Duality
As I have stated before - one of the aspects that HAS ALWAYS interested me on the Series is the Duality [Doubling/Comparing] - between Tony Soprano & Phil Leotardo.
I have stated before also that - 6.04 The Fleshy Part of The Thigh - is my favorite Episode [a very hard decision trust me - I love every single episode].
Duality is very prominent on the Series. Let's see how Duality plays out on the Series more clearly with the following examples, at the very least:
(Most of these examples taken from the comments section of the following link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thesopranos/co ... n_america/)
a. In this episode
6.04 The Fleshy Part of the Thigh - Tony and Phil are “fighting” in the Ring - as they do in “Real Life.” In other words - John Schwinn is alluding to the "two boxers fighting in the ring" as
CONNECTED ENTITIES - [they are really one entity] - since
"Everything is Everything." This is An obvious symbol for the feud between Phil and Tony and also how they'll die "together."
b. Nancy Sinatra has compared/doubled them before. She said, in
6.16 Chasing It, “You two going
home together?”
c. Tony B. telling Kevin Finnerty "you're going
home" [
which is death] and - above Sinatra asking if Tony and Phil are going
home together.
d. They have been compared/doubled through music. In the beginning of
6.21 Made In America - Tony wakes up dead to Vanilla Fudge’s “You keep me Hanging on.” Phil
dies to the same song playing on the car radio when he is killed in front of his
family. It is also playing on the car radio when Tony is driving to Carmela’s safe house by the water to his
family AFTER he is already dead.
e. They have been compared/doubled in
6.13 Soprano Home Movies - there were
Welcome Home Parties for both. Tony was
Welcomed Home from Jail. Phil was
Welcomed Home from Florida.
f. How they
died. There are very distinct comparisons/similarities relating to their
deaths: both killed in front of their families [while they're distracted by family]; the black guys [in both instances] who get a clear view of the murders of both; both never hear the shot, etc.
g. Both
died, or both went
home, after being killed by largely New characters that were Relatively Unknown to us
(Walden kills Phil Leotardro; Man in Members Only Jacket kills Tony Soprano).
h. THEY ARE THE BIGGEST ENEMIES OF EACH OTHER, YET THEY ARE CONNECTED EVEN DEEPER TO EACH OTHER THAN TO ANYTHING ELSE.
[Agent Harris in 6.21 Made In America: "Multiple calls traced to a payphone in Oyster Bay, Long Island;"
"We're gonna win this thing"]:
- 'TONY SOPRANO' vs. 'PHIL LEOTARDO'
(let's put it another way)
- 'AGENT HARRIS' vs. 'THE SHAH OF IRAN'
(let's put it another way)
- 'FBI' vs. 'Terrorism'
(let's put it another way)
- 'Good' vs. 'Evil'
So what can we get from all of this?
1. Well first of all, Duality is going to be necessary to talk about. It relates to the Series - as well as to Real Life, Science, & Spirit - in Very Important ways. Duality is so important, in fact, that I decided to dedicate an Entire Post to it's Discussion and Meaning.
2. The series (and Life) say that "Everything is Everything." We are all Connected. All Life is Connected. That was already hard enough to figure out - but Science and Life are not that simple. We Need To Dig Deeper.
3. AND IN FACT, WE CAN DEEP TOGETHER. Tony and Phil are “fighting” in the Ring - as they do in “Real Life” of course, yes. And yes, they have been compared/doubled in the boxing ring [John Schwinn saying to Tony - “The boxers are not separate entities"]. In other words, Phil and Tony are ONE (just as everyone is really all ONE, of course). BUT THEY ARE EVEN MORE CONNECTED (TO EACH OTHER).
