About: Seeing past either-or thinking
Let’s take a closer look at the phenomenon of duality. Because if we understand it, we have a better chance of finding our way out of it.
There is always a way out.
What is duality?
Duality is the condition of opposites wherein light comes with dark, good comes with bad, and yes, pleasure comes with pain.
Where does darkness come from? The dark side of duality is created by twisting a divine quality into its opposite. Then love turns into hate, wisdom into ignorance, and courage into weakness.
How did this happen? It happened during the Fall of the Angels, when we used our free will to go against spiritual laws—to act contrary to the will of God. Each time we choose darkness over light, we fall a little more.
The twisted version of something positive contains all the same energy as its original form, but now it is flowing against life. This destructive energetic movement is what creates the dark layers of Lower Self, also known as our shadow side.
Since the Higher Self, at our core, always remains intact—our inner light is eternal—a tension develops between these two parts of us.
This is what creates friction, and it’s the cause of every conflict and disharmony we face in life. For what exists within us becomes out-pictured in the world. What we can’t—or won’t—see within, is always reflected in our problems.
We are amazing creators. But if what is hidden inside us—in the unconscious regions of our psyche—is negative, we will create disharmony.
This negative spin is also what limits life. Because the more we align with our darkness, the more we go against life. Our fear, in fact, tells us to be afraid of life.
But life is only painful due to our mistaken beliefs now buried within us.
Untruth, then, is the root cause of pain. It’s what creates duality and keeps it going.
This twisted version of reality, which is always based on untruth, is perpetuated by our Lower Self intention to stay separate and to stay stuck. This is our negative intention.
We collude with this whenever we look away from ourselves—when we blame others or life for our struggles. When we refuse to search within for the real source of our troubles.
Once the untruth is uncovered and resolved, whatever was negative can be restored to its original divine state.
The goal is not to suppress, destroy or reject the distortion but to rediscover the truth and transform it:
Duality returns to reality
Images return to truthful concepts
Fear returns to trust
Pride returns to humility
Self-will returns to free will
Mask Self returns to Real Self
Lower Self returns to Higher Self
No-current returns to yes-current
Negative Intention returns to willingness to change
Unconscious returns to awareness
Compulsion returns to Spontaneity
Resistance returns to surrender to God and Oneness with all that is
This means that all disharmony is built on a misunderstanding. And every conflict can ultimately be healed.
We do this by realigning ourselves with spiritual laws. This is exactly what we are doing when we make the effort needed to heal ourselves. When we stop following the path of least resistance—which is the way of the Lower Self—we can wake up to the truth of who we are.
This is the essence of self-development.
Duality, then, is a limited reality, and it is an illusion. It is also a temporary reality. This means duality is not the only reality there is, and it is not true reality.
That would be unity.
We came from the Oneness, we are part of the Oneness, and we are heading back to the Oneness. But for now, we are stuck here in the “twoness.”
It is when we become more intent on the truth than on being right that we begin to transcend duality.
Duality always involves untruth
We become lost in duality when we find ourselves caught in some kind of trap with two equally unappealing options. It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
Here, opposites are identical in that both sides are unpleasant. An example might be when we find ourselves stuck in a bad relationship: If I stay, I will be lonely and feel worthless; if I go, I will be alone and feel worthless.
The reason we become mired in such illusions is that they dovetail with a hidden, untruthful belief that’s become buried in our unconscious. Like, “I don’t matter.” It’s our own mistaken thinking, then, that leads us down these dead-end roads in life.
It helps to remember that whenever we are caught in an either/or duality, we are not in truth.
The way out is to pray to know the greater truth. Because prayer is the way for our ego—which itself, is a separated fragment of Lower Self—to contact the unified self. That’s our divine center—our Higher Self—filled with infinite wisdom, love and courage.
But when we are lost, it may seem very hard to ask, “What is the truth of the matter?”
Our ego—which is limited to the realm of duality—has gotten itself locked in a life-or-death struggle to be right. To the limited ego, being wrong feels like death.
“This time,” we think, “I can win.”
But we can’t.
Why not? Because the ego avoids looking at our Lower Self. It keeps looking “out there” for causes and solutions. Meanwhile, our own Lower Self keeps attracting people and situations to us that match our hidden mistaken beliefs.
But if we pray deeply, greater truth will surface. If we look, we can always find the way out
Knock, and the door will open.
It is when we become more intent on the truth than on being right that we begin to transcend duality.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein
What Oneness really means
From here, going deeper into the next layer of duality, we’ll find that both unsatisfactory choices actually lead to one half of a bigger duality. For example, “I only matter when I’m in a relationship. I feel worthless when I am alone.”
It is our striving toward the “good half” with an equally strong desire to flee the “bad half” that locks us further into a no-win situation. Because the good half isn’t in truth, it’s just what we’re facing as we’re running from the bad.
There’s no escape on this level.
So now we are truly at the doorstep of death. Our work must be to finally learn to die. In a multitude of little ways, every day, we need to die—by letting go of whatever we hope will save us from pain.
We must die into feeling we don’t matter, if that’s our deep-down belief. Only then can we surface and claim the truth: “I matter, whether I am with someone or alone.”
