My friend and I were talking recently. I was saying how I was always most balanced and whole, most tuned to reality, whenever I was doing medicine. She responded, “Whenever I’m doing medicine, I’m walking on the earth, the sky above me.”

What she said beautifully expressed what I had been trying to say. My balance, in fact the only sane balance for all of us, has to always be between Mother Earth and Father sky. We are balanced and whole only when our bodies are connected to the earth below and our consciousnesses are connected to the sky above. Similarly, we are most tuned to reality when we are tuned to both halves of the reality that together make up our totality.

The Chinese, especially the Taoists, see that in each of us there are two souls joined together for the duration of our lives. There is our earth, or yin, soul and our sky, or yang, soul. According to the Taoists, when we die, our two souls separate, the yin soul returning to the earth from which it came and the yang soul returning to its home in the sky. We don’t just go to heaven, as the Christians would have it, we return to both the earth and the sky – and to both with full awareness.

For the past several thousand years, our prevailing western culture, based upon one-sided masculine values and the fear of death, has denied half of its reality. We have paid homage only to the sky above that we have called heaven and which we have seen as the only true abode of Spirit. Afraid of death, we have sought to avoid it by avoiding the earth, our final resting place.

In our vain attempt to deny reality, we have divided our very nature into two separate and warring factions. We have created conflict. Is it any wonder that repression and violence have become the norm in our Western culture, in spite of our lip service to love? How could it be otherwise, with our entire culture base upon fear and denial?