Posts Tagged ‘Duality’
So part of this spiritual path involves moving from fear towards love, becoming more and more loving.
The past few days I’ve allowed myself to be in my ego. To be angry. To feel my deep sadness. To experience this energy that for so long I’ve been trying to run away from, transcend, transform, heal, or in any way shape or form change. This egoic presence something I haven’t experienced in quite a long time, much less embraced.
I’ve decided to stop running from anything that is within me. Whether this fear is me or not me is not of primary importance right now. It is here, and I’m not going to run from it.
Diving into my own anger, I’m noticing one fear arising in particular: If I allow myself to experience my darkness, I’ll somehow slide back into my ego and become totally unconscious again, like some sort of crazed psycho killer or something. (Gotta love how the mind works…) A high degree of unconsciousness basically the complete failure for what one would call a spiritual person.
Looking at this more closely, we see that this fear is actually afraid of itself. It’s fear afraid of fear. The ego afraid of itself. It is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing mechanism.
If you’re afraid of experiencing you’re own fear, noticing your existing fear will bring up more fear, which will create more, which will create more, and so on.
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Non-duality is about inclusion, not exclusion. Non-duality seems to run contrary to duality. Non-duality (not two) says that All That Is is One.
The One is the All. The All are the One.
So how does duality fit into this?
Duality is the fundamental basis of separation, that there are many individual separate things. “This over here is me, but that over there is not.” While duality is not the ultimate truth at all, it is still a witnessable reality in a sense, is it not?
The All are the One. The One is All That Is.
If Non-duality didn’t include Duality within it, it wouldn’t be All That Is.
If All That Is didn’t include both the light AND the dark, it wouldn’t be ALL That Is. It would be Half-of-What-Could-Be.
Everything exists everywhere in the Universe simultaneously. It is omnipresent.
To experience physical reality, we basically put a filter over the Infinite to limit what we see, like putting on a pair of colored sunglasses. We vibrationally stand in a place which gives us a unique perspective to see various aspects of the infinite, a particular manifestation of All That Is. Playing with that vibration is the essence of the Law of Attraction. It’s a lot like looking at a hologram. It all exists now, but the version of the hologram you see depends upon the direction you are looking from.
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Question:
Dear Ariel,
Do you also appreciate God in everyday life, or mostly alone time in prayer or meditation?
I’m wondering if I’m on the right path to connecting with God. Here’s what I’ve been doing and hopefully you can tell me what you think about this…
I’ve been appreciating God when I look into the eyes of a baby, or a dog. I appreciate God when I hear my favorite music. This is especially confusing to me if I should think of God because I love bands like Nine Inch Nails and Korn which are quite dark but I really love it.
Basically everyone I come into face to face contact with, I try and silently acknowledge them as God, even if they are being rude.
Am I on the right path, or should it be more an inward journey of meditation and in solitude?
And also is it right to appreciate God in things which are dark, or should the acknowledgment be exclusive to things which are light?
Thanks a lot!
J
My response:
Great question.
We could say that at a certain level, God is generally found more through the light than the dark, yet God is in all that is so truly seeing things as they are would mean one sees the God in even the darkness. There is NOTHING but God. God is truly beyond the duality of good and evil or light and dark.
The easiest way to find God, however, is to look without mentation. To see without labeling, categorizing, or any of that other mental farting action. This is generally what happens when you look a baby in the eye or sit back and enjoy the presence of the music. You allow the energy to flow through you without mentally chattering about it.
Just be truly in the moment no matter what you’re doing and endeavor to see beyond what the veil of the mind covers.
It seems that it’s only by going beyond the mind that one can truly see God in everything, including even what is created through the mind. Otherwise one gets pissed, angry, and judgmental at things like rape, murder, stupidity, and so on.
The journey inward to experience things totally as they are is definitely a helpful part of the path.
The meditation in solitude can be good practice for allowing yourself to experience without the ego pasting its interpretation on top of what is, but it’s not the only time one can do this. The exercise of meditation gives you practice in adopting a new way of life, a lifestyle that you can incorporate into every moment of your day-to-day life.
That which we call God is truly available in All That Is so yes, it is appropriate to acknowledge God in all that is. Just keep in mind that the ego itself and all activity sourced in it is directly designed to deny or somehow replace God. Acknowledging the presence of and the power of God will help you see through the illusion of existence without God, of being disconnected from and separate from God.
God is All That Is.
Thanks for your question.
