Does Duality Even Exist?

Don’t bother pursuing non-duality

Recently, I have heard the word, ‘duality’ as often as I have heard ‘non-duality’. “We live in a world of duality”. What does this even mean? I don’t personally know anything about Advaita Vedanta, or certain Zen philosophies, books by Alan Watts or Krishnamurti, or even speculative science. Sure, I’ve sometimes heard about these works or read an article or two about them but I’ve immediately discarded them for the reason that I felt they were all taking me away from something. Same goes with why I don’t follow any celebrity gurus or people that claim they have the most followers, advertise they are enlightened, or sell you some kind of drug to experience “nothing”. I find them all so terribly boring. Hope I’m not offending anyone.

Now with that out of the way, is there such a thing as duality? Sure, there is the duality of man and woman, tall trees and short tress, big mountains and small mountains, narrow rivers, wide rivers, etc. But the duality I am questioning here is one of a psychological sense, because as far as perception goes, there really is only ‘what is’, and then there is what we think there is which becomes very subjective.

I’ve always assumed duality has something to do with measurement or a creation of some separation between what is and what we make it out to be. In a recent post/blog and in many discussions, I use the analogy of an elastic as the distance I create between ‘me’ and the other, perhaps you. In this stretch of elastic lies my conditioned thinking which comes with many inherited “lenses” (ways I view the world) that are actually the cause of conflicts, various opinions, unconscious biases, misery, beliefs. So the beginning of the elastic could be the point of reference of a ‘me’ or a ‘center’ which then sees another point of reference which is at the end of that elastic and that could be the ‘you’. Now wait a moment. The ‘you’ at the end of the elastic, the stretch of elastic being the content of consciousness, is also created by the ‘me’. You as in how I see you, what my interpretation of you is including your personality, anything you identify with, a record of previous meetings, etc. In my consciousness, I’ve created ‘you’ at the end of that elastic and the distance between the ‘me’ and ‘you’ is consciousness with all of its issues - psychologically speaking that is. So all of my interactions with ‘you’ are projected through an image I have of you. And you are probably doing the same thing of me.

So basically, I have a ‘me’ and the other. This is where duality lives. I have created a center which looks at the world, aka the ‘me’.

What if even just for a moment, I don’t have a center. Then that elastic never exists, correct? It can’t even be created. There is no center creating any distance, therefore, duality is not present. Is it a fact, and if it is, can there be any alternative?

Another way to state this perhaps is if there is a direct perception, meaning there is NOTHING between the thing you see and the see-er (the perceiver), meaning there is NOTHING in-between interrupting the perception with it’s beliefs, ideologies, systems, biases, etc, then isn’t that kind of (direct) perception denying the existence of duality?

💡💡💡

I suppose you might now be asking where or how does duality arise because it seems we all seem to live in duality. Where does the center come from and so forth. Ah, the mind is quick to move towards an answer. It wants to know for sure if there is a center which is deemed ‘evil’ and therefore I can go after it and destroy it. I wonder if it knows that this very thinking is originating from the ‘center” :). Patience dear friends. We will not go after the “idea that there may not be duality”. You see what we said here? We are trained, out of our conditioning, we will go looking for the opposite which means we have not understood the ‘what is’. It’s as if the mind doesn’t know or want to deal with what is and therefore, it creates a direction or action of the opposite. And that is how duality is created. It sees (rather the ‘me’ sees') that one is frustrated, doesn’t know or want to deal with it, and says I must not be frustrated, or it’s no good to be frustrated. So duality it seems, is created out of a conditioned mind that can’t face or deal with ‘what is’. Is this making any sense?

We said earlier that where a ‘center’ operates, it creates a separation between the ‘me’ looking out at an object and the object itself. Is it possible to perceive that there is only the object? Is there a way that one can be aware that the mind moves away from fact of ‘what is’ which in-turn creates duality? And being aware of the risk of this phenomena arising, there is only direct perception of what is. This then does away with the need of any ‘me’ that observes and wants to take some action based on its petty little conditioning.

Now how does one “get it” from their perspective - can you perceive this through your own eyes, with your own mind? Not to take what I write here, try to understand it as a theory, and then project that theory into your mind as a means to try and achieve it or put it in practice, and then put your faith in the writer as a teacher or some authoritative figure - I reject all of that. It is you who needs to know what is perception.

Is it possible for a conditioned mind to perceive without the ‘me’?

Is it possible for a conditioned mind to perceive without the ‘me’? By seeing, we mean observing, being aware of, understanding. When we look with the ‘me’ we only ever see things partially. Partially means a mind that has learned to see with knowledge. That knowledge is limited and that seeing is contained within that knowledge. One example of this is say you meet a family member after 20 years of absence. When you meet, you carry with you the image of that person from 20 years ago, and what does your mind do? It perceives your conversation/meeting through that image. It’s starts comparing a picture of what the person used to look like with all the wrinkles of now, hair loss, and still carries all the memories from the past, regardless of how that person has changed over 20 years. So we never really see the person, we project through an image which is limited. This is the ‘me’ in action.

We are essentially asking if we can see wholistically because the ‘me’ only works in fragments of time. What if I could really understand myself totally then I’ve essentially eliminated all my problems. I can’t experience stress unless there is an experiencer that is actively experiencing stress and perceiving it as stress. But without the experiencer there is only the experiencing. For perception to be wholistic, we need our senses, our eyes, our ears, our whole being but we like to use our mind which is conditioned by knowledge, beliefs, experiences from the past and this is how we solve all of our problems which to me sounds very dangerous. Because if you look at your own life and what is happening in the world, we only ever solve problems temporarily - they keep coming back. The arguments return. The burnouts return. The anxiety returns. You try and subside it with superficial wellbeing activities or take a pill, but all of that is escaping from what is. Globally, we try to stop wars by signing treaties and so forth which is after they have annihilated people and then hate each other for the next thousand years. So we need get to the root of all issues. If one sees how they are constructed, you can see that the world is no different - it operates in parts/fragments and therefore divides and where there is division, it inevitably destructs.

So our perception must be one out of silence - not chattering from knowledge, experience, beliefs, and so on. Now, I put to you a question: how do I get rid of a noisy mind? And of course many of you would say meditation which is just a fragmented activity that temporarily quietens the fragmented mind by concentrating/focusing on breathing, apply a method, sitting a certain way, etc. That too will never last because you are still exercising the ‘me’ - in fact you are probably strengthening its validity. It’s so unfortunate that the word “meditation” has been turned into something repetitive, something that people “sell” because if one truly took the time to understand what it really is, this whole post would be unnecessary. But back to the point. Perception must be out of silence and not out of the experience or knowledge from the past.

When you see the truth for yourself, you would never ask how do I get a quiet mind. The truth you see is that the mind is noisy and from that truth in which you must put all of your senses and energy into to understand this, then the mind is free from that noise. This kind of perception is intelligence which doesn’t assume you need to be silent in your observation. You see with full attention. It is when you are not attending to seeing that your daily stress and problems exist.

Love and Light,

GC