The following is an unedited version of a paper I submitted in my final year at the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York, an institution created by Sun Myung Moon to allow members of his church to pursue a masters degree education in theology not only of his teachings but to study world religions. Unification Thought is a more intellectually based explanation of the teachings of the Unification Church put forward by Sung Hun Lee. The terms, Sung Sang and Hyung Sang are Korean words used to describe the ideas of internal character and external form, roughly what we identify as mind and body or spiritual or physical. Don't get hung up on the first couple of pages. This was written to address an audience of Unification Church members but for the most part this paper tries to get to the heart of the question of this inner female and male quality within men and women respectively. This may seem like a very intellectual article at the outset but it's not. I think it will engage you to consider how there is a gateway within each of us that leads us to embrace that unconscious space within us, that part of us that connects us with a higher consciousness. For your convenience I have included at the end of each installment a list of the sources that I used in writing this paper as well as links to where it is sold online so that you have all of the information about that particular source.

And so, without further ado, I present to you my research.


Unification Thought has brought to us a very interesting understanding of the Human Being granted we accept, at the outset, that we are a reflection of, or the manifestation of our divine origin, God. If God is the original being of Sungsang and Hyungsang and Positivity and Negativity then it stands to reason that his creatures would possess these same characteristics. The following will be an examination and a closer look at the aspects of Positivity and Negativity or Yang and Yin within the Sungsang or the spirit mind of the Human Being.

We are already well aware of the Yang and Yin aspects within the Hyungsang level of reality that we perceive with our physical senses: the mountains and the valleys, the hydrosphere (ocean) and the atmosphere etc. All these contribute to the beauty that we behold within creation. But, more essential and what may be considerably more subtler to us are the male and female components of men and women, the two complementary yet differentiated forms of the Human Being. This is the Yang and Yin aspects of the Sungsang. But, what do we mean by this?

Within the spirit mind of a Human Being there are the attributes of intellect emotion and will. Therefore, in brevity there must be intellect emotion and will that is expressed in a masculine way as initiating, aggressive and creative, as well as a feminine side which is receiving, placid and being.

Sung Hun Lee in the “Essentials of Unification Thought” says this about the concept as it relates to men and women.

“In their Sungsang aspect also, both man and woman have Yang elements and Yin elements, but there is a qualitative difference between the type of Yang and Yin elements possessed by a male and the type of Yang and Yin elements possessed by a female.” (Essentials Of Unification Thought EOUT p. 13)

Lee, in establishing the ground work for the ontology of Unification Thought, is very firm in setting up the distinguishing characteristics that allow for a qualitative argument for the differences that exist between men and women. However, the fact that men and women both contain within themselves male and female aspects or Yang and Yin must be discussed further as to articulate in a deeper sense the way in which these Yang and Yin aspects within each gender contribute to the completeness of the individual and that individual manifestation of his or herself as an incarnation of God.

Before we proceed with an elaboration of this important concept in Unification Thought it must not be overlooked that although this is a concept based on the original image of man in the likeness of God, the implementation of this concept will not occur in a vacuum but within the context of an already, deeply entrenched male-dominated paradigm in which our world is based. There are certain problems that I will deal with briefly here so to, in effect, till the soil for a union-based paradigm. First of all, I will deal with some preconceived notions of this union of male and female or androgyny and then the traditionally held beliefs based on the male-dominated paradigm.

ANDROGYNY
Elizabeth Badinter in her book, “The Unopposite Sex: The End of the Gender Bender”, speaks of the androgyny, or in it’s most basic definition, the man/woman: an individual in which both sexes are present. But to avoid any confusion with the mythical monster, the Hermaphrodites, she offers what she calls the resemblance model.

“The resemblance model helps us to take account of our androgynous nature. Today we are quite willing to admit that it is through the recognition of their bisexuality that individuals achieve fulfillment. But, does not this ‘recognition’ mean that we are accepting a previously unknown truth? It is therefore not so much the ‘advent’ of an androgynous nature that we are becoming aware of but more of its ‘return’. In the same sense in which psychoanalysis speak of ‘the return of the repressed.” (The Unopposite Sex TUS p. 167)

I think it’s important in pointing out here that androgyny, in the sense that it is addressed here, is not in any way a contrived concept but a part of an original blueprint in which Human Beings as well as the whole of reality was created from. And within that blueprint was a particular order of relationship that seemed to satisfy temporal needs as well as provide for more enduring and eternal values central to creation.

“If God (or nature)—who does nothing without a purpose—created two different types of being, it was not simply to introduce richness and diversity into creation, it was also to give each a consciousness of limits, which differentiates creature from Creator. When solitary, the human being is sterile, incomplete. Happiness and completion only come from reunion with the Other…Two creatures are necessary to make a creator, otherwise God’s status and predominance are threatened.” (TUS p.168)

The Androgyny, as it is accounted in Plato’s The Symposium, is a distant ancestor of the Human Species, half male and half female of formidable strength and a threat to the gods. In punishment, Zeus split the androgyny in two, thus resulting in the separate genders of man and woman.