I want to share something very deep & meaningful that I found about Duality and I feel is Helpful to understand it more clearer. It is, without a doubt, one of the best articles I have personally stumbled across about Duality:
Taken from the following Link: https://www.psychreg.org/life-death/
Start -- Duality is an essential concept that must be grasped if one is wanting to have a deeper understanding of life. Without recognising duality, we are missing out on one of the most profound learning tools available. Duality teaches us that every aspect of life is created from a balanced interaction of opposite and competing forces. Yet these forces are not just opposites; they are complementary. They do not cancel out each other, they merely balance each other like the dual wings of a bird.
With the concept of duality it is said that you can’t fully understand one side of the dual nature of something without comparing and fully understanding the opposing side. For example, you couldn’t understand what the concept of “up” is without having a “down” to compare and contrast to. Same applies for in-out, hot-cold, sweet-sour, young-old,
male-female, liberal-conservative, and on and on, the list goes. If we don’t have an opposing counterpart, then it can’t have any value to us.
Let’s apply this concept to one of the most consequential aspects of our existence: life and death. What if it is equally as valuable to experience the non-physical world that death gives us, as it is to experience this physical world? Maybe we wouldn’t fear death as a lot of us do now. What if we lived our life not being afraid to die, by knowing that this next aspect of existence was just the other side of the same coin?
"Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides."
- Lao Tzu
What could be a more profound example of duality than life and death? What could illustrate more succinctly how duality works in our world? In order to die, you must first be alive. We would never know what death is unless we are alive, which gives us a comparison. Let us explore this magnificent teaching tool and what it helps us to learn about duality in general.
First of all, this example allows us to understand how clear and distinct duality can be, even to our limited perception. I believe that this is an example we can all understand. Either you are alive, or you are dead. It is hard to create any grey areas within this black and white scenario with our highly subjective perception.
[Actually, that's not so hard to create, even with our Limited Perception: Schrödinger's cat (aka the Final episode), anyone?]. There are a lot of dualities we experience that aren’t so cut and dry as life and death. Dualities such as right-wrong, or good-bad, have so much relativity between all of us that they become hard to distinguish as a universal measure.
Because we are alive, we can sense and value our “aliveness.” We can perceive “aliveness” because we are alive. Because we aren’t dead and we have no tangible access to the dead, we really can’t truly understand death. That leads us to be afraid of this unknown. But what if when our physical bodies die, we become part of a beautiful and wonderful existence in a non-physical world? The problem with the duality of life and death in this world is that we don’t have access to the other side that would help us to better understand and cherish our life here on earth.
Duality doesn’t stop with our life and death example. Our entire existence in this world is run on duality.
Why this basic concept of life isn’t even mentioned in our education or upbringing or wherever is mind-boggling to me. It helps to explain so much in our life. For me it explains how our opposing values are both integral aspects of a “whole.” We can’t have one side without the other.
Most all of our value-based conflicts have their roots within this scenario. If you think about this in depth, our conflicts with others who differ from us reflect our inabilities to understand the other side’s value. Just as death is presently beyond most of our capabilities to understand, our inabilities to understand our opposites in this life reveal our lack of perception. We just need to expand our consciousness and recognize how this world really works in order to learn appreciation and gratitude for the life we are living. Understanding duality is a good starting point.
"If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse."
– Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living
Death is one of the most difficult of life’s dualities to accept. Our culture has done a very poor job of preparing us for its reality, as it has on the concept of duality. We have a long way to go to get caught up with the insight duality provides us.
It is because there is death that there is life. We were born. We will die. We were not alive before we were brought into this world. We are part of the never-ending cycles. I have to believe and have faith in the continuum. Live well and live deeply with a fearless heart, as we are here to experience this side of the thread. The other side is there waiting to provide us its lessons. --
End.
That Truly is a Great Article, and it goes back to so much of what we have been talking about, especially about Life & Death.
Duality Ends at a certain point in Evolution, and Totality comes into effect instead.
Being Total, or Unified, occurs when we Reach a certain Level (maybe 5th or 6th dimension or The Like, or Higher), and we become One with our Spirit. Evil disintegrates here, and Good Prevails. This is likely when we merge or Become One As A Soul, With Our Twin Flame (twin flame is your soul-mate, your other half, your mirror-opposite).
