From Two to Many - Parallelisms

Some days ago I wrote (in Spanish) a post on our society's obsession with pairs of opposite elements. It was also about the beauty of shades and open minds.  

The post was influenced by a book I was reading: The Ethical Slut. Two days later I started reading its last chapter and I was astonished to discover the similarities between my post and this final chapter. I'm going to copy it here. I'm sorry that only those who can read both Spanish and English can appreciate the parallelisms (even though the book is more centered on sex). Enjoy!

"From Two to Many

The world is very fond of twos: black and white, male and female, mind and body, good and bad. These pairs, we all learn, are opposed: there’s the right way and the wrong way, and our task is to do battle to defend the right and destroy the wrong. This kind of thinking dominates our courts, our politics, and our talk shows, with some crazy results: for instance, some people believe that anyone who enjoys sex outside of marriage, or a kind of marriage that’s different from theirs, must be attacking their marriage. Anything that is different must be opposed, must be the enemy.

When right and wrong are your only options, you may believe that you can’t love more than one person, or that you can’t love in different ways, or that you have a finite capacity for love—that “many” must somehow be opposed to “one,” or that your only options are in love and out of love, with no allowance for different degrees or kinds of love.

We would like to propose something different. Instead of these simpleminded either/or arguments, consider the possibility of seeing, and valuing, everything that there is, without viewing them as in opposition to one another. We think that if you can do this, you will discover that there are as many ways to be sexual as there are to be human, and all of them are valid. There are lots of ways to relate, to love, to express gender, to share sex, to form families, to be in the world, to be human … and none of them in any way reduces or invalidates any of the others.

When we open our mind to a world beyond opposites, we become able to see beyond unrealistic perfection and unachievable goals. We can free ourselves to be fully conscious of all the wonderful variety and diversity that there is right now in the world, right here, in the present, available to us.

Thus sluthood can become a path to transcendence, a freeing of the mind and spirit as well as the body, a way of being in the world that allows expanded awareness, spiritual growth, and love beyond imagining."