The most difficult thing about living in this land of duality is that whenever we strive for a certain desired goal, it brings with it, at least to some degree, an undesired one. Because black comes with white, dark comes with light, and pain comes with pleasure.
Yet on the unitive plane, neither side is thinkable without the other. If black exists, then white must also exist, along with all the colors in-between.
This is where that “all is one” notion of unity comes in. Because in true reality, it’s not life or death, it’s life and death. Indeed, if we want the Oneness, we have to be willing to experience all sides of it.
That means rolling with the inherent pains of life. We must allow ourselves to feel pain.
All our defenses and coping mechanisms have roots in the dualistic notion that pain must be avoided at all costs—or we’ll just die. We only want pleasure and we’ll fight like the devil to not feel our hurts, freezing ourselves into stuckness.
The truth is, feeling pain won’t kill us. What’s more, when we release painful feelings, we come alive.
Our frozen hearts melt, allowing us to feel and flow again—so we can experience pleasure, creativity and peace. This is the doorway that leads to a life of freedom, connection and joy.
Truth be known, it doesn’t actually hurt more to heal our pain than to hide it. And it’s only by stepping through the closed doors of duality that we can open to love.
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Learn more in Gems, Chapter 16: Relaxing into the struggle to find the Oneness.
How the script begins
A duality gets created when the child does not receive mature love. And note, given our current state of development and the way parents are chosen for each incarnation, very few children receive mature love.
This is an important “setup” to understand. It is a main plot point in the script we have each agreed to follow, on another level of reality.
Further, in the universal duality created by the child’s demand for exclusive love, the child can’t win. The duality is that the child wants the exclusive love of the parents, but the child suffers more if the parents don’t love each other or the siblings.
The child will be unconsciously jealous of siblings and both parents, feeling rejected and excluded. This “not winning” reinforces to the child that it is not loved.
The resulting painful thought might be: “This is the way it is supposed to be.” Or, “This is my sad lot in life and it is like no one else’s.” This will lead the child to draw negative conclusions about the self and/or life.
Yet neither of these statements is in truth.
The truth is that parents can love to some extent. And they can love more than one person, albeit imperfectly. So the child may be somewhat happy, because it got some love. But in some ways, the child also feels unhappy and unloved, and it doesn’t know why.
Either way, painful feelings of being unloved, and therefore unlovable, will get cut off and trapped inside. Because the child believes it will die from feeling such pain.
All this must be surfaced and explored.
This is where we must begin to do the hard work of dying. Every day, we can find places in us where we are hoping to avoid a buried pain We must die to this illusion by going through our painful feelings and discovering that this doesn’t kill us.
We must also die to our immature demands to have our way right now. And we must stop clinging to anything, or anyone, we believe has the power to save us.
In short, our ego must learn to “let go and let God.” In doing so, we discover a far vaster resource of wisdom and strength that already exists within.
Feeling all sides
Often, in our frustration, we will turn towards the very thing we fear, embracing the negative and resigning ourselves to feelings of hopelessness. In this case, we will often choose a substitute for satisfaction. This might include material possessions or even overzealous religious convictions, which we then cling to in hopes they will bring us the happiness we long for.
Yet if we can keep our hearts open and feel all our feelings—including the uncomfortable ones—we will discover that we feel better after we release the cramped, rigid holding of painful feelings. We are softened by a “good cry.”
This will give us a glimpse of how pain and pleasure are one.
It is the same with giving and receiving. They are a pair that cannot be separated. So if we say we are good at giving but not receiving, we deceive ourselves.
We cannot really give freely if we are not able to receive. And if we are stuck in negative intention and won’t give, we cannot receive the best life has to offer.
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Learn more in Bones, Chapter 2: The importance of feeling all our feelings, including fear.
The truth about truth
Truth is a spectrum. Until we see the whole spectrum of truth regarding anything, we may see something as being true when we don’t yet see the full truth.
We can liken our window on truth to the experience of looking out one side of a train. Through that window, we see a certain landscape. It is quite possible, though, that if we look out the window on the other side of the train, we will see something completely different.
Yet it’s all connected.
Likewise, in dualistic thinking, the world is divided into black and white. Reality, on the other hand, combines a bit of both: Sometimes they’re going to like us, and sometimes they’re not.
For the mature adult, this is not the end of the world.
Further, on the unitive plane, we discover that we are often both right and wrong, just like everyone else.
What’s more, even opposites can both be right.
Until we know the greater truth of any matter, we need to remain curious and be willing to widen our perspective. When something doesn’t land well in us, it is because we have not yet discovered the whole truth of the matter.
When we do see the whole truth, we will feel both enlivened and settled by it. This is what leads to peace.
To accept that life, with all its challenges, can also be meaningful and beautiful, requires courage. It takes hard work to face ourselves in truth—to see what is currently in distortion.
Yet this is what we must do to reclaim our ability to hold a greater level of awareness.
“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
– Niels Bohr
Again and again, the Pathwork Guide teaches that the way out of duality is not by going around it, but through it. Our work is to transform child consciousness into a healthy, mature adult that ultimately surrenders into unity.
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Learn more in:
- Gems, Chapter 14: How to visualize living in a state of unity
- Gems, Chapter 15: Surrendering to the double-sided nature of duality
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