It is the Merging of the Divine Feminine with the Sacred Masculine
- Which is what God is composed of. Also, God Has Created Adam & Eve in - Paradise - and they must abstain from sin, which once again goes back to Dante's Inferno (staying away from human sin in order to have Spiritual - or Godlike - Awakening). Dante's Inferno was highly alluded to in the final episode of The Sopranos.
Our Spirit, once Whole & Unified - has no room for polarity or duality or evil intentions - only Beautiful Unification & Good Intentions, and Pure Consciousness. In 6.21 Made In America, the idea of Material Possessions is constantly referenced, especially by AJ. I believe what Chase is demonstrating here is that the Material World is not the only world there is. There is a much deeper, Spiritual World and Life, that we can become aware of.
And this goes back to ALL Knowledge, once again, whether ancient or recent.
Let's take MYTHOLOGY for instance. Below taken from The Divine Feminine in Mythology and Theology:
"There are a lot of goddesses in mythology. And mythology is a part of so many traditions: Greek, Roman, Celtic, Egyptian, Nordic, Hindu and Pagan...
We may be most familiar with the Greek goddesses, many of whom are duplicates, with new names, from the Roman goddesses. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Athena is the goddess of war, wisdom and domestic crafts. Gaia is the earth mother goddess and Iris is the goddess of
rainbows and servant to the gods.
So in all these goddesses we find aspects of ourselves and our earthly life. War and birth, fertility, love, beauty, nature, creation and destruction. All aspects we find in ourselves, male and female. What troubled Paul and the early church who pursued Christianity in the face of all the god and goddess worship was that the Greek and Roman celebrations and rituals often were earthly based and became carnal, sense driven events of excess. The very things that caused Jesus to overturn the tables of the money changers, selling animals and birds for sacrifice in the Jewish temples. Although those sacrifices weren’t about human sensation, they were not about spiritual growth either. And this is the tension we face; to know and accept our humanity and our spirituality without judgment and without excess perhaps."
http://www.unityoflehighvalley.org/site ... eology.pdf
From another Source:
https://spiritualityhealth.com/articles ... d-feminine
Start - "The Sacred Feminine is a concept that recognizes that 'God' ultimately is neither anthropomorphically male or female but a Divine Essence (Goddessence) beyond form and duality – an essence that is in balance and unification of masculine and feminine principles – a dynamic interdependent 'Immanence' that pervades all life. The Asian Yin Yang icon is a good representation of this idea.
However, seeing the divine as an abstract concept of omnipresent consciousness, or immanence, is a challenge for most humans. We all have a basic human need to put the inexplicable into a tangible form in order to explore our relationship to it. Thus, we tend to anthropomorphize or attribute human characteristics to the unknowable. In other words, we name and assign form to an abstract concept in order to relate to it at our level of ability. So, the Divine Essence or Absolute has become a 'Father' God figure that we were taught to visualize, pray to, and imagine having a personal relationship with.
Unfortunately, seeing the vast, infinite, absolute, and indescribable Goddessence only in the form of masculine metaphor and symbol has severely limited our human spiritual potential and greatly hindered our ability to live in peace and balance on this earth.
For the last several thousand years the dominant religious belief systems of our world have been patriarchal which sanctioned societal ethics that elevated God the Father over Mother Earth, and man over woman.
But it hasn’t always been this way! It is vital to remember that for eons before patriarchy, throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages of pre 'his-story,' there were worldwide 'Mother/Female and Earth' honoring societies that lived in a more egalitarian, sustainable and peaceful culture that thrived without war for thousands of years. It is urgent to rediscover and exhume the lost memory of those cultures to inform us and inspire us to construct a more stable foundation for society’s future.
Remembering these lost matrifocal civilizations authenticates and validates the significance of the Sacred Feminine and the importance of women and female values as we rebuild a healthier global unity.
