The Yin Yang

As a kid, i've always found the "Yin Yang" symbol pretty cute. I really couldn't relate any meaning to it then. I had the impression that it was some sort of a logo for 'Feng Shui'. Last week i happened to listen to one of Alan Watts' seminars on the Yin-Yang. Yin Yang is really about duality ... duality in which there is not only an opposition between the two poles/extremes, but also a kind of inherent co-operation between them. Watts gives a simple analogy to make his point clear. Darkness and Light - the definition of one is dependent on the other ... if there was only one of these poles then it simply would cease to exist !! ... confusing eh ? ... lets put it this way -fishes are not aware of the fact that they are in a liquid medium( water ) because they've never been on land (alive i.e)... so these poles or extremes need each other to exist.

Check out some Yin-Yang correspondences

Yin	Yang
Earth	Heaven
moon	sun
autumn, winter	spring, summer
things female	things male
cold, coolness	heat, warmth
darkness	brightness
inside, interior	outside, surface
things small and weak	things large and powerful
the lower part	the upper part
water, rain	fire
quiescence	movement
night	day
the right side	the left side
the west and north	the east and south
the front the the body	the back of the body
the hours between noon and midnight	the hours between midnight and noon
exhaustion	repletion
murkiness	clarity
development	incipience
conservation	destruction
responsiveness	aggressiveness
contraction	expansion