“It is from this distant epoch, then that we may date the innate love which human beings feel for one another, the love which restores us to our ancient state by attempting to weld two beings into one and to heal the wounds which humanity suffered. Desire, born from this severance, is the very source of love of the feeling of completeness, which when fulfilled, deprives desire of it’s raison d’etre.”(TUS p. 168-169)

The Platonic interpretation was that the splitting of the androgyny resulted in two very different creatures, void of any dual nature whatsoever. The male and the female were of two totally different species and origin, seemingly incompatible. In contrast, if we interpret this using a resemblance-based model rather than a polarity-based one, as Badinter suggests here, the result is a union-based origin.

“The intimate union resulting from their interpenetration would explain why the splitting of the androgyny did not give rise to two specifically different human beings, but to two different kinds of androgynous creatures, who would both simply be the reflection of the original one.” (TUS p. 169)

According to Unification Thought, it is through the unity between Man and Woman, the culmination of God’s own harmonized aspects of Yang and Yin achieving unity in no other way possible, that the human can “be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” There is no threat to God in the sense that there is to Zeus in the Greek myths. There can only be completion within each gender, among them and between God and all of his creation.

When we speak of resemblance we are speaking less of quelling the particular gender in question in either the man or woman and more of a recognition of the person as a whole. Using the term bisexual echoes connotations that there is somehow or some way an abnormality or something there that shouldn’t be. It speaks of something freakish.

What Badinter and other writers in this field are trying to get at essentially is this. We all have some awareness that we should somehow be more than the way we are at the moment. There is always a group of muscles in our physical body that we have never used so much in the past. So, when we start jogging or going to the gym to work out, the muscles we have never used before, to our surprise, have become sore afterwards. I think the same can be said for our anima or animus that we know full well has always been there working for our benefit protecting us, guiding us in many ways. For the most part, however we have usually ignored what actually is our soul. It has, in turn, been more convenient for us to find an ideal mate or a soul mate, someone who is going to turn my life around and make it all better. Well, the fact is, there is no such person. It all becomes a fruitless endeavor, even selfish to an extent, to shift this precious responsibility that belongs within the breast of every human being, over for someone else to take care of. In a sense, when we neglect to acknowledge our own inner world, our own soul and project that onto our spouse or people we admire, whom we delegate as heroes and assign to them the role of saving the world rather than taking on the challenge ourselves, we have done ourselves and God, who created us, a great disfavor.

A definitive recognition of sexuality in Human Beings seems to only happen once the person has reached puberty and continues until old age brings about the twilight of that person’s physical existence on Earth. Within young infants and elderly adults nearing the end of their life there is less of a differentiation of sexuality and as Badinter puts it, a stronger emphasis on bisexuality.

“The history of the individual shows evidence of this both on the physical and the psychological level. At the moment of birth and during the first years of childhood, the sex of an individual is only recognizable by the external genital organs. ‘This means that the whole body is still undifferentiated that is oriented neither in one direction not the other. It is potentially bisexual, not only because it may acquire the characteristics of one sex or the other, but also because each sex shows the rudiments of the characteristics that are more pronounced in the other.”(TUS p. 170)

So, it is at the times in our lives when we are most vulnerable, not in control and subject to the forces of nature that bring us into this life and take us back out of temporality, seemingly and unavoidably subject to eternal forces greater than any of our own personal power to prevent, that we are undifferentiated in our sexuality. We are in a unified state that is neither man or woman but being either growing towards differentiation to take our place in human society or finishing up our lives and preparing to enter the next level of consciousness.

George Gilder in his book, “Men and Marriage” sees the concept of Androgyny from a different perspective. Calling the movement to bring about a sexually neutral society sexual liberalism, Guilder is seemingly sounding the alarm that male sexuality is undergoing an unusual revisionism from groups like the NEA (National Education Association) who have set their agenda to aim sex education towards the most impressionable yet the most innocent young school children.

So, on one hand the term androgyny, according to Badinter, although admittedly having its connotations, in the classical sense, refers to a beast that is half man and half woman. Badinter is obviously avoiding this definition while preferring a more essential one.

“In actual fact, we are all androgynous, because human beings are bisexual, on several levels and to different degrees. Masculine and feminine are intertwined in us all even if most cultures have been pleased to describe us as all of one piece and to want us to be so." (TUS p. 167)

Resources
1. Lee, Sung Hun Essentials of Unification Thought: The Head-Wing Thought Unification Thought Institute Japan 1992
2. Badinter, Elizabeth The Unopposite Sex: The End Of The Gender Bender Harper & Row Publishers St. Louis 1986
3. Gilder, George Men and Marriage Pelican Publishing Company Gretna L.A. 1986

Part 2 of The Integration Of Male & Female Aspects Within Men & Women