Question Duality

   If you have ever felt hurt by something that a person says to you, you will notice that part of the hurt comes from the fact that you are subconsciously agreeing with what the other says. You hold that possibility in your mind and even start to collude with it. A person says that I am walking too slowly, and then I feel terrible about it. For one, I might suspect that the person is correct in their assessment of me, and start to become somehow defensive. For another, I agree with the person's evaluation of what it means to be a slow person; that is, I see it in a negative light, rather than in a neutral one. I might even go so far as to think that all the world would agree with him, and therefore I am the only one who is slow. Thus, I brand myself a kind of outsider to the world. 

   All of these states are rather depressing, and they all come from the agreement that something is good and something else is bad. Not once do I ever question this dualism. Is it really correct that one person's pace is superior to another's? If so, where does that belief come from? Can that belief possibly be questioned? This is where it's important to see that duality is always a construction of the mind. A person, a quality or a thing is never "good" or "bad" unless some value system or judgment is imposed upon it, at which point it starts to appear as good or bad. From this appearance comes a host of suffering, including feelings of estrangement, insecurity, bitterness, defensiveness, and so on. If one is able to see that all duality is fundamentally a construction of mind, would one be so quick to deem one thing as "good "and the other as "bad"? Perhaps if a person could see the harm that duality causes people (including cases of human conflict and war) they would be able to see how deceiving it is, and how much suffering it makes i the world. On the other hand, if a person suspended their own tendency to see things dualistically, they may start to relieve the suffering they create for themselves or those around them. Things and situations are never absolutely good or bad. Instead, these are always assessments or value judgments we make in the moment that create suffering. 

  The point I am making is, if one is able to see the mechanism through which the mind creates dualisms and reinforces them, there is more chance to behold those dualities as parts of a whole, rather than seeing oneself as "one" or "the other". This is a bit like a chess player who is playing both sides of the chess game. She or his is cognizant that a chess game could not exist if only one player's pieces were on the board. Similarly, for me to feel the grief of thinking I am one thing, there must be an accompanying tension to embody the other. And both sides are simply being played out in the mind. This is a bit like Yin and Yang. To see that these tensions and opposites are continually feeding on one another for their existence is to reckon that we are neither absolutely one nor the other, but that both conditions co-exist as mental constructs that are in flow or in process. And what is the mind that truly beholds those processes, moment to moment? Well, that's for all of us to figure out!