The Rainbow YinYang

The Rainbow YinYang is an image I've been working with for about 30 years. Even when I got married 28 years ago, I had the pastry chef make it right into the frosting of our wedding cake. Sometimes I say that if I had to take all that I have ever learned and communicate it into a single symbol, the Rainbow YinYang would be it. (And that's after having several books, having gotten a Ph.D. in parapsychology, and having conducted radio and television interviews with close to a thousand people.)

The image represents how creation itself occurs by taking the essence of the universe, which in one sense is nothing at all, because before creation there was nothing, and dividing it, taking nothing and dividing it in two. In Buddhism that is called "mutually arising conditions," and it's precisely how cosmologists and physicists today believe that the big bang occurred. There was a singularity, and in that singularity, out of the nothingness the universe was created in an explosion of huge amounts of matter and anti-matter. That was the big bang. What we have left now is just a little bit of the matter that didn't get destroyed when the matter and anti-matter collided and mostly destroyed each other, and went back into the great nothingness of the universe.

The ancients who created the YinYang philosophy did so in an effort to integrate all the known thought of their own time, and they did it early enough in human history, some 2,500 years ago. They weren't constrained by certain ideas that we moderns take for granted; for example, the idea that there is such a thing as subjective and objective. The ancients understood it differently. They knew everything was interrelated, interconnected. No one of us can't separate our self from the rest of the world.

And so the philosophy of the Yin Yang was based on this integral understanding. Out of it emerged the I-Ching, the Book of Changes. Based on the notion totally alien to the modern Western mind: that a human being can, for example, throw yarrow stalks - or coins - into the air and watch how they fall, understand from them what are the dynamics of interplay of energy in the world and how that might effect the state of the kingdom, or the fate of an individual posing a particular question at a particular moment in time. To the modern mind, these things have nothing to do with each other. To the ancient mind, they were quite related, because the ancients didn't separate subjective and objective.

The Rainbow YinYang, or the YinYang, is the archetypal symbol of all complementarity, all duality. In each body, there is the heartbeat; there is the breath; there is the muscle system, the digestion, the nerves, and even at the level of DNA, the double helix, molecules - a constant sense of movement, of balance, of dance, of rhythm, of two forces always playing with each other, always in equilibrium with each other, and all of these multiple systems in equilibrium with each other in the healthy person. Sometimes they get out of balance, and we can use healing symbols and mandalas to help us restore that balance that unifies all of these symbols.

So the philosophy of Yin and Yang became the basis of Chinese medicine, and it became the basis of all the martial arts in Asia, which were also the basis of all dance forms, forms of movements, forms of walking with life energy, flowing with life energy, being attuned to the harmonies of the cosmos, the harmonies our bodies, the harmonies of our soul all at once.

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, had his patients draw mandalas. The changing mandalas were expressions of the creative unfolding process of archetypal elements in the patients' own souls. I've often thought of that as being my process right here, that if I were to show you a picture of my soul, it would be the Rainbow YinYang graphics, so I think this is part of my urge to express it as well, but I think of it as more than just my soul, obviously related to the collective consciousness.

Click here to see my animated version of the Rainbow YinYang.