GRAPPLING WITH DUALITY
The hidden source of all our struggles
Every human life is shaped by a struggle between opposites—good and bad, pleasure and pain, hope and despair.
Why does life seem to be built this way?
The story of Jesus Christ speaks directly to this struggle. Everything about his life—his teachings, his trials, even the purpose of his incarnation—addresses the same inner conflict we all face.
To understand why, let’s look at the world in which this struggle takes place:
the world of duality.
Every human life is shaped by a struggle between opposites.
In this realm, opposites appear together.
Where there is light there is darkness; where there is pleasure there is pain.
Our natural urge to run toward pleasure and away from pain creates much of the human struggle.
Yet duality is not the ultimate reality.
Spiritual teachings remind us that beneath these opposites lies a deeper truth:
life itself is rooted in love.
On this deeper level, opposites exist in harmony rather than conflict. This is the place of unity, which we can also call the Oneness.
As we’ll soon see, we all come from the Oneness and are ultimately moving back toward it.
But for now, we live in the “twoness” of duality—a temporary reality in which everything appears divided into opposites.
Dealing with death
So how do we move from the twoness of duality back to the Oneness we came from?
The answer is surprisingly simple—though not easy:
we must learn to face both sides of life.
Instead of escaping pain and clinging only to pleasure, we must become willing to experience the full range of life. Only then can we begin to see beyond the illusion of opposites.
Conditions here on Earth are such that, no matter how spiritually evolved we may be, we will need to deal with death.
Dealing with death is the way to get to the other side of duality.
We have a clue we are trapped in a dualistic illusion when we find ourselves caught in a struggle from which there seems to be no way out.
All duality is an illusion.
To see this in the moment of struggle, we must realize that we are not seeing the truth.
At this point, the majority of our being seems to only know one thing: there are no good options. When this happens, we are facing a buried fixed idea about life, called an image.
Up until now, we were not even aware this existed. In fact, we have been so convinced of our wrong conclusions about life—which we formed in early childhood—we don’t even think to question them.
They are very hard to dig up on our own.
On this level of duality, which is the plane of the ego, asking for help is vital.
If we ask, help will be given.
Then, working with someone such as a therapist, spiritual healer or friend, we can begin to pry open our tightly held beliefs. We must search for evidence of something that—just consider the possibility—may not be true.
This may not be easy to accept and is even harder to do.
The part of us holding this belief has gotten stuck in childlike black-and-white thinking. This young fragment of consciousness, often called our inner child, feels that to be wrong is to be bad.
It is no accident that we are here on this life-or-death planet. It’s because we all have this inner life-or-death wiring.
This is what makes us fight to the death to be right.
But if we pray deeply to know the truth, answers will come.
Knock and the door will be opened.
In that moment when we are more intent on the truth than being right, we begin to transcend duality.
What we’re really up against
From here we can go deeper—to the next layer of duality.
There, we find that, strangely enough, all unsatisfactory choices lead to one half of a bigger duality. More to the point, there will be a striving toward the “good half,” with an equally strong desire to flee the “bad half.”
This is where we are genuinely running from death’s doorstep.
So, in our work, we must finally learn to die.
We must do this over and over again. In a multitude of little ways, every day, we need to learn to die.
We must die to our demand that our desires be fulfilled immediately—to our desperate clinging to something we hope will save us.
To our desire to not feel so alone.
Sometimes we become so exhausted and frustrated that we finally turn and face the very thing we fear. By embracing the negative, we may collapse into hopelessness and resignation.
Such despair and resignation is often what pushes us to turn to false gods, like material possessions.
All our defenses and coping mechanisms have roots in this dualistic notion that pain must be avoided at all costs.
We only want pleasure.
We’ll fight like the devil to not feel our hurts.
On an unconscious level, we’re running as though our lives depended on it.
When we are more intent on the truth than being right, we begin to transcend duality.
Learning to live in both/and
Here’s the thing about living in this land of duality. 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.
On the unitive plane, neither side exists without the other. For example, only when the active and receptive sides come together can we create something new.
Our goal is to wrap our arms around the Oneness.
But to do this, we must open them wide enough to hold both life and death. This is not so easy for us to do. It means we must be willing to experience it all—the pleasure and the pain.
To love requires that we be willing to feel the pain of being hurt.
To the child within us, feeling this pain is akin to death.
To the mature adult however, experiencing pain is just a part of reality.
We see that it won’t kill us.
The ability to hold opposites is what allows us to create heaven here on Earth.
This will lead us to a unitive way of walking through this world, where we can unflinchingly live this deeper truth:
it’s all good.
It actually hurts less to heal our pain than it does to hide it.
And healing is what we must become willing to do if we want to live fully.
If we want to feel the restorative and enlivening pleasures of love.
Everybody wants to reconnect with God—whether they know it or not.
Our longing for reconnection
Much of this journey to the Oneness takes place underground, so to speak, inside ourselves.
When we embark on a spiritual journey, we often seek a guide—a spiritual teacher—who can help us journey inward. This is a fairly recent development in humanity’s history.
We haven’t always been so introspective.
In the past, when various religions came into existence, God was found outside of us.
For Christians, we have gone to church to pray, to find God there. Often we believe we need an intermediary—a priest or a preacher of some type—to do the praying for us.
People in spiritual circles are often quick to distance themselves from all this, assuring others that we are not “religious.” To us, being religious means to blindly accept a lot of dogma that frankly doesn’t hold water.
The word “religion” literally means “re-connection with God.”
Everybody wants this, whether they know it or not.
We all, in fact, do have “a God-shaped hole in our soul.”
All unfulfilled longing is basically nothing other than a wish to get back to God. Because what we need, only God can give us. This truth transcends all our human confusions.
The more we’re aware of this, the more easily we’ll follow a road that will help us find it. This exploration can happen through any avenue that opens inner doors.
This is the way to find our true selves.
And that inner essence, that is God.
Whichever way we decide to go—and there are many roads leading inward—if we get caught up in the deviations and minor errors, we can get lost.
To be sure, every path has some errors. But no matter what route we take, we’re going to need help from the outside.
No one can do this work alone.
This is true, whether it’s the inner work of healing the soul or the outer work of helping heal the planet.
Outside help gives us the materials we can use for constructing—or reconstructing—our own inner house. But we must ask to receive these tools, this spiritual help.
Whether it comes to us in the form of religion or a spiritual retreat depends on us.
What do we want?
What are we ready to receive?
Regardless, we all need some tools to work with and some help to use them.
As such, part of our work is to truly knock.
Knock, and the door will be opened.
This is a spiritual law.
Unravelling confusion
Religion often symbolizes the struggle between opposites as a battle between God and the devil.
Confusion sets in when we can no longer tell the difference.
An example of this is the polar pull between enjoying physical pleasure and “being good.”
In truth, there is a great battle going on between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
The forces of darkness revel in this type of confusion.
As long as we cling blindly to a faith we hope will save us from sin, we remain stuck.
How do we get out of this?
We have to find our way to the light of truth.
We can begin by understanding how we helped create duality out of a single unified core.
Yes—we did that.
At the heart of this split lies one central fear: the fear of death.
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