Many call bal­ance the golden mean, while oth­ers take it for mediocrity itself. We might say that the world is out of bal­ance, yet it is rather that the state of har­mony comes about dynam­ic­ally. If we try to inter­pret bal­ance through the word har­mony, we must define har­mony itself as well, and har­mony is noth­ing other than things com­ing to ful­fil­ment, in their meta­phys­ic­al sense as well.

To assume bal­ance or har­mony turns our atten­tion to the begin­ning of the uni­verse: did the world arise from peace or from ten­sion? Every­one fires back the answer: the Big Bang, the expand­ing cos­mos… Could a piece of mat­ter the size of a coin, of prac­tic­ally infin­ite dens­ity, have set off on an expan­sion like a chain reac­tion? Today the other view, the stand­point of cre­ation, is voiced more quietly, and yet the work­ings of a single cell are far more com­plex than any­thing that could have come about by chance. What if the good Lord merely tossed this cos­mic coin high into the air, and is still wait­ing to see which side it lands on: heads or tails? It may be that ten­sion belongs to the nature of the dual world, and energy is no doubt needed for the set­ting out, the com­ing into being, the unfold­ing of the uni­verse, and yet we may assume that infin­ite calm, an immeas­ur­able tran­scend­ent bal­ance, is car­ry­ing on this exper­i­ment of dual­ity. Oth­er­wise, how could any bal­ance at all arise in this world so fraught with ten­sions?

The two poles of dual­ity strain against each other in etern­al coun­ter­bal­ance, in the paired oppos­ites of mat­ter and spir­it, body and soul, earth and heav­en, tran­si­ence and etern­al exist­ence, shad­ow and light, evil and good. Between the peace of bal­ance and the dynam­ism of ten­sion, what mat­ters is to find the golden mean. To com­pare, and so to keep things in pro­por­tion, we need a fixed point. Archimedes, too, needed a point from which he could move the world, and Epi­cur­us also remarks: ‘If you go to war against all sen­sa­tions, you will have no basis against which to judge the very sen­sa­tions you claim are false.’ (Prin­cip­al Doc­trines XXIII). Accord­ing to an Indi­an say­ing, the great temple of Dwarka will stand as long as the Sun and the Moon are in the sky – that is, in this cycle of cre­ation this sac­red build­ing is such a sure point of ref­er­ence for the faith­ful. Bal­ance on earth and in heav­en? Con­stancy in a chan­ging world?

Nat­ur­al phe­nom­ena shun lin­ear­ity, and what we see instead is cyc­lic­al pro­cesses at work in the etern­al return. It makes a dif­fer­ence where our enquiry begins: do we dis­cov­er, between two chaot­ic states, a bal­ance that settles for a moment, or do we sup­pose, between two states of bal­ance, a cer­tain top­pling? Dis­crete points and states line up one after anoth­er in a chain, and there arises a kind of order, a cer­tain bal­ance. Bal­ance is at times the res­ult, at other times a neces­sary com­pon­ent, of move­ment. In nature there is not a single true circle or right angle, and yet it may be called per­fect. And the phe­nomen­on of exist­ence is prob­ably described most closely by a wave-like nature and the fractal pat­tern.

The state of bal­ance is usu­ally linked with still­ness, but we also know a bal­ance that shows itself in move­ment and change. When some change pauses for a while, we may regard that too as part of bal­ance: after out­pour­ing comes with­draw­al, after move­ment comes rest, a set­tling. We may say that move­ment and still­ness, stat­ic and dynam­ic states, organ­ic­ally pre­sup­pose one anoth­er, and indeed, seen from a vant­age point high­er than any par­tic­u­lar situ­ation, bal­ance and imbal­ance are in bal­ance.

These exceed­ingly del­ic­ate work­ings of nature are forever being dis­turbed by tem­pera­ment­al man, as if he wanted to tip the har­mo­ni­ous order of nature off bal­ance.