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Overcoming duality is a critical step in achieving wholeness, but the mysteries of light and dark are complex and often elusive. In this excerpt from his latest book The Secret Tradition of the Soul, Patrick Harpur takes us on an dance through the primordial complementarity of spirit and soul and illuminates many of the misconceptions surrounding the age-old connundrum.

The Greeks regarded sexual passion as a kind of madness -- possession by Eros -- which deprived you of all dignity and made you betray your friends. Nowadays we are particularly prone to such madness because we have lost the religious depth which would contain and define the soul's desire for something beyond the human. 

The daimon overturns the conventional view held by psychotherapy: that what happens early in life determines what happens later. We are not the products of our history; we are a-historical creatures for whom events in our childhood and later development are mirrors in which we catch glimpses of our primordial image.