It is time to balance the masculine and feminine principles within our belief systems, our religious doctrines, our cultural ethos, and within ourselves. To gain this equilibrium, we must shift our focus for a while to the idea of Universal Motherhood – we need to explore the metaphor of the Mother, the symbol of the Goddess and the model of Priestess. We need to bring to light the archaeological evidence of ancient Goddesses and their stories. We need to emphasize 'Motherly' love, wisdom, compassion, and creativity as well as respect sexuality as natural and sacred. We must empower women and celebrate their contribution to spirituality, culture, and society. And we must awaken ourselves, teach our children, and educate our men.
Awareness of the Sacred Feminine will aid us to appreciate the feminine nature in women and men. Awareness of a Universal Motherhood will help us to respect the earth and Mother Nature. Awareness of the Feminine Principle will help us honor women’s bio-physical and emotional passages through life, and to help all people (women particularly) to attain healthy self-esteem. And this awareness will encourage all persons to find inner balance and peace, thereby increasing respect and tolerance of each other – which ultimately will promote greater world harmony.
It is time to honor the Sacred Feminine. 'Honoring the Sacred Feminine,' in the spiritual sense, means valuing the feminine principle, along with the masculine principle, as equal and fundamental aspects of the Divine. From a planetary level, it means respecting and healing our Mother Earth. From a cultural standpoint, it means revivifying the archetype of the Goddess through entertainment and the arts and using language that gives equal emphasis to the pronouns 'she' and 'her.' In the societal sense, it means re-creating the role of Priestess, and respecting the contribution of women in business, science, art and politics, as well as the home and community. In a religious view, it means offering ceremony and service that reaffirms our connection to the divine, the Goddess, the earth, and each other. In the human sense, honoring the Sacred Feminine means especially valuing the innate worth of woman’s mind, body, and soul, as well as appreciating the 'feminine' qualities' in the male character." - End
Therefore, balancing the Divine Feminine with the Sacred Masculine is necessary to attain spiritual awareness and spiritual awakening and inner peace, and ultimately, ascension.
The word Gnosis, is even more ancient knowledge that supports all of this - and it is taken from the year 200 A.D. or earlier.
From Wikipedia: "Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge. The term is used in various Hellenistic religions and philosophies. It is best known from Gnosticism, where it signifies a knowledge or insight into humanity’s real nature as divine, leading to the deliverance of the divine spark within humanity from the constraints of earthly existence."
"Gnosticism originated in the late first century CE in nonrabbinical Jewish sects and early Christian sects. In the formation of Christianity, various sectarian groups, labeled 'gnostics' by their opponents, emphasized spiritual knowledge (gnosis) of the Divine spark within, over faith (pistis) in the teachings and traditions of the various communities of Christians. Gnosticism presents a distinction between the highest, unknowable God, and the demiurge or 'creator' of the material. The Gnostics considered the most essential part of the process of salvation to be this personal knowledge, in contrast to faith as an outlook in their world view along with faith in the ecclesiastical authority. They were regarded as heretics by the Fathers of the early church."
Duality/Polarity begins to fade away above the 3rd-dimension going into the 4th-dimension. I think Chase's work encapsulates a Multi-dimensionality to it [instead of just 'good vs. bad'] that illustrates this stepping stone in our Evolution quite phenomenally.
For example, in 1.08 The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti, Richard La Penna says to Melfi: "... And after a while, finally, you're going to get beyond psychotherapy, with it's cheesy moral relativism, finally you're going to get to good and evil. And he's evil.” Immediately following this scene is one of the most beautiful scenes in the series, where Tony is standing by the train track waiting for Christopher. The camera starts spanning all the different aspects of his face, showing the Multi-dimensionality that we could appreciate in Human Nature, instead of the duality that constrains our 3rd-dimension.
Gnosis = Knowledge = Power = Humanity's Divine Spark within Oneself = Salvation. “Education should never stop, it enriches all aspects of life.” - Mr. Wegler [5.06 Sentimental Education]