If success and failure become independent of their accentuation by the felt duality of others, they become something entirely different from what they generally are. The severity of their contrariety is very considerably mitigated and they gradually get amalgamated. For example, the persons who failed to reach the top of Everest before its first conqueror will be seen not to have failed but to have succeeded in getting near the peak, unless success happens to be a name not for the entire process of climbing but only for the last step which the first conqueror took.
The more our perception is free from clouding and the less vitiated it is by felt duality, the less contrariety or incompatibility exists between the extremes or opposites of experience. In the final undimmed perception there is neither success nor failure, for there is nothing to gain or lose. However, until this unfailing self-assurance is permanently established, one is inevitably encaged in the illusion of duality or relatively false values. Then there always are approximations towards a receding target; and these approximations may be called either partial failure or partial success, according to one’s own point of view. This also shows how every success implies a failure and every failure a success. The two opposites tread upon each other in the world of illusion. One who can withstand both success and failure with equanimity is nearing a truer appreciation of both; and for one who goes beyond the extremes or opposites, the question of withstanding either does not arise.
However, both opposites are unavoidable during the process of evolution. Evolutionary illusion or illusory evolution has to proceed through apparently incompatible opposites such as pleasure and pain, vice and virtue, success and failure. Of the many pairs of opposites, the pair which needs especial mention and consideration is that of man and woman. Male and female human forms are rightly described as opposite sexes. Progressive realization of the adequate forms, the continuation of the species, and the onward march of the incarnated lifestream are dependent upon the opposition and interplay of the sexes, particularly at the higher phases of biological evolution. This is equally true of psychological and spiritual evolution as long as it is held up in the domain of illusion. The opposition of sexes and the alternative attempts to overcome or reconcile this opposition are admittedly a source of inspiration, sublimation and exasperation, which haunt the interplay of sex opposites at the psychic level until they are withstood or understood fully and adequately.
-Beam, p61