DUALISTIC DUPLICITY

What is, manifestation, existence, can be seen as accidental chaos, or it can be felt organically as something so much more than that. This feeling is not of the senses, or the body, but something deeper and more subtle within. When that inner feeling is deep, clear and stable multiplicity dissolves into emptiness, separation into unity: questions dissolve into silence and silence emerges as delight.

Questions arise when we are moved out of the stillness of silence. This is a movement into separation: a movement that brings with it a sense of isolation and vulnerability, however subtle and unacknowledged. We feel exposed and seek safety: that seeking takes the form of questioning in the mind. If a question remains in the mind it can only generate an endless sequence of further, qualifying questions, even if at first they take the form of answers: for that is the function of mind: to enquire, even with an answer.

All of this: questioning, answering, dissolution, emergence is the dance of duality. The dynamic of duality is the dynamic of life, of existence. This dynamic expresses itself in every layer of the human experience: birth and death; day and night; male and female; love and hate; rich and poor; clarity and confusion. Most fundamentally it is the dynamic of perception and cognition: within which subject and object polarise into awareness-of.

Awareness-of, consciousness-of arises within and as an expression of awareness or consciousness itself. This is where we live our lives. Recognising possibilities; evaluating them according to our experience, understanding, preferences, values, hopes, fears, desires and selfimage; selecting between them; making a decision, taking an action and being faced with the consequences. This process takes place within the field of subject-action-object; wherein awareness itself as unencumbered delight is obscured by the perceptions that it illuminates. This is the field of duality

Within the field of duality we are constantly distinguishing, differentiating, comparing, evaluating, judging. All of which are indications of the dissatisfaction that has moved us out of the stillness of silence and into separation, which they naturally and inevitably express and sustain. Deep within the grip of this dissatisfaction, whatever its cause may have been, we lose touch with the unity from which all this multiplicity springs: we forget where we have come from, we forget what we most deeply are and most deeply know ourselves to be. In this forgetfulness we become delirious with the unacknowledged desire to remember and return to the silence of stillness, to our deeper self, to our source. We conjure up an endless stream of fantasies, concepts, images, rationalisations to provide the momentary comfort of having established some kind of clarity, certainty: as if that would some bring us back home again. But the comfort that knowledge brings is not enough, it does not last: the endless questioning reasserts itself.

The dualistic mind cannot bring us home. Its functioning is what drives us into exile. This is not an error. Life is adventure and homecoming, exile and return: the dynamic of duality. Unity, by its very nature, makes of itself multiplicity: movement of itself makes rest. The dualistic perspective cannot be relinquished by ideas or images however beautiful or truthful. Only by clear, direct seeing, which itself requires no thought but completely changes the way that thought moves in us, is dualism eclipsed.

Clear direct seeing is not about the recognition and accumulation of specific information. It is about seeing into the dynamic of duality so deeply that you see through to its nondual heart or source. In effect it is to see so clearly the mechanism of perception that all perceptions become transparent to their source. It is also to see clearly the dynamics of action until all action also becomes transparent to its source, while seeing clearly the nature of objects till they also become transparent to their source. This transparency must not be mistaken as being of the senses. It can be, and then takes the form of a mystical vision. But it usually, and most effectively, is not. It is a seeing that takes place more deeply than that, in the heart. A seeing that changes ones relationship to objects, actions, perception and life. It also changes ones relationship to the sense of self. This change can take place slowly, quickly or slow-quick-slowly. The change in inner orientation is in direct proportion to the depth and breadth of clear seeing.

Clear seeing is not the result of any special technique, though techniques can be, have been and are used to invite it. But this only works when they are used with the guidance of one who already sees. Otherwise they just produce new ideas and concepts, which because of the very nature of thought, reinforce dualism. Clear seeing is the result only of looking. This is what consciousness does when expressing in and as a nervous system. When that nervous system is human it has the power of deep looking: of looking deeply enough to see clearly through the dynamic of duality to its nondual core. In order for this to happen all effort and all intention arising from the mind must be relinquished: no matter how hallowed, sanctified, righteous or highly valued it may be. Any intentional effort arising from any level of mind distorts the pure seeing of consciousness left alone in its looking.

Many are the dualists who claim not to be, and convince other dualists that this is so. They are easy to spot for one who clings to neither duality nor nonduality, and not just because they are everywhere. Not only because to claim any characteristic as identity is to express the deepest dualism. But also because they give themselves away with almost every phrase that they utter, every sentence that they write. Their thinking and expression bursts with the illusory nature of volition.  This shows itself as  a rejection of some of that which actually is, that they either do not like or do not understand. They speak as if some things should be other than as they are. They speak as if how human beings are and what they have done and are doing is not sanctified in every detail by God. They speak as if they know things that cannot be known. They tell us what God wants in such a way that shows that they do not realise that the only way that we can know what God wants is to look at and see clearly what actually is. They of course do not realise that they are dishonest and blind because God wants them to be, needs them to be, as we also need them to be: and in being so are serving God, and us, no less fully than a true nondualist such as Rumi, Patanjali , Ramana Maharshi or the Buddha.