Our minds are built in such a way that if our beliefs have valid supporting evidence, they must certainly be true. After all, we have proof! All other beliefs must therefore be wrong. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
Let’s look at something as simple as the belief that 1+1=2.
It’s not absolutely true. It’s just an agreed upon concept.
What if we decided that 1+1=1? For example, you take one piece of clay, smush it together with another piece of clay, and you end up with just one piece of clay.
Or what if we decided that 1+1=11? Just stick the two numbers next to each other and call it a day. The Romans did something similar with their numerals.
In binary, the language used by computers, 1+1=10.
1 man + 1 woman = 2, 3, 4, 5, or even more people.
1 man + 1 woman = 1 person… if the relationship is really bad and one kills the other or jumps off a bridge. 
Or what if 1 + 1 = Window? Visualize it. The 1’s form the sides, the + is the crossbar in the middle, and the = forms the top and the bottom.
Silly examples, certainly, but they show the point:
Our beliefs are not absolutely true. They are only true because we agree that they’re true.
Let’s take this a step further. Here’s how to really demonstrate this for yourself. Read More …
Question:
The “problem” with spirituality as I see it is that it is not enough to know what to do, it is all experiential. We have to see for ourselves and learn the lessons ourselves to really understand. And this is one big difference between religion and spirituality in my opinion.
Most religious people I have met only do what they do because they have been told by someone else that it is the right thing to do. They are blindly following guidelines because “God” says it’s right. Their ego’s are so tightly glued to their beliefs that any reasoning with them they take as an attack on themselves and they get angry.
Of course they do. It’s their whole story, it is who they think they are. Who would they be if all of a sudden everything they thought they are would dissolve? You see, the ego provides a very useful function in our lives on this planet.
How else would we know to protect ourselves? How else would we know to feed ourselves? How else would we know to not put our hands in the fire, stay away from things that makes us ill, gather food for the winter, dress ourselves warmly, spread our genes to ensure that the species lives on and fight when we have to?
Ask yourself this question: Where would you be without your ego? Probably dead. Long time ago. Spend some time thinking about that one if you haven’t before.
So one of the functions of the ego is to ensure the survival of this body that we are in. It does so that we think that we are our thoughts, our minds, our body, emotions, the stuff we do, the things we have and everything else. Without the sense of self, there would be nothing to protect. If there was no other, there would be nothing to fear and we’d have become extinct long time ago.
My response:
First off, props to you for realizing that you do indeed have to EXPERIENCE Truth in order to know it. Simply intellectualizing or believing, buying into any structured external belief system of any sort will necessarily hold you apart from the highest Truth.
Truth can not be verbalized, only known. Whenever you put it into words, you are filtering down the infinite vastness of all that is into a few letters and sounds. The word “apple” is not the same thing as eating an actual apple.
Interestingly, you brought up this point and then went straight back into imagining (read, going to the mind for answers) as to what life without the ego would be like. You’re directly going against exactly the issue you just brought up.
Intellectually wondering what life would be like without an ego, while STILL coming from a place of ego will not work. You can’t transcend duality through duality. You have to reach Oneness by going to Oneness, not by going through the world of illusion.
Living in this world is like dreaming while you’re asleep. When you’re asleep, everything feels real and you know it to be so. You can’t say this is just a dream because you have nothing to compare it to.
It is only when you wake up that you can look back at the dream and accurately determine that it was all a dream, all a made up illusion in your mind.
This life we live in is the SAME thing. In order to experience it as a dream, to see the world of illusion as illusion, you have to first WAKE UP and then once you have awakened, look back at the dream and identify it as such. Read More …
Love is all there is.
It is literally impossible for anything other than Love to exist. Yet, if Love is all you experience, you will never truly be able to appreciate it.
In the same way that your favorite food grows tiresome if you eat it consistently, it is necessary to experience the opposite of that which you enjoy in order to fully understand and appreciate that which you enjoy.
Because Love is all there is and it’s impossible to experience anything other than Love, the next best thing is to forget and create the illusion of fear. You are given the tremendous gift of being able to believe fear is real in order to fully appreciate Love.
In the absence of that which you are NOT, that which you ARE is NOT.
In this lifetime and in all your other lifetimes, you have the ability to create whatever it is you wish. You get to create fear. You get to create Love. With enough trial and error, you’ll start to come to the conclusion that Love simply feels better. It’s a more enjoyable place to be. Fear may feel good to the ego, but it’s ultimately a destructive energy. What may feel righteous or justified in the short term will never bring long term happiness.
If fear doesn’t exist, how is it that we can experience it?
Let’s take a look at several pairs of opposites. Read More …
