“Accept the dualities of life”

The Law of Duality

When working with this law you may find that when attempting to balance the duality you will end up attracting the opposite of what you want.  For the moment you call in that which you are seeking to balance, everything in its opposite will come tumbling into your life.  If you are seeking more clarity, confusion will seem to reign supreme.  Nothing will seem to be clear anymore, and you will wonder why you ever started on this journey.  Yet, if you continue to work on changing your thinking and your belief patterns you will reach the balance point.  This is what the Law of Duality is all about.  It is about reaching a balance point.  It is not about operating at either extreme.  It is about remaining at your Centre even when the hurricane of life is swirling around you.

Imagine your most disgraceful moment and then imagine yourself at ease in it, sitting quietly while the leaves of worry float away in the breeze. Feeling sad about your losses will only way you down. Accept your desire without coveting or needing that which you want.

What is duality?

How many times have you determined that you or another were wrong, or right for that matter?

Have you experienced this duality of wrong and right daily, hourly or every moment of your life?

Duality is the concept and experience of life where one chooses to judge people, places and things. In doing so, one takes sides with either the right side or the wrong side.

This is usually not something that is turned off and on like a light switch at will. Typically, one lives from duality (ego) consciousness or they live from soul (unity) consciousness.

There is only one world, one people, one creation, one choice. But humanity, as a collective, has split the quality and value of people's choices into two categories. This split is “duality consciousness” when really there is simply “choice”.

All citizens of Earth choose each choice or make each decision the best they can give their life experiences and so each choice, truly, is a right choice and good enough for that person at that time.

Moving from duality to non-judgmental, unity consciousness will save energy, time and create world peace.

Let’s start by introducing the paradoxical world in terms that we understand on a day-to-day basis: life sucks sometimes. The pitfalls of reality can pull us into the thresholds of suffering, depression, delusion and sometimes feelings of guilt and failure. This is a negative way to start an article, but it’s the truth. We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt the hurt, the ache, the headache, the dull pain of unfortunate events, or even worse, the lack of events – boredom.
The point being, we have all, in one way or another, been uncomfortable and experienced something that didn’t feel so good in the mind and/or the body. Here is the upside, the other side, the alternative thought: we live in a paradoxical reality. There are two sides to every coin. Every failure exists as the counter of success, every pain counters the great feeling of comfort in the body.

Why is understanding the Duality significant?

Understanding the duality of all things is important because it allows us to see from other perspectives. The more important part of understanding the duality is seeing that all perceptions are RELATIVE and therefore separate from the inherent, physical reality. There is the distinction that the mind is not the body and vice versa; we can perceive the world, but we will never know it. 

Examples of Duality in Perspective

The True Color of The Flower

I see a flower, it is turquoise. A colour-blind man sees a flower, it is light-green. A dog sees a flower it is dark blue. A blind man doesn’t see the flower. A woman born with more cone photoreceptors in her eyes can see a spectrum of more colors: she says it’s “_____” (not yet identified color). They are all looking at the same flower. These are all relative observations, so who is to conclusively describe the color of the flower? Nobody. Not even one knows the true color of the flower, but at the same time they all know the color of the flower. The flower is all colors, and it is but one. 

*Key point: The body’s perception of the flower is distorted, so the reality experienced by the mind becomes only relative. Because each of our experiences of the universe must first pass through a flawed medium (the physical self), the final experience we receive is impure and diluted. The colors they each see are real and false at the same time. Each person witnesses a different color. What is the true property of the flower itself? Does it have no color? Or is it all colors? The answer to this lies in the realm of the absolute, something our physical bodies cannot translate or experience. 

What Happened When the Man Was Shot

A man is shot in the back, killed instantly by a passer-by. There are several witnesses, and this is what they say. A woman says that it happened very quickly and that it looked painless and calculated, as horrible as it was. A child says that it was the longest happening he has ever seen; he wonders why no one saved the person. A man says that this was a tragedy, and that “random” and “senseless” violence is disgusting and pitiful. A man says he saw the gunman earlier pacing back and forth near a bus stop, like he was planning something. One last girl says that she knew the man who was shot: it was an ex-boyfriend that abused her; she says it was good riddance. The perceptions they have made are both true and untrue. 

