The Puzzling Paradoxes of Duality
A paradox is a complex, entangled, messy place to find yourself. It means that you are sitting in a duality, with two sides of equal power, both sides pulling at you, believing they are right.
Like a political debate of two equals, there is no winner.
The Paradox of Duality
By Royce Amy Morales
Lately, humanity is finding itself thrashing about in some massive dualities. The amount of divisiveness, right/wrong thinking, desire to fight or flee, and needing something external for happiness are all signs of dualities.
These attitudes are indicative of feeling divided from within.
On this evolutionary journey we have chosen to be on, duality is the final frontier to get past an essential spiritual goal. However, there is no user manual explaining how to get there, and non-duality goes counter to everything we have been taught.
Giving opposing labels to things seems a logical choice. Think about how often your thoughts divide something into two sides. You watch a movie and criticize it as good or a waste of time. You meet someone and immediately determine if you should continue a relationship or chalk them off. You judge a political party as senseless, yet you continue to dutifully vote for them.
What would it look like to no longer perceive the world and all that happens as divided into two parts? How can that happen? Is it possible to reach a spiritual place of “is-ness,” seeing reality as one unified field?
Where Does Dualistic Thinking Come From?
The truth is you have already accomplished that high-level spiritual task. Maybe before you were even a toddler.
You entered this physical world in a non-dualistic state; everything is the same, and I am connected to all consciousness. However, within a few months, you recognized yourself as an individual and started dividing life between yourself and others.
Plus, in order to have control over you, and ensure you would acceptably fit into society, parents labeled some things you did as good, some as bad, some choices as right, and some as wrong. Naturally, you wanted to please them, trying to keep or gain their approval, so you bought those dualities. Thus, their value system became your own.
Even before you entered school, you were taught by the use of comparisons. Nighttime is for sleeping, and daytime is for playing. Sweets are for dessert not dinner. Spring is better than winter. Happiness is good, and sadness is bad.
Teachers continued using this form to educate you, defining concepts using one to explain the other.
Seeing life dualistically comes from another source even more powerful an influence than how you were raised or what you were taught: Subconscious, fear-based programming.
As a young child, prior to developing your ability to think logically, you experienced incidents that contained some degree of pain and/or loss. During those moments, your survival-based consciousness jumps to high alert doing its assigned job to make sure you survive. It then made decisions about yourself, others and life to assure you were safe from then on.
Those decisions became your inner programming.
From those survival-based thoughts, you divided the world into certain things symbolizing survival and other things as perceived threats. Then, based on those etched-in subconscious programs, you began observing life in a generalized, separated, dualistic way.
No amount of logic or reasoning can change that viewpoint since it feels like truth and keeps you safe. Perceiving life non-dualistically feels like death to your primitive mind.
Dealing With Duality
There are ways to shift out of dualistic thinking. Mindfulness and observing those false notions can help. Notice the judgments, the right-wrong labels you automatically put on things. Generally, those notions contain various triggers, negative emotions, and physical sensations.
Then, do an inner check to see if you have the same or similar judgments of yourself. This can be as simple as catching yourself thinking he is an idiot and asking yourself where do I believe I’m an idiot?
Duality vanishes when you see yourself as one with others. You experience that we are all the same, manifesting in unique ways, choosing to be here to help wake each other up to whatever denial we are in. The willingness to look honestly at what is being reflected takes you back to connectedness, to oneness.
Without duality, you experience things exactly as they are like seeing a flower as just a flower rather than a beautiful object that brings joy to the receiver on Valentine’s Day.
The Power of Spiritual Experiences
Spiritual experiences, before your mind attempts to describe or make sense of them, are non-dualistic. A spontaneous out-of-body experience is simply that until you return and try to understand logically what happened or give it a good/bad label.
With more spiritual experiences, you change how you see them and live from them. That enlightenment will be how you live your life and experience different situations. It means a part of you has shifted, and there will be many more transformations to experience.
Those light bulb moments change your awareness of reality, but your fear-based consciousness is often the main boss. Resolve those old incidents that are subconsciously running you, having you divide yourself into dual aspects that divide the world.
Your personal history is not the source of who you are and how you perceive things. Getting past dualities takes mindful work, not avoiding them.
The Ultimate Goal
Although there is a place for dualistic thinking in this physical reality, once dualities start dissolving, life takes on a feeling of connectedness and expansiveness. Obliterating it can be as simple as recognizing where it comes from, determining whether it is truth, a need to be right, or an effort to prove something.
Your values may change and become more “world-centric,” caring about the entire world instead of something smaller like your tribe, society, or nation.
You may still care about those smaller entities, but your primary orientation is toward the health of the whole planet. You identify as a global citizen, part of the human family rather than just a nation. You pursue causes like social justice, human rights, animal rights, and the environment. Your concern is about the entire web of life you are part of, especially the evolution of consciousness.
See It, Know It
Start to envision life without duality. Realize that you are already non-dualistic, rediscovering your connectedness. Allow yourself to remember experiences of non-duality. Perhaps times you did not even realize that was what they were.
Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, know that it is possible. Be open to living in a nondual state. Don’t try to fake getting there by using spiritual bypass techniques.
That does not mean that you are eliminating all differences. Instead, it means you see the differences as connected, like a yin/yang symbol.
Life is an ongoing dance of not knowing and revelation. It is quite an adventure discovering that you don’t know and yet you do. However, with each passing year, you are mellowing out and not as drastically dividing things.
Your spiritual journey escorts you to experience that everything is the same even though things change from minute to minute in this physical reality. The ultimate goal is self-realization and then letting go of self. Having a glimpse of a spiritual state can start the process, dangling a carrot of possibility.
Keep in mind what St. Francis said: “What we are looking for is what is looking.”
The ultimate non-dualistic truth is simple: All is love. It is your true nature and does not need an opposite to exist. And, if love is who you are, there is no loss. How could there be a loss if you are everything?
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About the Author
Royce Morales is a spiritual trailblazer who has been teaching her innovative approach to inner transformation, Perfect Life Awakening, for over four decades.
Her classes and private sessions shift subconscious, disempowering, false programmed beliefs by releasing where they originated. As a result, self-sabotaging patterns and paralyzing issues lose their impact, transforming life from triggered to empowered.
She authored three books about her teachings available on Amazon. www.RoyceMorales.com
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