beyond duality introduction

In this series of talks I am going to be looking at some of the key dualities which we face on the spiritual journey. And part of the spiritual journey is to do with transcending these dualities, going beyond them. But before we look at specific dualities, I want to give an introduction.

The first thing to be said is that we are not indulging in philosophy whilst we are undertaking a spiritual journey. Philosophy will get us nowhere on this path. Philosophy is to do with building mental understandings of the world around us, and that is not the game we are involved in here. We are not concerned with mental understandings. We are concerned with direct truth. We are concerned with life, lived in its totality, in its rawness, in its immediacy. We are concerned with the feel of truth.

Whilst we must use words to explore together duality and the mysteries of life, in your own search, within, forget about the understanding, the words: they do not hold the truth, they cannot convey it. At best, they can help us to see our misunderstandings, where our anguish comes from.

Duality – twoness – opposites: yin and yang, black and white, day and night, light and dark. These are concepts, and in creating opposing concepts, we create a battlefield. Somewhere between these two a line is drawn, an arbitrary line, and it takes energy then to keep the opposites apart: mental energy. And we invariably begin to dwell on one side of the line or the other. One side is seen as good, as healthy, as the home, and the other side is seen as the enemy, the evil side, the dark side – to be avoided at all costs, to be held back, kept at a distance. And in this strange psychological world we shall never feel whole, for we have cut ourself off from half of life.

On the spiritual journey we must go beyond such duality. Not only one specific duality, such as masculine and feminine, but all dualities. The whole dualistic way of approaching the world shall be transcended. And in that transcendence we feel our wholeness once more. Through that transcendence we can feel our divinity. We become one with god. We realise that we always were this, but our mental divisions of the world, into opposing pairs, into opposites, has somehow clouded our view and removed us from the Garden of Eden.

So to return to paradise we should look into these dualities. But not just intellectually: we should feel our way into them. And as the feeling of a particular duality deepens, we shall find ourself balancing the opposites, until they are felt as of equal worth, of equal weight and measure. And when they are totally balanced and we are resting at the fulcrum, no longer taking sides, no longer leaning this way or that, when we are still, at the centre point, the duality can collapse and disappear as if it never existed. For in truth it never did. It was but our thinking mind that created the duality in the first place.

It should be understood from the beginning that words create duality. Symbolic thought separates existence into parts. It fragments a continuous whole. Existence has diversity in it, yes, but energetically, all these diverse parts are not separate. They form a continuum: one continuous energy field, a process ever changing, moving, flowing. But symbolic thought does not like this continuity. Symbols are discrete things. They separate one object from another, arbitrarily. And in this separation, this mental separation, there becomes the possibility of fight, of struggle, of conflict. And indeed, such conflict is inevitable once we come to believe in the fragmented view of the world.

So we need to go beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond the symbolic way of living in the world through the mind. We need to feel the world. We need to feel life directly. And in that directness we will come to see that there are no boundaries. There is no separation. Ultimately, there is no separation between me and all of existence. And so, by going beyond duality, we can come to reside in our wholeness once more.