someone does something which hurts you, you should just take it; this isn’t an excuse for heroically sticking around while someone else treats you badly. Part of being alive (in body, mind, heart and soul) is experiencing what it is like to be separate, to be different, to be Me and not You, and to act in accordance with what that Me needs in this lifetime: love, compassion, tenderness, liberation. That includes exiting relationships which do not support these needs. But in those relationships with an established foundation of trust and care that do fulfil these needs, what keeps us angry, frustrated or upset? It is the comfort we feel in separateness and the discomfort we sense in connected vulnerability.

The same goes for a relationship with your soul, or God (or whatever you choose to name spiritual presence). To stay separate from your deepest yearnings, from the whispers of what you truly desire, from a sense of ecstatic peace and contentment – that is easier than opening up to new truths and life-altering changes. I have witnessed a woman walk to the edge of cracking open her ego to embrace spiritual presence … and then, almost in slow motion, I have seen the walls come back up and the concrete shell reform around her tender heart. It is more comfortable to remain in the binary, in the dualism, than to meet the Oneness with open arms and experience liberation.

There are several processes that helped me take steps forward on my own spiritual path away from dualistic thinking. The first has been a deep reconnection with the more-than-human world; the woods, water, earth and weather near to me that is ever-changing, open to interaction, and ‘thinking’ in its own unique way we have yet to discern. To be in nature – with no podcast, running route, nothing to do and nowhere to go – is a way to experience Oneness as you witness ecologies of life being created and decaying around you, reflecting your own changing nature.

The second has been cultivating a spirit of compassion in my closest relationships. It is a practice, that’s for sure; I’m no saint, I act irrationally, I have thoughts that ignite my trauma from seemingly nowhere. But I try to stay in compassion, first for me and then for them. Through identifying our shared suffering (even if we are having radically different experiences) I stop seeing through only my eyes and start to draw them closer to me – so close I start to see our Oneness rather than our separateness.

And what continues to aid me in my steps forward are spiritual practices of contemplation & appreciation. Within these I include meditation, chanting, singing, dance, and all forms of ‘prayer’ that allow me to connect with something within myself that is beyond the bounds of my body and the pain of my past. They are active practices – I am not dissociating or ‘coming out’ of my body or mind to do them, but rather working with all parts of myself to remind the whole of me that I am beyond binaries of mind/body, soul/human, dead/alive. They remind me to come to a point of Oneness. I move from “I think, therefore I am”, to simply “I am” – and that is enough.