*Key point: It is both random and not random depending on perspective. The perspective makes your personal observation true and untrue. It is random if you believe it to be, but it is also not random. The tragic nature of the killing is also a perception. Something is tragic only in relation to one’s own beliefs. Is it tragic that the man died? It is all perspective. The variable of time also comes into play: time just is, but it is also perceived and measured at varying levels. To say that something happened quickly or slowly is a perception of time. Time only flows at one speed but is perceived on infinitely different levels. 

My House

I have a house. I say the house is worth $100,000. A real estate appraiser says it’s only worth $90,000. A monk says it’s worth nothing. A monopoly owner says it’s worth $300,000 and he’s willing to pay cash upfront for it. A bird flies by and shits on it and doesn’t consider its worth whatsoever. A kid, who is the son of the previous owner, thinks that there is no price that can match the value that it means to him because he has lived there his whole life until his family moved out. Who is right? 

*Key point: They are all right and none of them are right. The house has no inherent value because all the values given to it are relative to the person ascribing the value. The relative nature of value means that there are no true values for anything because everything is based on perspective. This is the separation of mind and matter. Because these values are relative, the house itself has no set value; it can be changed at any time. The significance of this very liberal nature of values is covered in my last point below. 

The Relative and the Absolute – The Nature of Duality

The duality is what separates truth into two parts, two parts of the same whole: the perceived, relative truth, and the inherent, absolute truth. If something is perceived, the absolute truth cannot be understood. Absolute truth lies beyond the perception, because perception is only one filter that can be used to view something (it is merely one angle and not all angles). 

“Dark would not exist without the light”

On those dark days, we sometimes forget that the dark would not exist without the light. That deathly hangover came from a wild night of endorphin-raging inhibition; the dark and stormy skies precede a heavy rain that makes the greens greener and the harvests plenty.

“Beauty exists only because there is ugliness.”

The Tao Te Ching offers another perspective of this duality that we are constantly experiencing but often fail to see. He brings to light the paradoxical unity that exists right beneath our noses. He notes that, “beauty exists only because there is ugliness.” We create these judgements and duality belief systems without even knowing it. We love to label and categorize things as negative vs. positive, or right vs. wrong. It’s part of our nature.

What the Tao suggests is that we find oneness and unity within these paradoxes, within the ugly and the beautiful, the happy and the sad, the negative and the positive. This is a ‘big picture’ perspective, often hard to truly incorporate into the perception of your day-to-day life, but I encourage you to try it.

This unity is the understanding and acceptance of both sides. The Tao tells us to live “openly with the apparent duality and paradoxical unity.” This suggestion, translated into our modern-day world, is: JUST BE, ACT WITHOUT EFFORT, ACCEPT WHAT IS. Accept the good and the bad, appreciate that every emotion and every feeling has two sides. Be aware of the dualities in your daily life and give thanks for the bad, because it would not exist without the good.

Duality handling in Bhagwat Gita

It points to Gita - equilibrium of mind in all situations. Not to get shocked with surprise because world is like that. Nothing can surprise us. Because things should be taken as it is without any likes and dislikes.

What things should You never do?

1.     Never share your aims and goals with others.

2.     Work hard in silence, make your success look effortless.

3.     Never get emotional with someone who isn't too close to you.

4.     Let go of your ego, but not your self-respect. There is a fine line between the two.

5.     Never be available to a person all the time. People tend to take things which come easily, for granted

6.     Never hurt your parents for others. You might get a replacement for that person in your life, but your parents will never find a replacement for you.

7.     Never speak too much. The less you talk, the more it is valued.

8.     Never fail to appreciate a person who deserves it. You'll find the happiness in it once you start doing it.

9.     Never waste your life living other dreams.

10.Never share your success with people who won't be happy about it.